On January 13, Sophia, Bella, Daria and I went to ABC News to talk to Tamar Gargle. Lexi wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed at school. When we first got to the ABC studio, we were told to go to the other lobby. We ended up going to two other lobbies before getting to the right one. I was surprised to see that there were so many. Once we got in, we met Ms. Gargle on the 8th floor, and went to her office. Once we had taken off our coats, she started our tour of the building.

Most of our time was spent on the graphics floor. We got to see people preparing things for the news that night, and short animations presenting tv shows and parts of their show. However, we also went to a control room on the fourth floor, where we got to see how abc edits and maintains it’s shows. They had screens all over the wall, with different news shows playing, so they could see what their main competitors were doing. While we were in there, they told us that almost everything we see in the news is on 5 second delay. That way, if they have to, they will know when to switch the cameras, or make a quick edit.

After, we got to go onto the actual set, it was really fun. Once we left the set, we went back up to the 8th floor, and sat down to talk to Ms. Gargle a little. We asked her questions including; how are girls and women represented in the news, and what is it like being a woman with her job. She told us that it’s not their job to show pretty girls, they just want to give people the news, similar to what another woman working in graphics told us. She also told us that her gender does not really affect her work, everyone’s treated the same.

What I learned from this fieldwork that I want to teach in my teach in, is that not all forms of the media misrepresent women. In the news, they always give people the real information, so they would have no purpose in changing a woman’s appearance. I hadn’t thought about this before. I went to meet Ms. Gargle thinking that women are not fully represented in the news, that female reporters are mistreated. However because she is not a reporter, I got to learn about the inner part of the news.

This fieldwork was very interesting for me and my group. I really enjoyed getting to see the set and the graphics rooms. I learned a lot about a part of my topic I didn’t know about. We all had a great time.