Comparing Articles

URLS: Fox News Article on Super Tuesday; CNN Article on Super Tuesday



Summary: Yesterday was Super Tuesday, the closest day our country has to a national primary. Nearly half the states in the country selected their party nominees for president. On the Republican side, John McCain emerged as the clear front runner, winning a majority of the most important states. For the Democrats, the result of Super Tuesday is less clear cut because Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton virtually split the field.

Prompt: Compare and contrast the way in which two different media sources covered this event.


For this post, I looked at cnn.com's and foxnews.com's coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries. For the most part, the reporting was similar. They presented the same facts about wins, losses, and delegate counts. Both articles also mentioned that John McCain is now the Republican front runner and that Mike Huckabee is reemerging as a legitimate candidate. Both sites also agree that the Democratic race is as split and undecided as it has been at any time during the campaign.

While the sites presented the same basic facts about the election, they differed in the way they presented the information. For example, the headline on CNN.com was "No Super Tuesday Crowns." This headline emphasized the fact that despite the hype that Super Tuesday is a "national primary," none of the elections were officially decided. They article focused more on looking forward to the coming races than Foxnews.com did. The Foxnews.com headline, by contrast, read "McCain emerges as front runner while democrats spin Super Tuesday wins." This headline seems designed to present the Republicans as united and the democrats as divided, 'spinning' the results to make it fit their purposes. In keeping with this focus, the rest of the article focused on McCain's acceptance speech in which he declared himself the front runner.