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What happens to the news when it's controlled by corporate giants? Is there a threat to democracy when journalism is bought and sold like a product? In short, what happens to information before it gets to us? These are some of the larger issues that media analysts deal with.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is a media watch group of journalists and activists. At FAIR, analytical minds take time to monitor corporate control of the media and try to answer these questions. Jennifer Pozner is director of the women's desk at FAIR.

As a college student, Pozner was on the hunt for an organization that complemented her values and her interests, something that satisfied her desire to make some kind of an impact.

"I was doing research around misrepresentations of feminists and misrepresentations of women....What I found was that women were either distorted when they were covered or not covered at all," she says.

While she was doing this research, Pozner discovered a place that shared her concerns: a nonprofit organization called FAIR. Now, with her own seat at FAIR's women's desk, Pozner continues to analyze media content. The difference is, she gets paid to do it!

"We have a very specific content critique where we look at the framing of stories that are in our hands....You look at how those stories are framed and whose perspectives get to guide the story," explains Pozner.

Pozner is now in a position to help budding media skeptics follow in her footsteps. "We have interns who work at FAIR quite often, and one of the things I say is that you need to have sort of an open mind, questioning what you read and what you see. It's an amazingly broad job and it's different in each place," says Pozner.

Pozner's independent pursuits have paid off. She's made an impact, as general response to her work shows. Still, knowing she's making a mark seems surreal.

"Yeah -- it's funny," she says. "I'm at the point where I'm finally starting to realize that. I mean, people who don't know me call me and tell me that they have my work as a fundamental part of their research. I was told by somebody that I had been reading for a while that her new book starts off a chapter with a blurb from one of my articles."

Pozner adds that FAIR receives calls all the time from students, professors and colleagues. They often speak in hushed tones, thanking the staff at FAIR for voicing certain issues.

"[Reporters] say things like, 'That was a great piece. You're really helping me because I was trying to bring up that critique and they were telling me that I'm a whistle-blower!'" says Pozner.

Many analysts come from a journalism or communication background. Journalism professor Christopher Dornan hesitates to define media analysis as a field of work since it is rare to find full-time, well-paying work as an analyst.

However, he says that an education in journalism or communication provides students with just the right tools for related jobs in the information industry -- including media analysis for the lucky few!

"A journalism degree is tailored specifically to producing journalists, and many of our students are perfectly happy to take the degree, due to the skills and the credentials that it confers. But by the end of it, many of them don't become journalists. They go sort of on the other side of the fence, and they become information officers for government ministries or private sector corporations," says Dornan.

Media analyst Lydia Miljan says there are no standards in the industry by which to define media analysts at this point. While she calls herself a media analyst, there are others in the information industry who call themselves by the same name, but perform very different tasks.

"What I see in the industry is that media analysts tend to be people who clip and just do summaries. But we do much more sophisticated content analysis, where we actually look at every statement and make discreet observations about it. Again, there are no standards in the industry, and everyone does their own thing. It's tough because it's how people define it. Rather than being a job, it's more a research technique," she says.

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