Friday, October 26, 2007

Steve Lopez

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez26oct26,1,3435455.column?page=1&coll=la-util-news-local

Within this "story" that Lopez writes about several times he uses the first person point of view. The first word that he used within this particular copy was "you." I believe that by doing that right away it grabs the readers attention because it made me want to keep reading to find out what it was that I as a reader knew this "thing" had to happen.
The way that Lopez delivers his stories is by keeping the reader on an adventure of sorts. Obviously the majority of the country did not go down to New Orleans after Katrina and more then the majority of Americans are not going to go to San Diego or other neighboring cities in California to offer a helping hand. By Lopez giving a first person account for the damage and restoration of these places it is giving us, the reader, an opportunity to see the what is going on within the tragedy.
One part of the story said that:

"We've evacuated more people than were evacuated in Katrina," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender said Wednesday. Not only was that ridiculously untrue, but one might argue the evacuations in the San Diego area were made necessary by a lack of firefighting personnel and equipment in a region that shuns taxes and happily sticks outside agencies with the tab when the bill comes due.Talk about being on the dole.And I hate to break up the back-slapping party President Bush, Gov. Schwarzenegger and various local officials staged Thursday, but the equipment shortage in the state's wildfires was indisputable.In 2004, a Schwarzenegger panel recommended that the state buy 150 new fire trucks, and only 19 have been ordered.

Within this small piece of the story not only is he telling us what San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender thinks of the situation but then it tells us that Lopez thinks that his comment was "ridiculously untrue" which is in a way giving us a first hand account of the situation. Not only does he comment on the number of people evacuated in both disasters but he also gave his opinion about Bush and Schwarzenegger's press conference held on Thursday and the current situation that is going on still in New Orleans and in California.

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