Follow up to State of the Union Address
I apologize for not getting to this sooner.
I have attached the video from youtube.com. I personally watched it via CNN, but it really doesn't make a difference.
Obama's State of the Union Address, in my opinion, was very well done. I try as a journalist not to exert my personal opinion, but since this is my blog I figure I can get away with it once in a while. I appreciated what he had to say about college students and that getting an education should not lead to poverty.
I acquired the transcript via abcnews.com so that I could quote him accurately. The part that stood out the most to me was:
"...When we renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we will work with Congress to expand these reforms to all fifty states. Still, in this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job. I urge the Senate to follow the House and pass a bill that will revitalize our community colleges, which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families. To make college more affordable, this bill will finally end the unwarranted taxpayer-subsidies that go to banks for student loans. Instead, let's take that money and give families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increase Pell Grants. And let's tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years – and forgiven after ten years if they choose a career in public service. Because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. And it's time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs – because they too have a responsibility to help solve this problem..."
(which I acquired directly from : http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/State_of_the_Union/state-of-the-union-2010-president-obama-speech-transcript/story?id=9678572&page=2)
Now, as for the analysis from other news sources:
I watched CNN right afterwards and they had their team of "senior political analyzers" go over every line that Obama spoke and show how the Democrats, Independents, and Republicans were "impacted" by each word/line spoken.
Newspapers did some news analysis through their print versions, but I notice that most of the analysis was done online. I think that this is because news outlets are able to deliver their information right after the President gave his speech, and the news outlets were also able to include the video footage from the State of the Union.
I would like to say that in the future journalism will go back to treating accuracy and objectivity as the two biggest deals when publishing an article, but that may be too idealistic. In my opinion, the analysis of the President's speech was particularly bias, and I feel like each reporter/anchor/writer inserted his/her own personal opinion when "reporting" about the speech.
I do not want to attack particular news sources, but in a lot of my findings the articles about the President's address were put under "news" "news analysis" to show that it would be hard news and objective, but the result was personal opinions inserted, as well as first person references.
I truly hope that the future of journalism will return to objectivity, because people that decide to read about the speech online without watching it themselves may blindly follow the opinion and "facts" given about the speech on the news website without actually getting their own opinions since none of the sites are able to objectively analyze his speech.
"A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state. " - Walter Lippmann
February 3, 2010 at 5:51 PM
What would the world be like if we didn't analyze everything a politician said?...Actually, that might not be good.