Covering the Coverage

I've been doing my best to read the NY Times and my blogs this week. I've noticed some very interesting things this week in particular, for instance, the coverage of the Honduras story. Now, the blogs I'm following are fairly conservative and the Times is fairly liberal. These different perspectives lead to different coverage and emphasis. The blogs have been emphasizing the fact that President Zelaya tried to rig a referendum to make himself president for life and the Honduran parliament had unanimously voted to remove him from office. The NY Times, on the other hand, has been emphasizing the Unites States' involvement with the help of other South American nations in restoring a wrongfully removed president. Both the Times and the blogs talk about other South American countries that support President Zelaya. The Times does not mention which countries these are while the blogs specifically mention Venezuela and Cuba which is a significant detail. Also, the blogs admit that they do not have reporters in these countries, but the NY Times does not appear to have reporters there either, but rather they seemed to be in Pakistan following Secretary Clinton. In addition to the fact that both news sources take a different stand on whether the US was right to intervene: the blogs say we shouldn't have intervened and the NY Times say we were right to do it. It is also intriguing how the writers choose different aspects of the same story to support their beliefs. Because there are so many aspects of a story that may not all be told by a single news source, I think people should try to read sources with different views to see the bigger picture.

Since the blogs I've been following are political by nature, I see a lot of political stories like the upstate NY congressional race between Owens, the Democrat, and Hoffman, the conservative Independent (liberal Republican, Scozzafava, has just quit the race and endorsed Hoffman). The NY Times has more social stories like how public schools are managing during the Recession. The reason for this difference is that these news sources have consciously chosen to focus on certain issues.