Critical journalistic approaches

As we read Hamlet, we are studying different critical approaches to the play that have been applied to literature through the course of history. It's interesting to incorporate critical approaches such as feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic into a reading of a text that may otherwise have been read by me simply in a more traditional formalist manner. Between these critical approaches, there is a multitude of details that are made apparent as being relevant to a certain approach.

While I attempt to better understand these approaches, it has become clear to me that approaches like these don't apply only to literature, but to more everyday media, including the news. Different news sources report from different perspectives. One such news source is the World Socialist Website, whose perspective is akin to the Marxist critical approach. Many people are aware of liberal or conservative bias among major news networks. News networks blatantly report facts that aren't completely accurate or frame information in a way that construes something different than the reality of a scenario. Of course, it's difficult to determine what is the "correct" perspective on an issue; there's always a different way to interpret facts and cause an effect. Such is one of the points of the new historic critical approach.

But anyway, I thought it would be interesting to compare two articles from different sources, written about the same issue. The first article is from the World Socialist Web Site. The second is from CNN. Both are written about intervention of world leaders in Libya. One noticeable difference is that while the CNN article refers to US forces or the British Prime Minister, socialist article consistently refers to "imperialist" forces and "imperialist" leaders. It's a small difference, but nonetheless makes a difference in the mindset of a reader and adds to the socialist slant of the article. There are many points in the socialist article that are blatantly biased, and the author intends for them to be, it is also the smaller aspects of the article that stick with a reader and add to the different approach to the issue.

The CNN article quotes two politicians...

Gadhafi and those around him must be held accountable (for any actions) which violate international legal obligations and common decency," she said. "Through their actions, they have lost the legitimacy to govern."

Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called Gadhafi "delusional," adding that "when he (Gadhafi) can laugh when talking to American and international journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality."

Meanwhile, the WSWS article says,

Gaddafi is a criminal who deserves to be brought to justice, but none of the imperialist leaders currently denouncing him have any standing to point the finger elsewhere. They are all complicit in wars of aggression and colonial-style occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and are implicated in all of the attendant crimes, including torture, rendition and indefinite detention.

The apparently less biased article does not give any indication that world leaders have anything but disgust for Gadhafi, while the socialist one gives another perspective that readers otherwise would probably not get. Who's to say which is right? Both present facts; they just frame them in different ways. It's interesting how different critical approaches can apply not only to reading literature, but to reading as well as portraying news.