The first article that I discovered was titled, “Better dead than fed, PETA says.” The author of the article was Debra J. Saunders, she is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and writes three columns every week. Before that she worked for the Los Angeles Daily News and worked for advocacy groups supporting a Republican leader of the California State Assembly. In addition, she has also written for the Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. Through this I discovered that she is considered a conservative, opposed to the War on Drugs and supports same-sex marriage. For this article her work was published on SFGate.com, which is the website for the San Francisco Chronicle. The SFC is a daily newspaper that is published by Frank J. Vega and is considered the largest newspaper in Northern California. The publisher and newspaper in general have a lot of power because they have been around since 1865. Plus there sources are credible because of their high reputation and the overall ability for them to grow into the second largest newspaper on the west coast. In addition, they have also won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize. The San Francisco Chronicle has no affiliation with any other businesses, they are an independently run newspaper founded by two brothers over a hundred years ago. Because of this, I believe that biases are kept to a minimum. The primary audiences are people living in the San Francisco Bay area. The demographics of the audience are mixed because of San Francisco’s large diverse population. I think that the paper makes assumptions that the audience actually cares what the writers are saying. I believe that the websites and newspapers main goal is to spread news and share information throughout Northern California.
The second article was titled, “PETA accuses lab of animal cruelty.” This article was written by Kathy Benz and Michael McManus. I wasn’t able to find any personal information for Benz, but I did discover that she was in a lawsuit during her time working for CNN. I was able to find more information on McManus; he is an author of a paper entitled “Ethics and Religion.” Through this I was able to uncover that he was a conservative and he doesn’t believe in same sex marriages, divorce or gun control. Through researching his background I was able to understand why McManus would be writing an article about PETA, animal cruelty. The article was posted and published on the CNN website, CNN.com. It is produced by many different producers and has a lot of authority because of the overall size and excellent history. CNN is owned by Turner Broadcasting which is a Time Warner Company. I think that because CNN is such a large conglomerate it has the tendency to form many biases. Because of the overall size once a bias is formed, I would think that it would be very hard for it to be dispelled. Plus there is no way that CNN can control every bias that is formed through there broadcasting, it is impossible. CNN serves a global audience of millions of people with various ethnicity, race and class backgrounds. I think that CNN assumes that all people that listen to the news go to them first. This is because there slogan is, “The Worldwide Leader in News.” I believe the overall purpose of CNN is to spread and share news all over the world, thus connecting millions of different people.
