Nick Engel Hall Response

I enjoyed the writings and opinions of Jane Hall. It was interesting to read the article about the media treatment of Al Gore in comparison to her critic of the media treatment of Barack Obama. I also enjoyed reading about the media involvement and future involvement in American wars because I had never really given much thought to the planning behind all the media in wars like the one in Iraq and how their coverage of wars like Iraq and Vietnam have persuaded American opinion for and against these wars. For my response paper I would like to discuss my opinions on these two topics in comparison to what Jane Hall has mentioned.
When I was reading Jane Hall’s article about Gore media coverage in his Presidential campaign I saw many comparisons to what we saw in this year’s Presidential election. The main topic I kept thinking of was media accessibility of a candidate compared to the media treatment of that candidate. When thinking of this I thought of how open and accessible Barack Obama had been in his campaign and how that might have persuaded the media to give him better coverage. Even John McCain prided himself as being very accessible to the media with his “straight talk express” even though one can argue that he may not have been as personable or on message as Barack Obama had been. In contract, when Sarah Palin was first announced as the running mate to John McCain her access to the media was very restricted and this may have led to some of the negative treatment we saw of her in the media. In the 2000 election of Bush and Gore, we saw Bush much more open to the media treating them as friends while Gore never was as open with the media and kept pretty guarded. I also noticed her opinion on how many times Al Gore tried to reintroduce himself with a new message and was not consistent. We saw this in the primaries and the Presidential election with Hillary Clinton and John McCain constantly changing their messages against Barack Obama who seemed consistent with his message of change.
The other topic that I found interesting in these articles was Jane Hall’s writing on media coverage of wars and how the future of media coverage in wars would look like. What I found interesting while reading this article was thinking about how different the Iraq War would have been if we didn’t have the 24 hour news coverage access that we saw. Also, how different would the opinion of this war be if media were not allowed into Iraq? I feel that there are strong comparisons to the public opinion of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and some of this could be attributed to the media treatment of these wars. I can agree with Bush’s opinion that media focuses often times on only the negatives of war in their broadcasting of death tolls and showing only fights in comparisons to showing the positive results of the war such as a newly formed democratic constitution or children getting an education they never could have before because of their new freedom. This is a tough thing for news organizations covering war because it is so large in scale their reporters cannot possible see the whole picture. I believe that the future of war is going to be more managed by government and become less independent. Also, the future wars that we face may not be anything like what we see now and it will be interesting to see how the media will adapt.
Overall, Jane Hall’s writings and opinions have been some of my favorite from this semester because her topics were interesting to me personally and they made me think.