Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on cda tools applied to the text. The genre is news, and the qualifier is that this is a piece of breaking news. As a piece of news, there is an emphasis on making it appear that this is an objective piece of reporting, sans any political leanings or agenda in terms of social relevance, political or economic relevance. While the title says the prescription is being made by the Greens party, in truth the first paragraph of the article relates the prescription not by the Greens party but by a Greens Senator in Senator Scott Ludlam. Out of the first five paragraphs of the news story, the first three are about the thoughts and words of Senator Ludlam, and out of the fifteen paragraphs that make up the news story, all but four are about the prescriptions of the Senator, while the rest give a background about legislation on retaining such metadata that is pending in the Senate and is currently being debated upon.

The news reports that the Senate is leaning towards more intensive metadata retention for longer periods of time. The news article ends with a set of bullet points that summarize how one can avoid their data being retained, from Senator Ludlam. As straightforward news, there is an attempt to make it appear that the facts are the point of the news article, and there is no place for any opinion in it. All of the ideas and thoughts are properly attributed, and those attributions are mainly made to the Greens Senator (News Limited 2015).

B. Framing

Here the framing is that of a struggle or a battle between the Greens and the rest of the Senate, or between those who are in favor of metadata retention, and those who are against the metadata retention. In terms of Foucault, this framing is in terms of presenting the metadata retention as the point of contention, as a way to present the emergence of a particular kind of solution to a problem related to national security may be, and to the prevention and arrest of crimes within society. The framing is in terms of polarizing the Senate into two sides, with the side of the Greens implied in their public prescriptions on skirting the metadata retention rules altogether.