A gunman in North Carolina shot and killed 7 residents and one caretaker at Pinelake Health and Rehab center. The shooting at this nursing home just outside of Raleigh, is featured in both the mainstream media, AP-informed Foxnews.com and on Reuters.com, which is an online multimedia news agency funded by Thomson Reuters whose journalists are subjected to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.
The presentation on Foxnews.com, whose information was gathered from the Associated Press, is clearly fact based with over six quoted lines within the article. They presented the information on a first person scale by interviewing the local sheriff, the shooter’s ex-wife and current neighbor. It was cut and dry in not using specific names of the victims or describing their previous situations before the shooting. It seems that Foxnews.com’s main intent is in providing the background information in hopes of finding and placing the blame on why the shooter did what he did as opposed to focusing on the victims left dead. They leave the audience to decide who or what, other than the obvious perpetrator, should be found culpable.
As for the presentation of the information on Reuters.com, this article had a grass roots feel in giving specific ages of the victims and gathering sympathy from their readers in describing them as “elderly patients in wheelchairs.” This presentation also focused on gaining the awareness and stirring protest to the public when they announced that this was “the third major shooting to occur in the southeastern United States in less than a month.” Through using the empathy of Alzheimer’s patients being shot helpless in wheelchairs and publicly announcing the horrendous increase in deadly shootings, this article is focusing on rallying to stop these mindless killers from killing innocent victims.
The most interesting difference between these two articles on the same gunfire incident lies within their overall purpose for distributing the story. One is on the hunt for the motive and the other wants to pity the victims and end the senseless homicides. It was interesting to see the same quotes used but to portray two different intents in the end.
Links:
Foxnews.com http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511575,00.html
Reuters.com http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE52S1V320090330?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
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