A Little Test in Mask Mandate Perspectives

    As a small test, I took a look at two similar articles by two drastically different news outlets. CNN and FOX News tend to be very popular news sources that have a reputation of biasness due to their politicization and contrasting two-party system present in the United States. The CNN post titled "'Asserting power when they don't have any': GOP governors move to ban mask mandates in schools" goes through a couple of states to detail their mask rules/mandates and discuss a bit about what that would entail as of the post date June 13 2021. The title alone shows some resentment towards governors, as the writer believes that the governors are attempting to take away mask mandates from their schools even if they supposedly don't have the power to do so. The perspective of the writer of this article, Tara Subramaniam, puts a bit of pressure on those political figures throughout but I can't deny the details of these mask mandates and the relatively clear repercussion that would have in her list of states that include: New York, Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina. But it's important to note the clear position she sets out from the very beginning and is apparent through her article. The FOX News article I found details similar facts but focuses on Utah. David Aaro, the creator of this article, does a great job at explaining the story of how Utah came to impose state-wide mask mandate as of the writing of that article, November 9th 2020. He adds many references and twitter posts from the Utah governor himself with a post detailing the following: "Due to the alarming rate of COVID infections within our state, tonight I issued a new state of emergency with several critical changes to our response. These changes are not shutting down our economy, but are absolutely necessary to save lives and hospital capacity. #utpol". Overall it's a well detailed article where I genuinely struggled to find bias in. These two articles are random and insignificant in comparison to the large amount of articles in both these news outlets and should not be used to represent the whole. I used these random but related articles in search of differences in writing and to see if I could capture any perspective from any of the authors in these informative posts that, I hope we can all agree, should stay as objective as possible. I say this keeping in mind that these are, again, news outlets that report on news daily to a grand audience nation-wide and should worry about their writing as subjective articles could begin to sway a population's perspective and that is arguably manipulative. One should let the reader learn and decide how to interpret and interact with new information for themselves. But I don't know, that's just me...

Cites:

CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/13/politics/republican-governors-ban-mask-mandates-schools/index.html

FOX News

https://www.foxnews.com/us/utah-governor-orders-statewide-mask-mandates-other-coronavirus-restrictions

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