Purpose: To conduct an objective content analysis of a former President’s SOTU (it can be any president, even trump) in order to verify claims and facts. By analyzing it, you will have a greater understanding of how to analyze and synthesize important political rhetoric, like the SOTU. The skills you gain by identifying, tracking, and articulating what you find will be of important.

Skills:
Applying your skills of verifying claims,
Judging/Evaluating what you collected

Task for Part 1:
1. Choose a State of the Union address from any President.
2. Analyze and fact-check at least 20 unique statements/facts from the speech.
3. Fact-check each statement from at least 2 different (reliable) sources.
4. Make a word cloud of the most used terms in the speech. Write a short analysis of the word cloud and what it means. (300 words minimum).
5. Evaluate the overall tone the speech has for the state of the union. Is it positive, negative, mixed, or neutral? Explain. (300 words minimum).
6. Are any of Sagan’s logical fallacies used? Show at least 3 examples. If no logical fallacies are used, choose three statements that could be turned into 3 fallacies. (500 words minimum).
7. How truthful is the overall speech on a scale of 1= not truthful at all to 4 = extremely truthful? Explain. (500 words minimum)
8. Find an article from a reliable conservative source ( preferably wall street journal or the weekly standard) on the SOTU address and an article from a liberal source ( preferably New York Times or Huffington Post). How do they frame the SOTU differently? Find at least 3 major differences in coverage (can be tone, content, or frame) between the two articles. Explain. (600 words minimum).

Criteria for Success:
1. All word minimums must be met.
2. All components must be included.
3. There must be a works cited included, with in-text citations.

*I will provide documents and links that help better understand this assignment.