September 2008 Archives

 As I started looking at different sources of media coverage after Friday's debate between Obama and McCain, I started thinking about the role of the media in determining what is "newsworthy."  After watching the debate, I looked at some of the coverage today on the websites of various news organizations including Fox News, MSNBC, and The Washington Post. These articles have titles such as "No knockouts in debate: Economic jabs, then punches on world affairs" (The Washington Post)  or "Temperature of debate? Lukewarm" (also from The Washington Post). These articles seemed fairly objective in presenting both positives and negatives from each candidate while also acknowledging that nothing especially amazing happened during the debate. This was also my impression after watching the debate. The debate was significant in that it was the first official debate between Obama and McCain in the 2008 run for President, but at the same time nothing new or out of the ordinary seemed to happen. Both McCain and Obama articulated aspects of their campaign or positions on events that the general public had already heard before.

[Full Debate Seen Below]    

When talking about the media coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, it is interesting to think about who might be getting a "free ride" with the press in terms of media coverage. Recently Sarah Palin agreed to sit down for her first interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson. When I first heard this news from online blogging sites, the posts seemed pretty skeptical of Gibson's ability to ask "hard hitting" questions. For example, see number 6 of this blogger's post on The Huffington Post or this post on Gawker which refers to Gibson as Charlie 'Softball' Gibson. There seemed to be a lot of questions raised about whether Palin was getting a free ride with the press by selecting to grant an interview to Charlie Gibson.

I can't help bring up Sarah Palin when discussing transparent versus neutral journalism.

I think one particularly interesting story that appeared on Gawker on the night of Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention is this one, in which Reuter's published a story on Palin's speech before it actually happened.  I clicked on the link in the story before the speech took place and Reuter's did, in fact, publish the story before the event. This story, tagged by author Ryan Tate as "Journalismism," writes, "Presumably, Reuters's coverage of the forthcoming Republican convention address by Sarah Palin is based on a pre-distributed written version of the speech, and that's why the report at left was posted at least an hour ago. But shouldn't the future tense be employed, or a disclaimer be included, given that the speech hasn't, you know, occurred yet?"