Media Connatation

Earlier this week, I read two articles on the same topic and was shocked as to how different two articles on the same story could actually be. Both were about the migrant caravans at the border of the US. This first article can be found here https://www.foxnews.com/world/migrant-caravan-members-may-be-planning-human-stampede-at-us-border-to-provoke-us-aid-group. This article presented the people of the caravans to be overstepping at almost attacking the American people, regularly citing sources of people who are firmly against the caravans and describing the people as “stampeding” and “illegally crossing”. This article, while you could still pick the story out of it, truly focused on a one sided story, which is the story of the people from the town where the migrants set up camp. The story hardly ever talked about why the migrants are here or the living conditions they are in or how long it would take them to cross legally. It simple talked over and over again about how they had seemingly invaded this nice town.

Now compare this to the second article, which can be found here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/world/americas/mexico-tijuana-migrants-caravan.html. This article could not be more different. This article focuses on the exact opposite, hardly mentioning the town once and portraying America as being horrible for not letting the migrants in. They portray the migrants as being in need of help with words such as “sought protection”, and using words for the other side such as “Violent”, portraying the other side of the story as horrible people who are trying to kill these immigrants.

Overall, after reading these two articles it became very clear to me that there are always going to be multiple ways to tell the same story, and while some take the method of leaving out parts of the story as a whole, most will also take advantage of words and how they play off in peoples minds.