The story I chose to dive into is teen girls considering suicide because of bad mental health. The reason I chose this topic is that I myself am still a teenager being 19, and I also struggle with mental health at times, so I was curious to see what different resources would say when covering such a heavy topic. I looked at three articles. One was from CNN. Another from Fox News. Lastly, I read a short article from Axios. What I immediately noticed is that all three have one thing in common, the first few paragraphs of the articles are full of statistics. CNN, Fox News and Axios all stated that 57% of teen girls felt hopeless and that 30% contemplated suicide. All of their statistics are on par with each other because they all used the CDC to site their statistics. The CDC is well known, but during the pandemic, we know a lot of people didn’t trust them because of their own biases. Regardless, I did notice a lot of words were put in quotations and the choice of words were interesting. CNN mentioned that the CDC is pushing for training to be implemented for staff, so they can lead counseling and mentorship programs, and how it’s very important to talk to your children about what they are feeling and to look for signs. While all of this is great, mental health is much deeper than this. If a teen girl is feeling suicidal or depressed, counseling at school won’t be the only solution. Therapy should be involved, even talking to a doctor about prescribing medicine, but nowhere in these articles is this mentioned. In fact, in the Axios article titled “Teen Girls “engulfed” In Sadness and Violence, new report says” director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health says that these numbers are ‘unprecedent’. The numbers definitely show an increase, but to call suicide, sexual violence, mental health in teen girls unprecedent is a bad term. I think this could be a case of subjective language because the CDC doesn’t want to talk about failed cases of teen girls committing suicide over such things in the past and wants to talk about the present. Fox News was the only article out of the three to mention race, saying this is mostly affecting Black, Hispanic and White communities. The other two articles could be presenting a bias for failing to mention statistics concerning race and ethnicity because that culture can play a huge part in mental health. Only two of the articles mentioned the LGBQ+ community, Fox News and CNN. Axios failed to mention both race and LGBQ+ teen girls, which can hold a bias. Though when looking at all three articles, I was pleased to see that they all held very similar facts and sources. They didn’t favor one point of view over the other in its entirety, though failing to mention race or sexual orientation could be favoring a specific demographic. Regardless, the articles I read were able to present a hard topic with little bias
