The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.

The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.
The scholar

2005/10/23

A right-winger complains in our local paper

What we're fed is an unbalanced menu of negative news.

All the right is asking for is some parity so that in regard to Iraq, for example, the positive is reported and analyzed along with the negative, fair and balanced. Do that and just watch the criticism subside or disappear.

Sounds like a thoroughly unobjectionable and fair and proper thing to us all, eh? I could certainly live with that as a general rule. But how did the right act when they had he megaphone? How much parity did the left get? How “fair and balanced” was the news? My memory is that there was no parity, there was not even the pretense of anything resembling “fair and balanced”. Dave Lindorff explains:

If the N.Y. Times, in articles by Miller, was reporting breathlessly about Hussein’s having vast stocks of poison gas, germ and nuclear weapons, all ready to be delivered to the U.S. any day on pilotless drone airplanes, that was good enough for most of the rest of the nation’s media. And if any reporters elsewhere had sources who were questioning this view, they had an almost insurmountable task trying to convince their editors that they were right and the Times was wrong.

Leftist or just plain skeptcal views were pushed to the back pages, writers like Judith Miller, who were pushing hysterical stories of imminent death, were placed front-and-center in both newspapers and on newscasts.

In mid-2003, Michael Moore accepted an Acadmy Award. He carried on about how the Iraq War was immoral. [emphasis added]

Michael Moore was booed. Lustily booed. Loudly booed. Every single human being with functional ears heard this. It's on tape. It's history. It's a simple fact.
---------
And while a few folks in the audience (mostly in the balcony area) did not appreciate his pushing-the-envelope style, many applauded him for his bold scolding of the main man in the White House.

I saw a tape of Moore making his speech and it sure enough did sound like everybody and his brother, Aunt Ellie and little Suzy too, were all booing as loudly and lustily as they could. It was a wonder he could hear himself! Not only did conservatives object to liberals speaking, not only did they not want to hear what we had to say, they wanted to give the public the false impression that such viewpoints were less popular than they actually were!

Sorry, but conservatves have no claim to any kind, sort or variety of fairness.

No comments: