Finally Together, After Years Apart
I watched varying news sources from 5:30 pm until 10:00 pm on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. I watched CNN most of the time but also watched some FOX and MSNBC. All of the sources were surprisingly unbiased in much of their reporting. There were many slight biases in diction and stacking of the reporting. CNN, FOX, and MSNBC were all not obviously biased in their reporting, however only watching one of these channels on election night would definitely give you a different level of confidence in each candidate’s success.
Through the hours watching the reporting of all three channels. All were fairly unbiased. They all called states at similar times and had similar vote numbers. For example, at the beginning of the vote counts being announced, all three stations had Florida as Democratic and Pennsylvania as Democratic. Then around similar times later both states moved to Republican. The only slight difference was that FOX news called states earlier than all the other channels, but they called the states Democratic and Republican.
The majority of bias in the election courage on Tuesday night was in their stacking when referring to many candidates. On CNN, most of the analysis of the statistics was said in reference to how Biden could win and his strengths. They would always lead with which regions Biden needs to win then show which regions if lost, would cause Trump to win. The other major bias was the diction when talking about each candidate. For example, on CNN a couple of comments about Trump were “We want to give the president some respect” when bashing his behavior and “If Biden could rebuild the blue, forgive me, Donald Trump would pay for it” when talking about Biden potentially winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. On Fox, when talking about the distribution of Republicans and Democrats in the Us, they said “America is a couple of blue dots in a red America”. On MSNBC, when talking about alleged issues in the election process, the reporter said “I don’t think the Biden campaign is to blame for any of this” with no explanation as to why. They just claimed he could have nothing to do with it.
These two aspects together would only slightly change the perception of the candidates because of the lack of overt bias. However, if someone were to only watch one channel, they would end up with a small bias because of constantly hearing comments that are slightly insulting the other candidate. Over time, if many people only watch a single channel, their bais will only increase and we will have an extremely polarized society, which is what I think has happened over the last four years during President Trump’s term. Many people only watched or read one news source over the past couple of years which has given people extremely different views on the truth and created a society split into two sides. The only way to truly reunite our society is for everyone to be a well-rounded news viewer.
