For this assignment, it was decided to address one of the most pressing topics of the last few days, namely the threat of a Russian-Ukrainian war. Since this topic is quite sensitive and a large amount of propaganda is generated every day, a critical analysis of one of the online media outlets would be a good practice. In particular, the article “Why is Russia ordering troops into Ukraine and what does Putin want?” posted on the BBC News platform (Kirby, 2022) was chosen on February 23, 2022. The author is staff journalist Paul Kirby, and the published text is an informed article with analytical elements. Kirby does not express his own opinions or concerns in the article, so his main goal is to inform broadly, describing the various parties’ intentions. Therefore, the journalist refers to Putin’s speeches, tweets from the UK Department of Defense, and the words of some high-ranking American officials. According to the reading, it seems that the article’s primary audience is all English-speaking people who are interested in the topic of political conflicts or are concerned about the global world. The link to the article is published on the home page of the media, and for this reason, it is likely that some users unintentionally get to the material without having such a purpose in the first place.
Consequently, the material read should be classified as “good” because it generally clearly demonstrates the current agenda and cites opinions from different sides. For the material to be classified as “excellent,” it probably lacks the citation of cited historical facts, the expansion of the analytical part of the journalistic research, and the absence of punctuation errors. In addition, the article itself does not specify exactly who the author is, so it was necessary to research this on one’s own. It was found on LinkedIn that Kirby is a European editor who graduated from Oxford and worked full-time for the BBC. In other words, he is credible (Paul Kirby, 2022). Otherwise, no authorial contacts or affiliations have been given. The article is free to read, but BBC News has a subscription system activated upon completion of a trial number of articles. The article, however, contains a large number of punctuation errors; for example, in the sentence “As a former Soviet republic Ukraine has deep social” there is a comma missing after the word “republic”: none of the editors checked this work, according to the information provided.
Meanwhile, the published text comprehensively covers the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and therefore is relevant. In terms of organizational specifics, the article states that it was published “5 hours ago” without indicating whether it was updated at least once. That said, the material is relevant to the geopolitical agenda because it reports on the latest intentions of stakeholders — that is, it summarizes all the material available to date. All the links are used to lead directly to primary sources, but the number of such links is not very large. The site itself, BBC News, is an authoritative platform updated relatively frequently.
In terms of accuracy, the information is consistent with other works and does not provide facts that may be questionable in terms of historical or political accuracy. There are no advertisements on the site, but there are cross-references to other BBC News articles, including within the material, but the proper design has distinguished the main content from the advertisements. Because of the lack of citations and reinforcements (other than tweets), there is no bibliographical sheet, which lowers the perception of the accuracy of the material. In terms of validity, the material is well structured and has a revealing narrative logic, and any of the information used is easy to verify, but this requires additional, independent research. The use of opinions from many stakeholders increases the diversity within the work, which is positive in that there are no misconceptions or biases on such a sensitive topic; the article is unbiased. In other words, Kirby adheres to the position of an independent journalist without taking sides. Search for any information or other articles on the site using the built-in functionality or “CTRL+F.”
References
Kirby, P. (2022). Why is Russia ordering troops into Ukraine and what does Putin want? BBC News. Web.
Paul Kirby. (2022). LinkedIn.