Fox News & CNN

As a consumer of media through news broadcasts, I must admit that each broadcasting station could very well present the identical story two different ways. The U.S. media interprets news and events; to do this, media frames the stories, provides opinions and even tells us what to think. CNN and Fox News are almost exclusively my two personal sources of television news. It is not unusual to be flipping through the channels and watch a segment of each. There is a strong chance that both stations are reporting similar news. In fact, I watched both Fox and CNN a couple days ago and the majority of each stations' news was concurrent with the others'. What sets them apart is their style of coverage and how they apply politics to the stories.
News stations do not own themselves. Fox is owned by News Corp and CNN is owned by Time Warner. A factor such as different ownership can be responsible for the type of interpretation news is given. Another key difference is audience. CNN knows it has a very large audience all around the world. The same can not be said about Fox News. Even if you have not been a viewer of either station for years like myself, after one viewing of both, you will agree that Fox falls on the conservative end of the scale and CNN falls on the liberal side. As for their coverage of major events, I know what to expect.
With major events, you can expect CNN to linger over them and really over exaggerate the events. Take the supposed Swine Flu breakout as an example. CNN devoted a great deal of time to cover it compared to Fox News who gave much less hype. Fox News covered the Swine Flu relatively early in the broadcast but quickly moved on to other local events. CNN seemed to have struck gold with this. I have to agree that such coverage is exactly what an international audience wants. Personally, I would prefer Fox News for coverage of a non political event. CNN would be my choice if I was seeking a concentrated political analysis of an event. If I had to choose between partisan coverage or objective coverage, I would choose partisan coverage. Partisan coverage is not such a nuisance if you share the same political ideologies as the party. It is also less likely to distort news than objective coverage. With partisan coverage, I can recognize the frame that has been placed on the news relatively easier.