For this assignment I choose to analyze BBC, a British News Station that is know for being un-bias and Fox News, a station that is know for being bias. More specifically I choose to look at the online websites of these two news sources. The story that I choose to analysis was the firing of NPR employ Juan Williams after he made an appearance on the O’Reilly factor with the ever controversial Bill O’Reilly. I am taking a Media Literacy class as well this semester, and I have been shocked to discover how swayed and manipulated some news resources truly are. As a result of finding this out it made me want to compare two opposites to see the real specific differences.
First I looked at the BBC article and found that the story was very factual and straight forward, they told what happened and didn’t offer any personal opinions or twists. I admire this about any outlet of news because I want to told what happened, I want the facts and the truth so that I don’t feel like I am being lied to or have to dig further to discover the real story. This article had no fluff, I was merely informed about what happened by a creditable news source with a good reputation. Lately I have been tuning to BBC for the majority of my news information, or PBS because I know I will get un-bias information. In BBC’s article on Juan Williams they provided quotes for backup for NPR about the firing as well as from Juan to know exactly what was said to cause the firing.
Next, I went over to the Fox website and began to read their article, and in the beginning it did closely resemble the BBC story with the quote about what Juan said and how NPR released a statement. However, the story was longer than the BBC one and that gave me a clue that I was going to see some more gossip like news about the situation, and not just facts, and I was right. The Fox article definitely swayed more towards the gossipy side offering opinions and swayed comments. In addition, this story hits close to home for them because Bill O’Reilly is in fact an employ of Fox so they had something to say about that as well. Bill O’Reilly being extremely controversial and right winged himself found no problem with Juan’s comment “I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous,”. However, this comment is not appropriate and that is why he was let go from NPR, he swayed from their standards and image, and I agree with their reaction.
Overall, I found it very interesting to actually critique two versions of the same news occurrence and I learned a lot.
BBC- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11600084
Fox- http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/21/npr-fires-juan-williams-oreilly-appearance/
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