Qualities Of Comprehensiveness And Conciseness In Two News Articles

Comprehensiveness and conciseness are two rather distinct and differing qualities to be found in a news article. In this essay, I am going to discuss how two media outlets, namely the CNN news and the Irish Times, have presented the scientific article – ‘Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure’ (Hoekzema et al., 2016). I will compare the two news articles’ overall comprehensiveness and conciseness through evaluating them in terms of coverage, accuracy, neutrality and accessibility. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the definition of ‘comprehensive’ is “complete and including everything that is necessary” ("Meaning of "comprehensive" in the Cambridge English Dictionary", n.d.) while ‘concise’ means “short

CNN has included most aspects of the study such as results of the GM volume changes, various cognitive tests carried out in the participants, ways of conception as a studied variable, and setting control groups of fathers and nulliparous women. As for the Irish Times, there is the problem of oversimplification where the article only briefly mentions about the reductions in GM volume, using women who had never been pregnant and the participants’ male partners as control, and the possible similarity of GM reductions “in adolescence” that “reflect synaptic pruning” with that in pregnancy. The Irish Times’ news article omits much of the other areas like the specific tests done in the MRI sessions and the “verbal word list learning task”. These eliminated parts may seem to be of less significance in general but they are actually still worthy of mention as these are the details that help to illustrate the full picture of the entire

Yim Yonkers, who was also “not involved in the new study”, that some alterations happened in brain regions “implicated in depression” may “help women forget the pain or difficulty of pregnancy”. In addition, David Van Essen’s proposed interpretation of “an increase of myelin” is also mentioned. These suggestions are not included in the scientific study so these possible new interpretations thus add to the neutrality of the news article through citing external ideas rather than simply extracting information from the scientific article. As in the Irish Times’ news article, there are no comments incorporated from scientists other than those involved in the study so this makes the news article to be inclined towards focusing only on the sole interpretation of results that is offered in the scientific