Putting It All Together - On Video.

 

Winstead, Ed. “Putting It All Together - On Video.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/insider/video-forensic-investigations.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FForensic+Science&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection. 

This review of the article, “Putting It All Together- On Video” had many well-presented and well-constructed aspects. The use of many quotes from the text was one of these aspects. The reviewer provided us with numerous pieces of evidence, by quoting the original article many times.This gave readers a sense that what they were reading was truthful and accurate, because all parts of the writing were backed up by proof. The 2nd well-presented aspect is how efficiently the reviewer critiqued the article. The reviewer makes sure to name the positives of the article, like how it is well-written and chronologically presented; but also includes the downsides, like how the report did not detail or specify on the new method they used to uncover the truth of the crime. For a review to truly be complete, it is important to criticize the article, and point out the negatives and what could have been done better. The reviewer understands this concept and did so perfectly. “I know this was strictly a “report” of what new method they found, but because this was on a forensics publication, explaining what kinds of evidence they were able to obtain would have been more appropriate.” The third and final well-written aspect of the review was how straight-forward the reviewer made their paper. The reviewer did not drag on with the theme and main idea of the original article, but said it straight-up, in an easy-to-understand fashion. Doing so helped hook the readers, as well as help them grasp the purpose of this article easily. “Members of The New York Times’s video department explain how they use forensic techniques to uncover new information about news stories. On Oct. 26, the United Nations released the findings of an investigation on a lethal sarin gas attack in a Syrian village in April that the Syrian Air Force was responsible for.”

However, there's always room for improvement; and the review of this article is not immune to this rule. Even though the reviewer used a lot of quotes from the text and gave us a lot of evidence; explanations were severely lacking. The reviewer put many in many useful quotes, but would just leave them there and not explain the evidence any further. Explanations for evidence are key in any piece of writing, and lacking this is a big weakness. The reviewer could have fixed this problem by adding on a sentence or two after quotes. For example, in the third paragraph of the review, the reviewer uses three separate quotes, but only one sentence written of her own. “We’re increasingly seeing the value in this type of reporting, and The Times has committed to making it a part of how we gather and report the news,” said Marcelle Hopkins, the deputy editor of the video department. “It has been done in the past with human rights organizations and some smaller investigative organizations, but we’ve recognized that this is something that can be extremely useful in reporting.” For Mr. Browne, videos of an event not only provide a sense of what it was like to be there, but are also sources of important information about the location and timing of key moments. “There has to be visual evidence that we can make deductions around, and there have to be discrepancies in the story being told” — by governments, the police or even the news media — “and the one we think we can tell through this sort of evidence-based journalism.” Another suggestion that could have made the reviewer better was to make the review longer. The reviewer’s work may have fit the criteria and rubric, but because of the lack of explanation for evidence as well as other things, the review itself was not very long. Both of these weaknesses are linked, and could have been fixed if more explanation was written to follow up quotes and evidence. 

I learned many new things in this review that I was not aware of before. I did not know before that there were video editors and scientists who had discovered a new way of uncovering the truth in crimes. Nor did I know it was possible to find out what really happened in crimes by “pieced together satellite imagery, photographs and videos of the attack, drone footage and more into a seven-minute video examining the strike.” I was also impressed by the fact that this method was not popular and was rarely used by detectives or crime investigators at the time. The knowledge I gained while reading this review has changed my perception of forensic science, and I now have more faith that the truth will be uncovered in political crimes.