The major breaking news story I chose was Hillary Clinton’s planted question. Although about a week old, I still find it to be the biggest story right with her poll numbers going down recently.
I went to these web sites and they are as follows: Fox News, ABC News, USA Today, and BBC News. I picked American press stories and one from England to get another country’s perspective on American politics.
First, Fox News took the Grinnell College student’s planted question for Clinton to dig deeper and find out if this had happened before with Clinton’s campaign. In a telephone interview, Geoffrey Mitchell, 32, said he was approached by Clinton campaign worker Chris Hayler before an event back on April 2. Hayler supposedly was going to plant a question using Mitchell, but repeatedly Mo Elliethee, spokesman for Clinton’s campaign in Iowa, denied the accusations to Fox News. ABC News focused on Grinnell College sophomore Muriel Gallo-Chasanof who was planted with a question for Clinton on global warming. ABC News cited the video of Chasanof winking to the camera after she said her question. ABC News says that Clinton’s campaign is blaming the mistake on one of their junior staffers. In the USA Today news story quoted a reaction from fellow Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards compared Clinton to George W. Bush by planting questions. Clinton’s campaign attacked right back at Edwards. In the BBC News story, it took a fairly straight forward approach by just saying what happened in the rally in Iowa and also brought up what ABC News said about blaming the incident on one of her aides.
The media presented this story pretty well with facts and quotes for all the stories. One error that totally just ruined their credibility with me is ABC News. They spelled Grinnell College with only one “n” (Grinell). You should never get a name wrong if you working for the big time like ABC News. Surprisingly the best online coverage I read was the Fox News story. My only gripe with Fox News was they continually showboated themselves by claiming they broke this story first. Fox News did not just report the news, they went out and investigated to see if Clinton had planted questions before.
1 comment:
Good thorough analysis.
If the ABC News writer was in this class, he/she would have to do a rewrite! But since they're not, I'll count it as an extra credit "copy edit" for you.
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