Wednesday Outrage: ‘Outrageous Media’ Edition
6th June 2007
by gordo
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
I couldn’t decide which photo to illustrate this post with, so I provided a selection
Media Problem: False Narratives
One of the big reasons why the media gets so much wrong is that reporters feel the need to shoehorn their stories into pre-existing narratives. For example, there’s the narrative of the religious conservatives, and their battle against the secular liberals. This narrative informs most of the reporting that we see when politics and religion intersect.
Over at CNN, for example, several reporters have suggested that leading Democratic presidential candidates are only now beginning to openly discuss their personal values and their religious faith. But as Media Matters points out, these issues have long been a staple of Democratic campaigns. Democratic candidates in general, and the three current front-runners in particular, have gone out of their way to discuss these issues for years.
Part of the reason that the media keeps returning to this particular narrative is that media outlets go out of their way to perpetrate the “godless Democrat” stereotype. This Media Matters report shows that on TV news programs, conservative religious leaders are quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost four times as often as liberal religious leaders.
The Outrageous Bush Administration
Bradley Schlozman, Bush’s election fixer/US Attorney, was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about why he brought bogus vote fraud indictments just before the 2006 election. Watch this smarmy frat boy squirm (video).
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Pamdagon points out that James Holsinger, Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, believes that homosexuality is physically harmful. He bases his argument on the assumption that vaginal sex is innately safer than oral and anal sex, and he seems unaware of the fact that non-vaginal sex is quite common among heterosexuals.
Dr. Holsinger needs to get out more.
Media Problem: Obviously Fictional Sources
Lois Lane, world’s worst reporter
It’s bad enough that many “journalists” unskeptically repeat whatever their sources tell them, but you have to wonder why editors allow them to use sources that are obviously fictional.
Punkass Kyso critiques a Laura Sessions Stepp article, in which she discusses gender ambiguity in men. The first source Stepp cites is Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp’s character in Pirates of the Carribean.
Meanwhile, PZ Myers points out that a source cited in Mike Adams’ attack on evolutionary biologists is an obvious invention.
Seriously, how did either of these articles find their way into print?
Media Problem: Obviously False Stories
Soon after falling for this hoax photo of “Hogzilla”…
…many outlets fell for this “big pig” photo:
Note that the original “hogzilla” photo had already been debunked, and that the second photo uses the exact same technique: posing well behind a large hog, relying on the camera’s lack of depth perception to create an illusion. See this story by Pepper’s Pal.
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Finlo Rohrer of the BBC writes that people with red hair may face prejudice that is every bit as harmful as that faced by blacks. As evidence, Rohrer cites several redheads who complain that people have made fun of them. Without more to go on than that, how can anyone take this report seriously?
General Outrages
The economy may be doing great by the investor class, but the rest of us are getting screwed. Most workers in the US get only about 14 paid days off, while workers in Finland get three times that many.
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One of the reasons the investors are doing so well is that the corporations they own rake in huge windfalls of taxpayer money. The Consumerist goes over some of the benefits that the taxpayers are handing over to the billionaires who own most of WalMart.
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The track and field events might be the most popular sports during the olympics, but the most popular pre-olympic sport is usually evicting low income residents from their homes in order to make room for sports venues. The Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million people will be evicted in preparation for the 2008 games in Beijing.
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This is how college papers are graded in the real world. (via Pharyngula)
Media Problem: Refusal To Correct
It’s really not hard to issue a correction
It’s a simple rule: when you print something that’s false, you follow up with a correction. So why does it seem so hard for big media outlets to follow?
Fred Barnes of Fox News wanted to discredit An Inconvenient Truth, the movie narrated by former Vice President Al Gore. Barnes claims that Gore’s data on rising ocean levels is contradicted by the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I have two questions for Barnes:
1) Since you don’t accept the conclusions of the IPCC, why are you citing them as a source for your criticism of Gore?
2) Since the IPCC’s data does not contradict Gore, when are you and your buddies at Fox News going to issue a correction?
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From Media Matters:
On June 3, The New York Times Magazine printed an excerpt from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s upcoming book, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co.) that asserts that Sen. Clinton’s (D-NY) June 21, 2006, floor statement was “the first time in her public speeches” that she offered “a new interpretation” — or “revised account” — of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. But Clinton had made the statement to which they were referring numerous times before. In the excerpt, which was posted online on May 29, Gerth and Van Natta write: “The authority Congress given [sic] the president and his administration four years earlier, Clinton explained, had been ‘misused’ because they acted ‘without allowing the inspectors to finish the job in order to rush to war.’” In fact, as Media Matters for America documented, Clinton had been publicly claiming that President Bush misused the Authorization For Use Of Military Force Against Iraq long before June 2006.
So, New York Times, when are we going to see that correction?