I decided to look at the issue of global warming from two very different news sources: FOX and MSNBC. Global warming is an extremely contorversial issue that can most likely be determined whether one is republican or democrat. Republican's lean towards global warming being a false issue where as democrats lean towards global warming being an iminent and extremely important issue. I thouht it would be interesting to look at an issue that is usually decided upon according to political party affiliation. Being as FOX is more of a right winged news corporation, I predicted that they would have articles trying to prove that Global warming was not an issue of importance. By contrast, MSNBC is an extremely left winged news corporation, so I assumed the news corporation would have articles promoting the urgency to act upon the issue of global warming, and promote such slogans as "going green".
Not to my surprise, my thoughts were confirmed. FOX news used the example of the summer of 2010 being unusually cool, and that if global warming were actually ocurring, this would not be the case. They went on to further state that since the beginning of the Earth's creation, there have been many temperature changes, and that this might be one more temperature change that our earth is going through. Moreover, they dismissed the idea of "going green" projects, saying that the projects were draining our treasury, and were causing an increase in taxes.
MSNBC was an avid supporter on the issue of global warming. Although they did not out right say that they supported and believed in global warming, they showed many stories on the dying polar bear population due to the ice caps melting. Polar bears hunt on the ice caps, and without the ice caps being a hunting ground for polar bears, the bears will starve and their species will eventually become extinct. In addition, they have interviewed Al Gore on his award winning movie an Inconvenient Truth. FOX never interviewed Al Gore, and never covered the significance of many animal speicie's going extinct because of this temperature change.
Nightly, I watched both of these news broadcasting companies on the issue of global warming. If they did not air anything regarding it on TV, I went online to see articles that journalists working for each company had posted about global warming. The news corporations took such different stances on an issue that should be only giving primary information on the subject, and not trying to sway viewer and reader's opinions on the issues by horserace and hoopla. The only job of news corporations should be to provide substansive coverage in a non-bias way.
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