Associated Press V. Al Jazeera; a showdown over U.S. politics in Iraq

Al Jazeera Article

Associated Press Article

With all I've heard about the anti-American attitude of Al Jazeera I was extremely surprised to see an article almost identical, and perhaps less biased than the Associated Press version.

"The legislation is the first binding challenge on the war that Democrats have managed to execute since they took control of both houses of Congress in January."

This comment from the AP article threw me off because it sounds like the they're making the Democrats out to be incompetent. However, as mentioned in the Al Jazeera article:

"Unlike an earlier version the house passed last month, this bill would not set a firm date for all US combat troops to leave the war. Instead, a nonbinding March 31 date for finishing the withdrawal merely would be a "target"."

The Democratic majority already passed a bill that was an obvious challenge on the war, more so than the current bill, and are now showing a willingness to compromise by passing one with more elbow room for the Bush administration.

Headlines

I thought the different headlines were interesting here. The majority are right on with the news, but there are certainly a few non-opinion (haha) headlines that speculate the veto of Bush (yes, I know he said he would, but regardless I don't think this SF Gate sort of a headline is appropriate).

What will happen to Roe v. Wade?

Court Backs Abortion Ban

I'm not sure that the lead for this article displayed both sides of the conflict in an accurate manner. First by labeling the Supreme Court's majority vote as "conservative" they are ultimately implying that all conservative efforts are anti-abortion. Secondly, by saying the decision "set the stage for further restrictions" to abortion, it seems as though someones opinion creeped into the lead, rather than the other side of the conflict. The abortion rights efforts were not necessarily mentioned in the lead directly, though it might be implied that there are those efforts otherwise there would be no court case in the first place. Still, I think that the lead showed more of one side of the story than the other.

Further on in the article, one needs to read all the way to the twelfth paragraph before hearing a comment from the abortion rights' side of the story, which seems a long way down, especially considering the first lack of mention in the lead. It also mentions all five of the Supreme Court Justices who supported the decision, as well as President Bush before introducing a source who opposed the decision. Overall, it seemed as though the conflict was unbalanced, simply through the story organization.

The full text of the decision of Gonzales v. Carhart can be found here at www.findlaw.com

Controversial article to begin with, but...

Pas de Deux of Sexuality, New York Times

The scientific studies he cited were almost all correlational, and therefore inconclusive. Relying so heavily on simply correlational studies makes for an interesting read, but certainly a weak foundation for the article. It seems like he came to a biased conclusion based on the inconclusive data. If he had taken another angle, and perhaps introduced the topic as the sexual nature of the brain including studies of what makes sexual orientation, it would have been better focused, and certainly easier to follow, but instead it seems like he almost wanted to make it controversial. I guess controversy grabs more readers than simply talking about different scientific studies that have inconclusively linked homosexuality with pre-birth brain development in men. It might have been easier for a reader to draw his or her own conclusion with a more neutral angle, at least until more conclusive research has been conducted.

This comment of his made me wonder:

"This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession, sidetracks the reproductive tissue from its ovarian fate and switches it into becoming testes. Hormones from the testes, chiefly testosterone, mold the body into male form."

Sounds like he's certainly "proud" of his Y chromosome, and certainly wanted his reproductive tissue to be "sidetracked from its ovarian fate."

Interestingly, one of the experts he cited is an MSU professor, whose website is here: The Breedlove Jordan Lab

Iraqis Protest Peacefully

Washington Post Article

New York Times Article

The difference in leads struck me here. Both leads included powerful imagery in addition to the hard news, but the New York Times article put emphasis on the news before introducing the imagery and the Washington Post put the imagery first. I wonder whether NYT made the decision to emphasize news because of the powerful image above the story, which gives the imagery in a different way, whereas the Washington Post lacked a picture and therefore needed to establish the nature of the protest before telling why it happened. Other than the organizational difference, the leads were essentially identical.

The stories also both included an observation that the crowd, supporting a Shiite Muslim, did not only consist of Shiites, but also of Sunni politicians. The New York Times article introduced this in their seventh paragraph, while the Washington Post article, once again emphasizing the imagery in much of the story, put it in the thirteenth paragraph. This interested me for a few reasons. The first was because though the protest is certainly news in and of itself, almost second to that seems that it was a peaceful political demonstration at which both Shiites and Sunnis were present. This is close to unheard of, since the groups are so forcefully divided politically. It seems to me that this fact should have been introduced much sooner than either of the stories introduced it, perhaps even in the lead. Sure, it would mean sacrificing the imagery elements, but I think that with the ability of photography to tell the visual part of the story, it might have been unnecessary to introduce it in the lead to begin with.

On a side note:
Associated Press Article

I wonder if the protest will have an effect on White House policies. The basis of the democratic society is that government must pay attention to the citizens, otherwise the right to protest is meaningless. Since the US government is occupying, shouldn't they be just as accountable to the citizens of Iraq as the Iraqi government? I would ask the US government to uphold their ideal of democracy and give the Iraqis what they're asking for, or if not to that extreme, at least take a less intrusive role in Iraq's government. I believe that the atmosphere in the Middle East is electric because of the US preaching democracy and then taking the role of imperialists. It's time the US practiced what they preach.