When Professor Lowe stood in front of the class last Tuesday and said something along the lines of, "I have something for you. I wouldn't call it an assignment, necessarily, I would call it ... an opportunity," the class glanced at each other and someone (who may or may not have been me) asked "So, when is it due?"
We separated into groups and were assigned a local news television station and sent on a mission, which we chose to accept, to access the Public File, a record of the contracts the stations have with political groups to run ads endorsing certain GOP candidates.
Kelly White, Erin Caughey and myself set out last Thursday for the Fox6 station, a 20-minute drive from Marquette's campus.
I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe that we would stand and argue with a man in a suit and demand to see these files, they were legally required to be available to us. Or that we would sneak into a back office and rifle through cabinets searching for the information we needed.
While we did sneak in through a back entrance, it was only because we thought it was the front, and someone was nice enough to hold the door for us. The woman in charge of political ads for the station was at lunch (which we probably should have expected - it was 12:30 in the afternoon), so we sat and chatted for a few minutes until she returned.
When she did, she was very kind and helpful, helping us pull the exact contracts we needed, and copying them for us for free. She handed us her business card with her direct phone line on it, saying that if we had any other questions, it would be easiest just to give her a call and she would help us right away.
While it was not quite the investigative adventure I had been expecting, I was pleasantly surprised at the experience we had at Fox6. Also, the inside of the station looks a lot like the station in the movie Anchorman, as I mentioned (maybe a little too excitedly to my colleagues) which was pretty cool, too.
We separated into groups and were assigned a local news television station and sent on a mission, which we chose to accept, to access the Public File, a record of the contracts the stations have with political groups to run ads endorsing certain GOP candidates.
Kelly White, Erin Caughey and myself set out last Thursday for the Fox6 station, a 20-minute drive from Marquette's campus.
I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe that we would stand and argue with a man in a suit and demand to see these files, they were legally required to be available to us. Or that we would sneak into a back office and rifle through cabinets searching for the information we needed.
While we did sneak in through a back entrance, it was only because we thought it was the front, and someone was nice enough to hold the door for us. The woman in charge of political ads for the station was at lunch (which we probably should have expected - it was 12:30 in the afternoon), so we sat and chatted for a few minutes until she returned.
When she did, she was very kind and helpful, helping us pull the exact contracts we needed, and copying them for us for free. She handed us her business card with her direct phone line on it, saying that if we had any other questions, it would be easiest just to give her a call and she would help us right away.
While it was not quite the investigative adventure I had been expecting, I was pleasantly surprised at the experience we had at Fox6. Also, the inside of the station looks a lot like the station in the movie Anchorman, as I mentioned (maybe a little too excitedly to my colleagues) which was pretty cool, too.