David Maziarz
COMM 337
Mary Schmich’s article about the Chicago family that was crudely kicked out of their home was a very good article. “Family shattered after raid, home loss,” was an article in the Chicago Tribune that really opened my eyes to a real world situation. I think the strongest part about this article is the degree of reality that you get from reading the article. It is hard to imagine living in a home for so long and then it suddenly being taken away unexpectedly one day. She dug for facts as she rattled of fact after fact about the Harris family and their situation.
First of all, I noticed that the article came off as an opinion piece because Schmich comes to a final opinion on the situation at the end of the article saying, “Chicago is better than that.” However the article, “Family shattered after raid, home loss,” is not in the opinion section of the Chicago Tribune’s website.
The article starts with the “play by play,” of the police raiding the house and eventually the story pans back to give the history of the Harris family’s situation. I think that this is a good way of grabbing the reader’s attention with a good lead. By starting with the most relevant and exciting information, it is easy to find yourself racing through the article to see what happens. I am usually not easily captivated by common news stories, but this one was different for some reason. Schmich’s lead into the story got me interested and as I read the entirety of the article I found myself actually caring about what happened to this family.
Not all news stories get the reader emotionally invested like this one. Schmich seems to have an agenda and she wrote this story to stir up people’s emotions. She believed that what happened to the Harris’ was wrong and that somebody should do something about it. It is definitely hard to imagine somebody reading this without having some sort of sympathy for the Harris family. She was able to stir up this sympathy by talking about how hard Mr. Harris had to work his whole life in order to buy this house. A man who started by picking cotton; worked his ass off, got married, had kids, and then worked his ass off some more in order for his family to have a home. It is definitely a story that was intended to stir up the emotions of the readers.
Something else that makes this story good other than its emotional appeal is its straight forward nature. Schmich hits you with fact after fact as she dives into which allegations against the Harris family are true, and which ones are completely false. She dissects every aspect of the case against the Harris family from the drug allegations to the dog fighting allegations, she covers everything. She also covered the background of the story very well by getting the facts about the history of the neighborhood in question. She wasn’t sugarcoating anything in this article and that is one of the qualities, along with the emotional appeal, that made it a strong article.
Mary Schmich also made this a great article by actually covering this story. You don’t often see articles siding with the family being raided when it comes to police raids. She could have done what everybody in their neighborhood did and just assume that they were guilty because the police busted down their door and they were evicted because of, “unsafe living conditions.” She definitely took a stand for the Harris family in the most professional way possible.
While it was an opinion piece, Schmich did not come across as being angry. She did not do any name calling or really anything of that nature. She definitely did a good job at attacking the issue, rather than personalities. She did use some quotes against some people in regards to the neighbors, such as the quote by one neighbor saying, “yo, I know about meth. I bet that they were totally cooking in there.” She used this quote to show the ignorance of some of the neighbors, but she doesn’t come out and say that why she is using this quote. She kept all the neighbors anonymous and attacked the issue rather than personalities.
From a journalists perspective (I’m not by any means implying that I am a journalist) Schmich kind of goes off the deep end at the end of the article as the conclusion is littered with her opinion on the issue saying that, “Chicago is better than that.” She did a great job throughout the whole article keeping everything bottled up and letting the facts to the talking, but unfortunately she threw her two cents in at the end of the article.
My opinion on the article was that it was a great story with great facts. She backed up everything with facts. Personally, I liked the ending even though it is kind of frowned upon to throw your own opinion in there as a writer. However the fact is that she didn’t need her own opinion in the conclusion in order to win the reader’s heart. She wrote a great story that probably got most readers on her side even before the conclusion. People don’t need it spelled out for them; they could clearly understand from the article that the Harris family had been mistreated.
