President Obama's policy states that religion employers must offer free contraception to female employees. Representatives of the Catholic church are against the policy because the initial version of it would have forced them to pay for the contraception. After a decent amount of backlash, the president revised the policy with the government taking on the expenses.
I compared both the Al Jazeera and CNN reports and found them to have some similarities while being largely different. In the Al Jazeera report, I found that they spent more time talking about the problems with the initial policy rather than talk about the revision. In fact, the revision wasn't mentioned until the last forty-five seconds of the report. They also spent a lot of time interviewing Republicans asking them about their views on policy. Though, the interviews seemed out of place with the rest of the report with one person saying that he doesn't support the policy because he's Christian. Another person said that she doesn't agree with abortions but I don't see exactly what that has to do with revision. Bias? I wouldn't doubt it.
CNN's report stuck more to the revision and why the policy was being changed. Instead of interviewing someone at CPAC, they interviewed the president of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, who still opposed the bill but gave reasons as to why he doesn't support it. They also noted that with the revision, many religious groups support it, since they don't have to pay for it. Bias? Hard to say. I feel that they stayed a little more in the grey area.
From what I say, it seems as though Al Jazeera's reporting is more biased towards conservatives as they didn't represent anyone who supported the original policy or the revision. Since I'm not conservative, they definitely won't get me to watch anymore of their coverage.
Mike -- you make some interesting points here. This exercise really forces us to consider what bias is, and how bias differs from focus, emphasis, and point of view. Remember to write in third person (no "I") and that corporations are not (no matter what Romney says) people. The appropriate pronoun for a TV network is "it." If you want to use they, talk about the journalists or employees of CNN or Al Jazeera.
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