Almost everyone has a preferred media outlet where they can get their news. Personally, I start off my day with The Today Show on NBC because it is more liberal, and I feel everyone needs to hear both sides of the story. Then, when I am in school, I will read The Daily Wire, and I also follow accounts on Twitter such as Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, and The Reagan Battalion that I will check three to four times a day. Then, every once in a while, I will listen to/watch a podcast like, “The Ben Shapiro Show” or “Louder With Crowder.” Normally, I would never think about reading something like HuffPost or Vox for my own enjoyment, or God forbid the fakest news of them all, CNN.
However, I was curious what it’s like for people who only read things such as CNN or HuffPost as their news media outlet. So, I decided to read CNN, and CNN only, for this last week. I unfollowed all of the political figures and accounts I follow on Twitter. Then I bookmarked CNN on my chrome browser and set in for the long haul.
The week started out, and at first, it wasn’t something that I really noticed or that bothered me too much. Although, seeing as the midterm elections occurred this last week, that feeling soon left when I started reading more articles about the midterms throughout the day. I started feeling less at home with the news I was reading. Then, Tuesday rolled around, and the only way I could watch the coverage of the midterms was through CNN. This felt especially odd because you could recognize the bias they had as they were cheering on the Democratic Party, hoping they could flip the house. Because of this, the experience felt very foreign as if they were on a different team than President Trump and the Republican party. This irked me a little bit because it almost felt like they’re trying to work against him, as opposed to working with him to fix some of the problems taking place in America.
Another reoccurring thing I noticed as the week went on, was the ability CNN had to focus on an individual candidate and their physical appearance, instead of the opinions they had on current issues in American society. For example, when I was watching the midterms on CNN, it really seemed odd to me how much they were focusing on the new “browner” Democratic Party, instead of the views that this new Democratic Party had. Really, race, religion, and sexual preference should not matter in politics whatsoever. It seemed to me as if CNN was doing this to cause the Democratic Party to appeal to more minorities. Many more left-leaning news outlets seem to do this to push the idea that Republican ideals can and should only appeal to straight, white men, which just isn’t the case.
Also, I feel that they placed many articles that contain very biased opinions in their regular politics section, and they were nowhere to be found in their opinion section. One of the biggest examples of this is an article that I read titled; “The 31 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump’s final 2018 campaign rally”. As if an article discussing something as subjective as that couldn’t be opinionated.
Overall, this was an interesting week that helped shape my political ideals. However, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone read only one news source without hearing both sides of the story, you would do this by viewing different news media outlets.
