What will bin Laden's death do for President Obama's re-election bid?

After historic events, presidents tend to see an increase in their approval ratings. The raid approved by President Obama, that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was no different. The question now is whether or not bin Laden’s death will impact President Obama’s re-election campaign.  Analysts say that while American citizens are happy with the action President Obama took, the economy is still the number one priority. Analysts also say that bumps in ratings like this one do not last long and people will forget. This entry will be looking at an article on the San Francisco Chronicle written by Joe Garofoli and an article from FoxNews.com written by Stephen Clark.

 The article on the Chronicle was a fairly good story, it had a good basic headline but it did not intrigue the reader much. The lead was a bit long and would have flowed a lot better if it had been broken into two sentences.  Garofoli used plenty of quotes and attributions from good sources such as Ford O’Connell a republican strategist, Darrell West the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution and even Obama himself. The attributions and quotes helped cover the topic very well. Garofoli also broke the article down to subheads, which made the article very easy to read. Overall the article was accurate, objective, clear and a good read.

The article on FoxNews.com was also very informative on the topic. The headline was also pretty basic and focused on what the main topic of the story; the problem is that the main topic that was stated in the headline was buried in the story and not in the lead where it should have been. When looking at the lead the words “a president who appears vulnerable on economic issues”  make it seem like the reporter is being bias because of the fact that not everyone may agree that President Obama is vulnerable on such issues.  The reporter had good quotes and attributions made by such sources as, Mitt Romney the “front-runner” for the republican presidential nomination and Dick Harpootlian the former chairman of South Carolina Democratic Party. Along with the article was an infographic displaying a table of approval ratings, which was a good compliment to the story.

Overall both stories did a good job covering this topic and both came to the same conclusion. The article on the San Francisco Chronicle did a better job of covering different aspects of the death of Osama bin Laden that make an impact on the 2012 presidential race. The FoxNews.com story felt as though it was lacking a bit and did not focus on what the headline said until halfway into the story, if an editor were to cut the bottom half of the story the headline would have to be tossed out. The death of bin Laden was covered by every news outlet that exists and I was glad to see that reporters took a different angle when covering it and also they were not incredibly bias, which can be very hard while covering politics.    

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