Tag: partisan journalism

US election fever

Examining Barack Obama’s re-election and the prospect of four more years of partisan journalism in a deeply divided US.

After eighteen months of campaigning, endless hours of airtime, and more sound bites than anyone cares to remember, the American electorate has spoken. The US election will eventually prove to be the biggest news story of 2012 in terms of coverage.

And there are plenty of media angles to explore: The unprecedented amount of money spent on advertising by the official campaigns and their shadowy Super Pac surrogates; the increasingly polarised media landscape in the US, epitomised by Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left; and there was the collective insistence on the part of the networks and the pundits they employ that, despite poll after poll showing the incumbent ahead, this was a horse race, much too close to call. Never let the facts, or the polling data, get in the way of a good story. The Listening Post team was up all night watching the coverage to bring you this week’s News Divide – US media election fever.