WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

I definitely am not one to talk politics with anyone let alone read about it on my own. This weekend I caught up on the Caucus blog on NYTimes.com and I can’t say I was uninterested. The Caucus blog did a very good job on covering the campaign of both the Republican and Democratic parties. But of course, to no surprise of mine, Obama was definitely in the center of attention since after all the New York Times is a more liberal publication and would give him more attention than his running mate, Mitt Romney.

The post that intrigued me the most was the article with the famous cover photo that was printed on nearly every single major newspaper across the nation of Obama being hug-lifted by a pizza man. Obama, trying to get some undecided voters to join Team Obama, went down to Florida to advocate his health care plan. In doing so, he bashed opponent Mitt Romney and his vice president candidate Paul Ryan is saying their proposed health care strategies will just make their lives much worse. One thing I do not like about politics is the bashing and I am pro-Obama all the way but maybe that was a bit more than he needed to say. Nonetheless, it’s politics and everything is fair game. Back to the story, the now famous pizza man, Scott Van Duzer, found some discomfort with his freshly acquired fame as he was bombared with hundreds of comments on his Yelp! page, both good and bad.

Of course, this blog is consisted of many articles pro-Obama and pro-Romney, yet through reading many of these I could only get the feeling that this blog was mainly an Obama cheerleader. The Nicki Minaj article where she tweets Obama saying “Thank you for understanding and creative humor Mr. President, the smart ones always do”, a reply to a public misunderstanding on her lyrics in a song, is a perfect example. Not only does this article promote Obama’s candidacy but it also ebbs Romney’s with the implication that these “smart ones” should have understood that her preaching for Romney in the song was a complete joke. Nonetheless, the caucus was filled with many good posts, some more over the top than others but definitely needed to be a little less “bashy”.

The multimedia coverage on the other hand was definitely more objective coverage than the caucus blog but again leaned more towards Obama. This portion of the Election 2012 section on NYTimes.com was filled with pictures and videos of Obama and Obama supporters. There was a slideshow of the backstage images during the Nation Democratic Convention however I found it interesting that there was no slideshow for the Republic side. But it was definitely a lot less bias than the blog. Many pictures from both sides were provided and videos as well. A very neat feature was the interactive one that tells you what words were said more by each candidate. Pretty much for reasons that tell you which topic each candidate would focus on more such as jobs, tax and energy as well as other friendlier words like family and the American dream. This was an excellent demonstration of last week’s conventions and public opinions through multimedia.