The votes have yet to be fully counted in the vote on Iraq’s constitution and you can see some confusion already setting in — as pointed out by Oxblog’s David Adesnik:
WaPo VS. NYT: WHAT HAPPENED TODAY IN IRAQ? Was turnout high or low? Were the voters subdued or celebrating? It’s hard to figure out even that much if you read both the NYT and WaPo.
He then gives you the two examples. Read them yourself and you’ll reach the same conclusion he does:
I guess the answer to my confusion is obvious: only read one newspaper, and then the world will seem like a much more orderly and rational place.”
He’s correct. Editors and reporters are human (although people on both sides of the political spectrum don’t think so when an unflattering story about one of their people comes out). News judgments are made based on what they believe the larger context of a story is.
If you look at a newspaper (or a broadcast entity — compare Fox News to CNN) you can see by their story selection, placement and the way they place it in the larger context, their perception of reality. Adesnik is correct: just read one and you can accept that view and it sure makes it easier. Read more and you might find it’s not as simple a situation as just reading one. The same applies to reading blogs.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.