Stephanie+C's+Election+Activity

During and after the Vice Presidential debate and the Presidential debates, I decided to check several news stations' websites and channels to see how they interpreted the proceedings of the debates. I looked at CNN, NBC, and Fox.

I have to admit that when it comes to anything news related, I tend to go to CNN as my primary source simply because they understand the importance of a balanced playing field for their audience. There was no exception to this during the debates, which helps me put bias aside in this scenario. While the debates were live broadcasted, CNN had pages up where viewers could go and look at a Twitter feed where people were "tweeting" their opinions of the debate. There were voices from both sides, and it made it an interesting resource to watch to see how different people interpreted the happenings on television. Obviously Twitter only represents a small portion of the population, and even smaller when you consider that in order for them to show up in this special twitter feed they had to use a select hash tag. Still, it was nice to see that people were voicing their opinions in a way where they could simply be heard and not ridiculed in return. The morning after the debates, CNN would put up different people on their morning news to essentially banter back and forth as to who they they did a better job and "won" the debate. They always choose people from either side to go back and forth and this keeps one side from overpowering the segment. Overall, I really appreciated the way that CNN represented the debates and I think that they help provide more accurate information for any swing voters out there, while reinforcing the ideals of people who are already party-sided.

As for NBC, I don't really check their news all that much, and for this case I only checked online during the debate. I was really surprised to see that they had taken a similar route to CNN, in that they did not have anyone live blogging about the debates, but rather had inserted a twitter feed where people could voice their opinions once again. Again, I really like this approach to population based commentary because of the fact that there is no real public form of berating by dissenters. We have all seen those articles that are politically oriented that have an open comments section where people go at each other for simply having different beliefs. The simple twitter feed is a much more civilized version of this commentary and I think would be wisely implemented in future use. I would put NBC along the same lines as CNN when it comes to their ability to inform swing voters or voters in general.

Fox News was very different for me. I have often listened to their morning bit of Fox and Friends back when I used to nanny for a family (they watched it every morning while they got ready for work) and have seen the show mocked on late night television (courtesy of Saturday Night Live), but have never actually paid attention to the station until now. I understand that they are more conservative based, and I think that really you just have to share the same mindset as Fox in order to really get much out of what they have to offer. During the elections they had someone live blogging on their site, and the "article" was in overwhelming favor of Romney. The same goes for their newscasts the following morning. Rather than offer any real insight as to what happened during the debate, they were more about pointing out what Romney did right and what Obama did wrong. I think that a station such as Fox that identifies themselves as being more conservative oriented really only reaches audiences that are like minded. I am not so sure that someone who was on the fence for this election, and who wanted to be well informed, would really be able to gather much from this station alone.