Slow News Week Solution: Look Forward, Analyze Data

Devin Bartolotta
DevinBart@gmail.com
@HighDEVinition

In my eyes, this seemed to be a pretty uneventful week in the world of the presidential race. But in the true spirit of media during election season, FOX News really, really tried to make news where there was none. So I decided to look at a different part of the FOX election site, the Candidate Tracker.

The Candidate Tracker tracks the appearances of each candidate's party throughout the United States. Zooming out, it was difficult to see exactly where the priorities of each party lay.

But zooming in, it was much more obvious that candidates are definitely paying more attention to swing states. An extremely high concentration of political appearances in states like Colorado, Ohio and Virginia showed that republicans and democrats alike are paying attention to these states that could potentially determine the election. FOX also has a detail featuring the amount of funding each party has spent in each battleground state.

In Ohio alone, the Obama campaign has spent $1,698,485 and the Romney campaign $3,152, 149. With a total of nearly 5 million dollars spent to win Ohio votes alone, it's no wonder that every time we open our mailboxes, we are infiltrated with mail about who to vote for and why.



It seems to me that FOX news is making a large effort to cover the election in an un-biased manner this way. The numbers don't lie, and these simple resources are giving voters a great opportunity to check up on their candidates before they cast their vote in November.

FOX is definitely looking forward toward the debates, however. Because of some recent gaffes in the Romney campaign, FOX news is definitely looking toward the impending debates to make up voters' minds.

In this article regarding Paul Ryan's opinion on the debates, FOX news reminds readers that the race isn't yet over and refuses to declare a winner before the race.

While many news outlets have seemingly already declared Obama a winner in the race, FOX news has yet to do that. It's giving each an equal chance and taking the time to remind readers that there is still quite some time before election day.