FIRST ASSIGNMENT

Course: Political Science – Critical Thinking

Instructions

Find two political news articles (NOT opinion pieces) from different sources that discuss the same news story to answer the questions.

Choosing well-known news sources with partisan biases may make this assignment easier for you. If you choose to go that route, you can use the Media Bias Chart. You can find some examples at  HYPERLINK “https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news” AllSides as well.

Provide links to the two articles you are analyzing. (Hint: Make sure they are discussing the EXACT SAME issue, not just two closely related issues).

Agenda-Setting and Priming – go to the homepage of the news source where each of your stories came from. What differences do you see between these sites? What stories are they giving the most space? What are some differences in the news stories on the front page?

Framing – How do the two articles differ in their framing of the story? Are their perspectives that are present in one article but not the other? Do the stories differ in tone? Provide examples of differences between the two articles. Be thorough, this should be the question you spend the most time on.

Bias – How might bias influence how these stories are written or presented? How might biases influence how readers understand and feel about the articles? Feel free to discuss personal cognitive biases (from the textbook) or media bias (from the online readings).

NOTE: Submit your answers to this Dropbox by Sunday, November 22nd at 10pm.