Journal #2

Friday Night Fight!

The campaign trail hit a crossroads when the presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, met for their first presidential candidate debate in Mississippi. The debate was broadcast on Fox and all local affiliates. The moderator was fair and kept the discussions on topic and rolling along. The debate never raged to any physical violence but the two candidates did exchange some harsh words a few times. The debate ended and the two retired to their separate quarters, and hopefully trying to fix our economy!

The real fighting began in the aftermath of this debate. Every medium and media outlet in America had to report or just give their opinion on the much malign festivities Friday night. All the political and news television channels were buzzing over the debate. The debate was front-page news on the Saturday morning San Jose Mercury newspaper. With the buzz in the traditional media realm the debate had a much easier transition onto the web. All the news and media outlets also run their personal websites and gave audiences a place to turn if they needed to read transcripts of the proceedings or wanted some in depth coverage.

Television had immediate post-debate coverage on Fox then later on CNN and MSNBC. While watching the Hannity and Colmes show on MSNBC I got to see some real debating. With forum quest ranging from presidential advisors to foreign policy experts the debate raged on, without the candidates present. The forum sat five upper forties white males that didn’t seem to agree on one single topic the entire show. The interruptions and yelling actually became almost comical watching grown men argue like little kids. The forum guests repeatedly interrupted each other the whole time only to completely distract me and probably the rest or the viewing audience.

The Mercury News handled the topic of the Friday night debates more tactfully. Newspaper has the ability to really engage in the reader’s daily life. You pick up a paper to read and maybe do games, but your engaged. The front page has an article mainly of the play-by- play of what went on and a really bipartisan account of the event. This was reassuring after the television the night before. The Mercury also featured a special election insert that showcased the different parties highlights of the debate. The feature I like best about the Mercury had to be the relief of getting uninterrupted facts from both sides of the political coin. The San Jose Mercury realized that Saturday morning people would get up and flip open the paper to read about the debate and the audience I believe was treated to a wonderful spread of political content to be read at their leisure.

With the success in the news and on the T.V. the web content pored in. everything from You Tube doctored McCain mistakes to polls on every media site asking us the viewers to weigh in on our thoughts. The Internet was the best of both words. Like the newspaper I was engaged and sought out my most trusted sources for news content and was not disappointed. I read my first article on KTVU.com and found it to be very bipartisan and neutral even for California standards. Still there is a reason T.V. rules the media landscape, and that’s the visual aspect it brings the audience. The web delivered with lots of videos and replays.

In the end I would say still the most reliable and straight to the point medium for following the political season has to be… the Newspaper. The web definitely has the largest upside to the future and shows no signs of slowing down, but the Internet has two inherent problems; one is that not everyone has the capabilities of the Internet and two how trusted can it be. T.V. on the other hand just gave me a headache after watching the “professional” “expert” people argue with each other.