One Story, Two Different Coverages

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/13/pentagon-us-dropped-largest-non-nuclear-bomb-in-afghanistan.html

Oftentimes, the way that we perceive current events in the world is affected by what sources we choose to read. Though different sources claim to have objective coverage, they often use wording or specific examples that imply one opinion or another. For example, I read two different articles about the "Mother of all  Bombs" dropped by the United States on ISIS' caves in Afghanistan on April 13. One of the articles I chose was from Fox News while the other was from the New York Times.
The Fox News article was extremely brief. It mentioned that MOAB was the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and that it was dropped on ISIS caves in Afghanistan. It gave a quote from Adam Stump, a Pentagon spokesman, saying that the bomb was 11 tons and that this was the first time it had ever been used in combat.The article stuck to the details of the attack and gave very little context for the reader to think about. Reading this article, I felt very little emotional connection to the event. I think that this effect was intentional, meant to lead the reader away from questioning why the bomb was dropped and who authorized it.
The second article, by the New York Times, was significantly longer than the article by Fox News. It began by mentioning how large the bomb was, saying how it had to be dropped from the back of a cargo plane. This image gives the reader more perspective on how big the bomb actually was. It is one thing to say that the bomb weighed a certain amount, but when I was given a reference point for the actual size of the bomb, I felt more emotionally connected to the issue of it being dropped. To a reader, a recitation of a weight does nothing to evoke emotion unless there is some kind of reference point to compare the weight to. In this way, the article is already more emotional than the Fox News article. While the Fox News article gave a quote from Adam Stump, it failed to mention Trump or his relationship to the Pentagon. The New York Times article mentioned the fact that it is not known whether Trump authorized the dropping of MOAB and that he has been allowing the Pentagon to have more authority. This kind of information was not mentioned at all in the Fox News article. It led me to think about the inner workings of our government and the potential problems that may arise in the future.  In going beyond the basic facts about the size of the bomb, the article leads the reader to question the actions of the Trump administration. This article got the reader more emotionally involved than the Fox News article, leading me to think that its intention was to get readers to question the reasons behind the event.