CNN article
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/10/16/france.strikes/index.html?iref=allsearch
CNN (Cable News Network) is owned by Time Warner Inc. Time Warner is the second largest media conglomerate behind Disney and is ran by Jeffrey Bewkes. The CNN article is writen by the "CNN Wire Staff". No specific columnist is mentioned in the article.
Huffington Post Article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/12/france-retirement-age-sar_n_759018.html
The Huffington Post is a news website that was founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti. It hosts various sources and columnists just like many other news productions do, only it is web based. The Huffington Post article is written by a columnist named Greg Keller.
BBC Article
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11532278
BBC is a "public corporation". It is payed for by British taxpayers who pay a fee if they receive television broadcasts.
The BBC article quotes various civilians that were asked to contribute to the article. It is also an article that was contributed and written by Reuters.
Keywords: Unions, retirement, retirement reform, strikers, President Nicolas Sarkozy, Eiffel Tower, trains, mass demonstrations, pension reforms, raising retirement age.
The articles all touch on the same major points. They all summarize that the French government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Many workers went on strike this week to demonstrate their anger at the French government, in particular the President. Approximately 3 million protesters country wide participated in 200 protests. They all talked about the gasoline refineries in France being a major factor in the protests. The amount of workers striking against the retirement reform even closed France's most famous monument, the Eiffel Tower out of commission. CNN was the only news reporter that provided reason for the retirement and pension reforms stating, "Sarkozy insists the changes are needed because rising life expectancy increases the financial burden on the pension system." I'm not exactly sure why but perhaps they wanted to have a rebuttal in their side of the story to see what the government is thinking instead of the people. The French are very famous for protesting everything they have a problem against. This is something that is major in the French media and the world media right now as well. These articles are providing the information of what is going on in France, as well as why and how people are reacting to the situation. I think that if I were to look into the business of the protests and the reform from a French point of view things would appear much different. Most of these articles are pretty similar because no one is really doing any investigative journalism. When a topic is as general as this it is hard to assume numerous points of view. Especially in a world wide news sense. The larger news spans the harder it becomes to narrow news down.
What I find interesting is that the article that almost seem to be leaning sympathetically to the protesters (BBC) also spends a lot of time talking about traffic backup. The other 2 articles seem to be quite obviously slanted against the protesters. Both Huntington and CNN talk about the governments point of view while dredging on the inconvenience the strikes are causing. Its interesting that none of the articles spoke to really any of the protesters about what in particular bothered them about the bill. I'll admit I don't know anything about the bill and it could simply raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 but having some experience with protests and the response by the media.. its often a whole lot more (maybe pension cuts..). Whatever side someone takes, its always interesting to see how little a media organization reports about protests. Thats my view anyway :)
ReplyDeleteIt's also very interesting that the CNN article contains a large photo of young people with face paint as the emblem for the protest. I'm suspecting that since these concern pensions, some much older folks are also involved. But the link between youth=protest allows CNN to connect protest to a myth of youthfulness, rather than the political situation in France.
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