Two sites, same article

The Washington Post and the Washington Times are typically the left leaning and right leaning newspapers of the DC area. I thought it'd be interesting to see how each reported the heated political debate over the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

For starters the online versions of the newspapers have nearly identical headlines and both chose Lady Gaga as the article's picture. The Washington Post used "Judge halts 'Don't ask don't tell' policy" and uses this interesting picture of Lady Gaga.

While the Washington Times went with "Judge orders stop to 'don't ask, don't tell policy'" which is essentially a paraphrasing of what the Post said. The Times used a picture of Gaga that portrayed her little more normally, with this

In the pictures, the Times has Gaga looking an honest, calm politician swearing to the tell the whole truth and the Post has her looking like a heated, angry protestor who will stop at nothing until this gets repealed. Each chose her as the symbolic mascot of the "Don't ask, don't tell" debate because she is the most recognizable person that has spoke out against it. The newspapers just go about showing her in different ways.

The lead ins for both stories include the main details. One addresses the Obama administration's injuction rejection and the other lists how long the ban on openly gay troops has been. From this point on it is mostly the same information and quotes just in a slightly different order based off of what the journalist thought was most important.

Despite the Post being considered a "Liberal leaning" newspaper and the Times being the "Conservative sided" paper I could not find any bias in either of the stories which surprised me.

However if you looked close enough you could find some bias. The Post's story includes multiple pictures of the Lady Gaga speech and has an interactive gallery to look through, the Times has one picture.

The Post's article is considerabley longer compared to the Times' story with the Post an entire two pages compared to the Times page and a quarter story.

The bias may be that the Times would not like to cover this story as much as the Post because on a Website there is unlimited space to provide pictures and articles but the Times chooses not to include them.

Two other biases outside the article were on the Times site. They included a link to notorious right leaning Fox News who they are labled as "partners." There is also a poll question after the article asking about the "Tea Party" and Republicans.

Other than those noticable differences in length, variety of pictures, and outside influences, the presentations of the stories are very similiar and as a reader I would have not gotten anything different out of one article that I didn't get from reading the other. Both stories serve their purpose and inform me on a current political event.

The links to the Post is here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/12/AR2010101206145_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010101407183

The Times here http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/12/judge-orders-stop-dont-ask-dont-tell-policy/?page=1