Lets Talk Media Coverage!

This blog post is an assignment for my mass media and society class, the class for which I started this bolg! My assignment this week was to monitor three days of election coverage from one media source. In this case I chose to monitor the Politico coverage, via the articles posted on Yahoo! News. After monitoring the coverage over the last few days, I am supposed to look for the roles that the media played, based on Kathleen Hall Jameson and Paul Waldman’s book The Press Effect. In order to shape my argument, my professor has asked me to use Toulman’s model.

After having read approximately six or seven articles, posted by Politico, on Yahoo! News over the last three days, I believe that Politico did a decent job covering the election. In the news coverage that I read for this assignment, a majority of the articles were well thought out, and portrayed the media in the “custodian of facts” role. Some of the articles that I read focused on horse race politics, while a majority, of the articles analyzed the candidates stances on important, issues such as Russia.

The “custodian of fact” role is the most important role the media can play! In this role, as described in The Press Effect, the reporter not only reports the story, but offers insight and analysis on the events of the story. While this is the most important role for the media to play in society, asking a reporter to analyze a story can often lead to the reporter’s opinion coming out in the story. As I stated in my introductory post for this class, I believe that it is important for members of the media to remain as unbiased as possible! Therefore when offering analysis of a story the press should try to offer analysis for both sides of the story. This seems like a hard thing for most reporters to do!

This blog post is only based on a limited number of articles by Politico and were chosen only from the ones posted on Yahoo! News. It is possible that other articles posted by Politico took on a different role in the media, however the ones that I read took on the role of “custodian of fact” as stated above!