Mitt Romney’s 47%

A secretly filmed video clip of presidential candidate Mitt Romney was released on Monday. It’s a video of him addressing donors to his campaign.  Apparently in response to a question, Romney made a comment about the 47% of Americans who are dependent on the govermnent, who don’t pay taxes, and who will vote for President Obama no matter what. I’ve found some different news stories on the video, that I hope to compare and contrast. I chose articles from MSNBC and Fox News, respectively being considered more liberal or conservative. Both use different rhetorical strategies to take different stances on the same video.

The first article I read was the one provided to us from Fox News. Here’s a link.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/18/romney-sticks-by-victims-comments-but-calls-them-off-cuff/

This article is from what is considered a conservative news station. It features different quotes from Romney himself, explaining and expanding on what is said in the video. The article uses positive quotes like,

“I do believe that we should have enough jobs and enough take-home pay such that people have the privilege of higher incomes that allow them to be paying taxes…”

And

“The right course for America is to create growth, create wealth.”

And

“He wants to help ‘all Americans.'”

All these quotes will appeal to pretty much anyone, conservative or not. Who doesn’t want a stronger, wealthier nation, where everybody has jobs? Who doesn’t want a President who is striving to help all Americans? Through careful quote selection, Fox News has managed to put Romney in a much better light than the video itself did. They managed to turn around much of what was said and offer and explanation, or more acceptable, reasoning behind it.

The MSNBC article I chose is one in which the “47%” is discussed, sort of a fact check. Here’s the link

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49100658

In this article, the author states that Romney lumped together three groups: likely Obama-voters, people who are dependent on the government, and people who don’t pay income tax. Romney treated these as one batch of Americans, whereas they don’t all overlap. Through this article, the author states that while about 47% of Americans said they would most likely vote for Obama in the upcoming election, most are working, younger, and well-educated. If a majority of the 47% pays income tax, clearly the people that make up this 47% are not all the same. The author uses different facts and statistics throughout the article, and through doing this, it allows the reader to get a few ideas. One idea is that Obama voters are “better” than Romney voters, and the other idea is that Romney is slightly ignorant about this group of people, therefore encouraging people to believe that Obama is the better candidate.

I have to admit, I’m not a big news-watcher or politic-follower, but even I was able to see the difference in the two new stations. While both claim to be neutral, this is clearly not the case.