Sensationalising Newspaper Reports

Shock. Horror! One day a woman went to her local shop and guess what she found inside her newly-purchased bag of bread? Unbelievably, to her amazement the whole bag was full of crusts of bread!! And you probably wouldn’t believe it either, but this story did actually make it onto BBC online news. This lesson takes this story and shows students how to blow trivial things up out of all proportion in order to sell newspapers. You can expose the serious nature of newspaper sensationalising while having some fun. Students add even more emotive language into the already existing newspaper report. The newspaper report with blanks for students to fill in is included, along with a twelve slide Powerpoint to introduce the subject. This is also a good introduction to the ethics of the press.