The opening line of “Shell Game Speech” sets the tone for the entire article in that the authors Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan begin by condemning the Bush administration and leading you to believe that they constantly disdain the intelligence of the American people. His remark about how the administration

The initial stance one would take from reading the two articles is that Tribune article is purely fact based and the Znet article is filled with nothing more than opinions. This is true to an extent, but whether or not the article can be seen as legitimate is up to the audience. The typical news reader would dismiss Jensen and Mahajan’s article as nothing more than propaganda, but in the eyes of the audience it is intended for the article is seen as informative. So ultimately it is up the audience to state whether or not the information at hand is valid. What one person views as a trashy editorial another may see as an enlightening work of art.

“hit a new low” already shows that he is bias towards some aspect of the administration (Jensen 1). On the other hand the “Senate Panel scrutinizes Bush’s Iraq strategy” article begins with hard evidence about Bush’s speech. The author Stephen Hedges starts out by telling us that Bush’s plan “to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan” are going to cost American taxpayers $87 billion (Hedges-3). In this instance the author gives us something to work with; he gives us an idea about what the speech was about. This allows us as the reader to form our own opinion rather than have one pushed upon us.

Another reason for the differences between the two articles is their typical audience. In each case the author writes in a style that most of his readers are going to tend to agree with. The Chicago Tribune article is supposed to take a fairly neutral stance tending to a wider variety of people, where the ZNet article which is from a liberal website is going to be geared towards an audience of smaller proportions. In the case of the Znet article Jensen and Mahjan are writing for a group of people who are going to be looking for articles about social change. For this reason he distorts some of the information and focuses on issues that his audience would be more interested in. In the Chicago Tribune article the audience is broader; hence the content is less biased. The goal of the writer is inform rather than influence the reader on the topic of Iraq. However this is not to say that the article is completely free from bias. As with most news subtle biases can be seen if one looks deep enough into the article.

An additional problem I found with the “Shell Game Speech” article was the obvious bias against the Bush and his administration. The first thing the reader notices at the top of the article is the website that it is taken from. ZNet is the site it came from and right next to their name is their slogan which reads “A community of People Committed to Social Changes.” Without even reading a single word of the actual article the reader can see that the author already h

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