Choosing Sides (less obviously)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/

With the understanding that the news media “should” abide by the standards of objectivity I listened to Jim Lehrer’s “Newshour” and although not nearly as bad and one sided as the FoxNews video we watched in class, there are several hints of who is on whose side. In the beginning of Friday’s news segment the headlines started off as objective as they could be; stats, figure’s and numbers all inclusive of the DOW Jones Industrial Average and how the slump in Wall Street has been affecting everyone, touching on oil and energy. The second headline talked about the nation’s observance of the 5th war in Iraq. Jim Lehrer mentions every negative thing about the war, showing his ”non-objective side”. He says that 4,000 American soldier’s lives have been claimed as well as 90,000 Iraqi lives. This automatically delivers a sad and negative pathos among those viewers who were already against the war, adding more fuel to their fire. On top of this information, he mentions the outrageous figure it has taken the United States to push through on this venture: a big 500 billion dollars. They play a clip of Bush, sounding almost unintelligent on the topic; pausing and mottling his words as if signifying some uncertainties. After this clip, the host Jim Lehrer makes it a point to recognize (as if he thought they were doing justice to this issue) the hundreds of people who protested and all of the students who walked out of class from Universities just to recognize the 5th anniversary of a sad and angry time in the United States. Overall this clip was a good for minutes and one of the longest, especially for the “News Summary” portion of the show. Interestingly enough, the next story was a positive one regarding Obama and his strong eagerness to get into the white house, with promises that this cruel war will only stop if he is elected. He is modeled as almost a superman who will save us from our impending doom of 5 years. The next story discusses the Dalai Lama and all of the violence and tear gas that is just destroying a nation. After this story we touch right back home in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas as the flooding is acknowledged and flight cancellations are mentioned. It seems to me that going from the Dalai Lama and mass deaths to flooding in DFW is pretty far stretched. In the next story gender is touched upon as the infamous Louisiana murder case about the “Black” man killing his wife is told, later Jim reports “Blacks were kept off the jury.” This seems like a very liberal thing for him to say in my eyes. Maybe that is that culture and understood, even his audience quite possibly. The first impression from just viewing the first half of this show is that is more left-winged liberal. And to make the comparison between NPR and CBS, they both strongly gave Obama air time through discussion of his campaign, successes, and speeches. This leads me to believe that the Democratic Party (unlike FoxNews) has a strong hand they play in these media outlets.