Tuesday, August 30, 2016

The News Atenas, Costa Rica (CS)

For this blog I chose to focus on a local newspaper written in Spanish and website new source called the Tico Times written in English. I tried to follow the news every night between February 27th and March 4th. The Tico Times has a Facebook page that I followed and so getting updates from them every day was straight forward and simple. However, the newspaper is usually brought over by one of the guards before dinner and there were a couple nights where the paper either wasn't brought over or someone else had taken it home with them so I wasn't able to read it every night. Also because it was written in Spanish I often only skimmed the headlines and had another student who had a better grasp on Spanish help me read an article or two so I was never able to read the whole newspaper. That being said I still felt as though I understood enough to get a grasp of what types of reports were written.

Both the Tico Times and the newspaper placed a high emphasize on sports, the environment, and occasionally politics. Most nights the front page of the newspaper was covering a fĂștbol game that had just happened. Then the side panels were usually dedicated to laws that had been passed or elections. The Tico Times similarly had articles about sports but the majority of the articles were written about laws being passed or lighthearted stories about festivals or events happening around Costa Rica. The Tico Times definitely had a more global focus, likely because it is aimed at English speaking expats who live in Costa Rica. Many of the articles on the website involved events or politics in the U.S, Brazil, and Nicaragua. One article was written only about the U.S presidential primaries. Both sources seem to have almost daily articles about the Zika Virus.


Both of the news sources seem to have an overall optimistic feeling. I feel as though often news outlets in the U.S highlight negative things happening in the U.S and around the world. Costa Rica news however seems to be more evenly balanced, they don't ignore when bad things happen in Costa Rica but the headlines also seem more factual and less sensationalized when they are reporting on a death, or a natural disaster, or really anything particularly negative. I would say that U.S news and Costa Rica news are pretty equally prideful of their own countries. Something about the local newspaper did seem a bit more serious than the Tico Times, perhaps because the local newspaper didn't run as many human interest stories whereas about a third of the Tico Times articles seemed to be human interest stories. 


Overall U.S news and Costa Rican news didn't seem that different. As a noted earlier Costa Rica news is less sensationalized. As a part of that it also is written in a more straight forward manner so that was they are reporting on is told in a succinct way. It also seems generally more optimistic. However, other than that there doesn't appear to be too many striking differences between the news in the U.S and news in Costa Rica. 

1 comment:

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