To whom it may concern, this blog I will converse about the difference between mainstream and alternative coverage of the same event. The first event I looked into is the current election in Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai won the election two months ago due to fraud. The first report I heard about this event was from fsrn.org, free speech radio news. In this report the report was given by a woman who was stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan. Their were interviews with local Afghani student and an Afghani government official, who spoke in Arabic. In these interviews I was exposed to their personal views, which seemed to be speaking for the general public. I would say that around half of the report was based on the facts of the campaign and the other half on the opinions of the Afghanis. I then read this story as reported by a journalist for the associated press. This article covered mostly what the American governments actions and thoughts were about this “fraud” election. At no point did it talk about what how the Afghani people felt about there being another election. Rather it talked about the actions that America would have to take for there to be another election. The next story I read was about Obama’s new plan on how to handle the ongoing civil war, genocide, and human rights abuses in Sudan. I read this article on democracynow.org. It was not a long story and just explained how Obama and the White House have devised a new plan and then had a quotation from Hilary Clinton explaining vaguely there general plan. Afterwards I searched the internet for a mainstream coverage of this news and could not find one. This is rather appalling to me because for my senior project I did a research paper on the Genocide in Sudan and feel very strongly that America should intervene and that this topic should be more covered in the media. The fact that no mainstream news reported anything about this, but almost every mainstream news medium reported about the “balloon boy” depicts on what the media wants the American population to focus on. And I find this sickening. The last story I was interested in was the story overtaking our news today and was surprised to find a story about “Balloon Boy” on an alternative media website. I found a short clip about it on alternet.org. It was a clip showing how the media is covering this story so heavily while they are not talking about any of the current problems going on in our country such as the recession and wild fires. I looked to almost every mainstream news website and even on the television and not one of them brought up the fact that there is other more important news going on. Instead they all showed repeated clips of balloon boy and talked about “what his parents were thinking”. This shows how alternative media is far more respectable than mainstream media. I could only find one website, alternative, that covered the story of balloon boy and it had my exact same thoughts about it. While this was happening I was watching a lady on CNN repeat the same thing in different ways about the “atrocity” of balloon boy and the effect on the parents children, I sit here and wonder, “what about the atrocities effecting everyone?”