Blog 1: RFK Jr. Dropping out of the Election Race and Endorsing Donald Trump: CNN vs. FoxNews
In this first blog post, I am comparing and contrasting the FoxNews coverage and the CNN report of RFK Jr. exiting the presidential race as well as his endorsement of Donald Trump.
Upon my first read through both news posts, there are many differences that are clear. CNN rarely includes every quote that Fox does by RFK and also ‘tip-toes’ around some of the statements made by him. CNN also makes it a point to focus heavily on the Kennedy family being upset with him endorsing Trump and that it was “a sad ending to a sad story”. There is also mention of Democratic National Committee senior advisor, Mary Beth Cahill, who adds that RFK endorsing Trump’s campaign will not even benefit him. There are phrases such as ‘good riddance’, ‘failed fringe candidate’, ‘betrayal’, and more included in this story. These remarks give indication of RFK’s endorsement as an unfortunate event for CNN’s broadcasters and journalists to have to discuss. Cahill also boldly states, “The more voters learned about RFK Jr. the less they liked him” (2024). This is more of an indignation that CNN is opposed to this endorsement and especially to any movement concerning Donald Trump.
FoxNews starts off their coverage on this matter with a quote from Kennedy and even adds his statements about election honesty. He explains that in a fair or honest election, he would have been able to win, but that is not the case in today’s world. It appears that FoxNews includes way more of the statements made by Kennedy and Trump versus CNN’s level of coverage. Fox goes into detail about Kennedy’s feelings towards the Democratic party; “Kennedy described the modern Democratic Party as "the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money."” (Steinhauser and Baehr, 2024). Fox utilizes Kennedy’s feelings of betrayal to further portray his stance with the DNC. After Trump’s attempted assassination, Kennedy met with him and they discussed key issues to which they both agreed on many matters. Through all of this talk of Kennedy and how this endorsement may be a positive thing, there is a surprising statement at the end. Fox included the same quote by Mary Beth Cahill about RFK’s familial remarks and her position on the lack of benefit for Trump. Then, the last statement is what the Harris-Walz campaign has stated about Trump’s campaign, meant to (I suppose) show how Fox believes this statement to be false.
I believe the two news outlets definitely show which party they affiliate with, but I was surprised to see how one includes way more quotes and speech than the other. However, it is important to note that this could just be because of the matters, in which they are both discussing a republican-based situation.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/politics/rfk-jr-suspends-campaign/index.html
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-endorse-trump-president-court-filing-shows
I found it very interesting to read what you wrote about the different media sources’ use of quotes. I noticed a similar occurrence while writing my own blog post this week. My post focused on Trump’s stance on IVF treatments and the two news sources I compared were Newsmax and NBC News. I noticed that the Newsmax source included a lot more quotes from Trump than the NBC News source did. I took a moment to skim through some other Newsmax and FOX News articles and noticed that the articles that focus on a conservative candidate tend to include a lot more quotes from the candidate than the articles that focus on a liberal candidate. I noticed the opposite when skimming through articles published by CNN and NBC News- these sources included more direct quotes when the article was focused on a liberal candidate. This would be interesting to conduct a more in-depth study of, but at first glance, it seems that the use of direct quotes is related to the bias of the particular news media source.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting post about the two media outlets. RFK was a major candidate and like I mentioned in one of my discussion posts this week, he was basically censored until the media had to pay attention to him. I believe Fox's coverage was because of the favorable attacks on Kamala Harris from RFK. Also, it would be in the best interest of CNN to not include the less favorable attacks on Kamala. It is wrong to censor a candidates ideas and CNN did that the more RFK attacked Biden/Harris. For CNN to say that RFK was a failing candidate is just a blatant lie. He wasn't going to win the popular vote or the electoral, but he as still polling 5-10%. RFK's independent voters could easily sway the swing state electorate. The BIDEN/TRUMP election was decided by the independents, so why wouldn't this one?
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