Bush nominates engineer to head NASA
The Weekend Australian, March 13 2005

I don’t like the way that this article is structured. It tends to jump back and forth between talking about the qualifications of the man nominated and describing an accident that happened over 2 years ago. The article actually seems to be as much about the accident as it is about what is advertised in the title, the nomination of a new engineer to head NASA.

The article is over a page long, which is very long for a newspaper article, but I think that it could be cut down to half the size if the bits about the accident were cut out. It really should be in a separate article but I suppose that the author couldn’t do that because the accident was a long time ago and the newspaper would look bad if the had articles on old news. I suspect that the author has included information about the accident to take up space because it is not overly relevant to the topic.

In the article the author has included several quotes from several authority figures that support the nominated engineer. The quotes do a good job of describing the man’s personality and why he would be a good choice. However there are no statements from George Bush, as the title might suggest. In fact there is only one brief sentence about halfway through the article that mentions that there was an announcement that Bush intends to nominate the man. It could be that the writer has just used the American President’s name in the title to catch the reader’s attention. This is a common journalistic technique but I don’t approve of the ‘false advertising’.

Despite this the newspaper gives a good account of the engineer’s relevant experience, but they don’t mention any other candidates for the position. All in all I thought that the article was pretty boring and could have been kept much shorter.

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