Public opinion and fake news during the pandemic

The grading rubric is printed in the prompt and it tells you exactly where the marks are: argument forty, organisation twenty, references twenty, style twenty. Argument is worth twice as much as anything else, which means the paper needs a thesis rather than a survey. A response paper that describes what happened during the pandemic — misinformation spread, discrimination rose — has produced no argument at all, because nobody disputes those facts. An argument is a claim that could be contradicted: that platform architecture mattered more than the content of any particular falsehood, for example, or that official messaging failures created the vacuum that misinformation filled, or that anti-Asian hostility was not caused by misinformation but licensed by it. Decide the claim before you write, and let the second question about China and Asian Americans be the case that tests it. A thesis you could imagine a classmate arguing against is a thesis; anything else is a summary.

The genre matters as much as the content. A response paper is defined in the prompt as a combination of your thoughts and analysis in connection with the course material, less structured than a research paper but still with a clear argument and flow. That means first person is permitted and expected, and it also means the course material is not optional decoration. Name lectures, readings, videos, podcasts and guest speakers specifically and use their concepts as tools. A paper that could have been written without attending the course will not score well on argument or references however articulate it is, because the assignment is asking you to demonstrate that you can apply what the course supplied. Quote a lecture or name a reading in the first page, and the reader knows immediately what kind of paper they are reading. Vague gestures at what we learned in class earn nothing under references.

For the first question, the useful concepts are the ones that explain mechanism rather than describe volume. Agenda setting explains what people thought about; framing explains how they thought about it; the information vacuum concept explains why misinformation spreads fastest where authoritative information is absent, changing or contradictory, which describes early pandemic communication precisely. Motivated reasoning explains why correction often failed. Source credibility and its collapse explains why the same message succeeded from one speaker and failed from another. Choose two or three and apply them to specific episodes rather than listing all of them, because depth on two mechanisms will outscore a taxonomy of eight. Applying a concept means using it to explain a case whose outcome would be puzzling without it, not defining it and moving on. One paragraph per mechanism is the right density here. Two mechanisms explained well will outscore eight mentioned.

The second question is where the paper must be most careful and most precise. The rise in anti-Asian harassment and assault during this period is documented, and the analytical question is how information flow contributed. The mechanisms worth examining are the naming of the virus by national origin and what naming does to attribution of blame, the conflation of a state and a government with an ethnic group and then with a diaspora, the role of political elites as sources whose framing is amplified rather than merely reported, the difference between platform-driven spread and mainstream coverage, and the pre-existing tropes that the pandemic activated rather than invented. That last point is the most important analytically: treating this as an entirely new phenomenon misses the longer history that made the framing available, and a paper that reaches for that history will be a stronger paper. Say who was speaking, to whom, and through what channel.

Two things will improve the analysis. First, distinguish the different publics rather than writing about public opinion as a single thing, since opinion moved differently by age, political affiliation and media diet, and the aggregate conceals that. Second, avoid the flat determinism in which media caused everything; people are not passive, opinion also moved through personal experience and interpersonal networks, and an argument that concedes this is more persuasive than one that does not. Where you make an empirical claim about harassment or about belief in a specific falsehood, cite it, and give the period, since both changed substantially across the pandemic. Both of these concessions strengthen rather than weaken the argument, because a claim that has anticipated its objections is harder to dismiss than one that has not. Say what would have to be true for your thesis to be wrong, and answer it.

On execution, the paper needs a minimum of a thousand words with the word count included, 1.5 spacing and Times New Roman, and at least three references outside the course material, for which the prompt explicitly permits academic journals, books and serious magazines and video lectures. Meet those requirements literally, since style carries twenty marks. Structure the paper so a reader can follow: thesis, mechanisms, the China and Asian American case, the complication you concede, and a conclusion that restates the claim in stronger terms than the introduction did. Write about a real and painful subject with care, and let the evidence carry the judgement. Give the word count as instructed, since it is part of the style mark and is trivially easy to include and equally easy to forget in the last edit before submission. Check the spacing and the typeface before submitting, since twenty marks turn on requirements that take a minute to meet.