By Julia Granato
The rise of political coverage in the news has rapidly been on the rise given all of the scandals and conspiracies with the most recent elections. The main goal of modern journalism is to maintain objectivity so that the public can arrive at their own decisions and stances on today’s political disputes. In an ideal world, this would be the standard that everyone constantly executes, however that is not the world that we live in: we live in a world where objective news is an illusion.
Two of the more mainstream broadcasting stations are FOX news and CNN are often compared to each other because, well they are pretty much the biggest players in spreading the word about politics. Check out a side by side comparison of the two stations here! It’s no secret that CNN generally leans towards the liberal side while FOX tends to target conservatives–this is because of the commercial media wanting to capture the attention of fragmented demographics for the sole purpose of generating a profit. Let’s look a little bit more in depth at two of the most current issues in the news and see just how differently FOX and CNN relay the information to the public.
With the new election coming up in 2020, we have had people begin to announce their intentions of running for presidency! Beto O’Rourke, announced Thursday he is running for president. CNN and FOX have taken two completely different approaches in their reports of his announcement.
In a segment filmed on FOX news, guest speaker Gingrich commented on how Beto is a “great example of the left talking itself into hysteria” and had lost to Ted Cruz in the past and will continue to lose. The comments are very negative towards his abilities to win a campaign where he claims “I was born to do this.”
In the CNN segment, they showed Beto’s presidency video in which he shows just how excited he is to be running for president. The newscaster commented on how his approach is that he wants to “run for something, not against something.” She mentioned how many democrats are focused on getting Trump out of the White House and how when prompted, he said that was his goal.
We can see a very clear divide between the way the information is prevented with a “For or Against” attitude. Given that objective journalism is in fact an illusion when it comes to reporting the news, we begin to see agenda setting especially with politics. While the news being broadcasted may be the same content, objectivity is lost in the way each respective news outlet presents the information. Even more importantly, viewers subconsciously pay attention to body language and voice tone etc, which influences people to feel a certain way without even knowing they are under persuasive techniques.
Politics in Mass Media 
In this post, you wrote about the lack of objectivity in news by drawing a comparison between the coverage of CNN and FOX on O’Rourke’s presidential campaign. Do you think that there is merit in the capability of having two very different perspectives, or do you believe that we as Americans should only support the most objective news sources? A big takeaway I had from examining the situation that you have laid out is that people may have a difficult time deciding what is objective and what is subjective. One way to combat the lack of objectivity is found in the UK, with the BBC. The BBC is known to be objective, and this is because it is paid for by everyone who owns a TV, and therefore, represents the majority of the population. The only way this may work in America would be through PBS, but this does not have nearly the social pull that BBC has.
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I really liked the way you chose to focus on just Fox News and CNN in this post. Your post lists the negative attributes of how polarized our news system is, but do you think that there are some positive aspects of this fragmentation? I also would be interested to hear your opinion on ways to possibly fix our current news system. Further, if it is not possible to truly fix the system, then what are some ways to help the public realistically evaluate the news they see?
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