Sunday, March 30, 2008

The latest news about the elections...



As in the last weeks I read above all the news about the right-wing candidates, for this task I decided to focus my attention on what’s going on in the current political debate between the Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Reading through the articles I found in the websites of the Washington Post and of The Times, I decided to focus my attention on the news about Hillary Clinton’s speech on her trip to Bosnia. It was interesting to see how different is the way in which the news is presented in these two online newspapers…


The first difference I noticed is that in the news of The Times Online “Hillary Clinton backtracks over 'misleading' Bosnia sniper story”, the video about her visit to Bosnia in 1996 appears in a central position and before the article itself, whereas in the article of the WaPo website "Hillary Clinton calls Bosnia sniper story a mistake" you can see it only at the end, by clicking on a link. What is more, this is not the same video: in The Times Online comments of the journalists are added, making Hillary’s speech seem a big lie (e.g. when the journalist introduces it saying that “this video is supposed to be an example of Hillary Clinton’s babble tested experience”). On the other hand, in the article of The WaPo the video only shows the fact without adding any further comments.


Further in the article, the journalist of The Times Online tends to report only the comments of Hillary's opponents, such as: “[…] But Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, argued that the claim was not simply a slip of the tongue as it was made in prepared remarks during the Iraq speech.“


In the related article by Gerard Baker “Hillary Clinton; fibber in chief”, right from the title the journalist openly considers her speech about her visit to Bosnia prepared and intentional, aiming at gaining more admiration for her experience in foreign policy. He criticizes her husband Clinton’s policy as well: “In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent. The comments of the people are incisive as well:"[...] since she says millions of words a day maybe she should take her own advice that WORDS MATTER.”


On the contrary, in the article of The Wapo website the journalist wants us to understand that the Bosnia sniper story might also be a simple mistake due to her intensive work "I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts […]". Moreover, he tends to justify her misstatement through her spokesman's words: "The important thing is that she was there. Our soldiers saw she was there and heard her and knew that our country cared about them and what they were doing,"
In the website of Il Giornale there wasn’t news concerning the US elections, therefore I went to read an article about Berlusconi which was about his current political platform. As usual, there is a big foto of him smiling in the foreground and raising his hands as if he already were the winner of the elections… In the article the journalist compares Berlusconi’s goals with those of Veltroni, always ridiculizing him: “Veltroni sogna il pareggio […]; …fa gli scongiuri politici, visto che tutti sondaggi danno nettamente indietro il Pd”.

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