[CLUE-Talk] Media outlets

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Sean LeBlanc wrote:

*snip*

> I didn't know he said that. You're right; it only becomes liberal when one
> decides it's time for a government program to fix it...

Heh. Alrighty... I'll agree with that, sort of.

> I hate to break it to *you*, but that's not so. You cited cases of people
> shouting and people who have resorted to condoning violence/killing. These
> are radicals. Not everyone who is opposed to abortion has the inclination or
> the time to picket, and certainly most don't condone violence or killing. In
> any case, America is definitely torn over the issue, and it's not some
> marginal group that is opposed - the radicals are the ones that make
> headlines, though:
>
> http://report.kff.org/archive/repro/2000/06/kr000619.1.htm

Actually, your survey proves my point... most people believe that
abortion should be legal, even if they disagree with it. That doesn't
fit into the "pro-life" camp:

"more than two-thirds said that, regardless of their own opinion, the
decision to end a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her physician.
Further, while 57% of respondents consider abortion an act of murder,
more than half that group believe that a woman should have the right to
choose an abortion."

Two-thirds of the people don't want the government interfering in
a woman's right to choose whether they have a kid or not. I'd say
that puts the "pro-lifers" far outside the mainstream.

> I don't lump all pro-abortion people in as one group, either. There are many
> shades on both sides. Not all pro are in favor of anyone getting an abortion
> at any time for any reason, and in some cases, without the consent of an
> adult. There are some who feel strongly that it's a "right" on the level of
> free speech, but they still agree to certain conditions. It's only the more
> radical elements that want unfettered abortion rights.

I will agree that many people are uncomfortable with late-term
abortions. (As am I, really.) But, when you say "pro-life" or
whatever, you're pretty much referring to the "never, ever, under
any circumstances" people. That's not an attempt to paint all
people who are uncomfortable with abortion in some degree as whackos,
that's the whackos claiming the "pro-life" label.

> BTW: I still don't know where I stand on abortion - I have been sitting on
> the fence for the past few years. At one time I was very much pro-abortion
> (I'm not going to use pro-choice OR pro-death, I think both are spin); these
> days, I'm not so sure. I do recognize that neither viewpoint is outside the
> mainstream, only the more radical factions of both.

I don't agree with it as a method of birth control, but I also don't
think that my moral choices should be a standard for everyone in
the country to bear.

> If you think carrying dead fetus pics is outside the norm, what about those
> pictures of smokers' lungs that anti-smoking folks use? No doubt, both are
> grisly to behold, but if that's the result of the procedure, what's the
> problem? That's just factual, if extremely disturbing, but that's their
> point.

Well... I guess part of it is that a picture of a diseased lung is
less disturbing than a picture of an entire fetus. Maybe it's also
because there's a lot of perceived hatred in the people picketing
with the dead fetus pictures, whereas I don't get the sense that
anti-smoking folks hate smokers. Maybe that's just me. I'll admit,
I can't quite say why one bothers me and one doesn't... it might
just be that I'm biased and I'm willing to admit that I am on
that point.

> I think PETA's methods are somewhat bombastic at times, too, but just
> because of that, I don't think they are necessarily aligned with the sort of
> extremism and violence that ALF (and ELF) have resorted to....

PETA does go overboard, yes. They do get presented as whackos by
many news organizations, too.

> My problem with the presentation of the issue is that it's an open-and-shut
> case, and all "reasonable" people support a woman's right to an abortion.
> The polls don't bear that out. And acting as if the crazies represent the
> entire group isn't intellectually honest. There are radical feminists that
> have proposed ridiculous ideas like forced contraception for all men past
> puberty. But these don't represent all of feminism, either.

Okay, but the percentage of feminists advocating forced contraception
is several orders of magnitude smaller than the groups of pro-lifers.

You don't find many moderate people out there stumping for limited
abortion rights -- you get the all-or-nothings. Same with the death
penalty folks -- you get the folks who are completely for, or
completely against. This has nothing to do with bias -- people who
hem and haw make for very poor soundbites. "Well, I think maybe that
it's okay in some cases, but..." really doesn't play well.

> > In all honesty -- though I think it was horrible -- I think that
> > Shepherd's murder received too much coverage. Put simply, it didn't
> > fit the definition of news for most of the country. It was, for
> > the most part, sensationalism. That, of course, doesn't fit neatly
> > within the conservative/liberal framework anyway.
>
> I would think that it dovetails nicely with current liberal idealology.

Sensationalism? Or the fact that it was used by many people to
push for hate-crime legislation.

There's another factor here. It isn't bias, it's laziness. Media
outlets tend to love pre-made stories. If they can go cover a news
conference instead of doing actual research, that's what plays. The
people who used Matthew Shepherd's death as a platform for arguing
hate-crime legislation made it easy for the news to cover it.

Same thing with the Chandra Levy case -- the media went full-bore
after a Democrat after Chandra Levy disappeared. Why did the story
stay in the news? On the advice of their lawyers, the Levy family
kept stumping for the press and the press went after it. Part
sensationalism, part laziness -- but I don't see any liberal bias
at work there.

> > Now wait a second... "find and show" -- in otherwords you're calling
> > for them to go digging until they find someone calling for this?
>
> No, but at the time that it happened, I'm sure they could have found
> someone. Whenever the "Reverand" Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton want to call a
> conference on anything, the press usually has little trouble finding them. I
> think some NAACP people did denounce Byrd, but I didn't hear about it until
> the rightwing media brought it up.

I think it did get some play at the time -- remember, though, that
Byrd wasn't in the same position that Lott is, though -- he wasn't
the leader of the majority party when it happened, which puts less
of a spotlight on him. Also, even the admittedly right-wing folks
were piling on Lott for the media to see.

But... don't get me wrong. The guy has no place in politics.

> Agreed. I don't think we'll find *anyone* that would defend Lott, and I
> wouldn't want anyone to. He knows what he meant, and he's the one that needs
> to explain what he meant.

Looks like he couldn't quite come up with an explanation good enough.

> No, they do not - Byrd's statement is water under the bridge. But, I hope
> the next time this happens, we'll get the sort of coverage that Lott
> generated. Lott's statement was rather opaque in comparison with Byrd's. Do
> you think that if Byrd made that statement and had that past (KKK) that he'd
> still be in office if he was not a Democrat? The media would have ran him
> out of office in a day or two. BTW, I think Lott *should* be *roundly*
> punished if he meant what everyone suspects he did, and that he needs to do
> more than just step down as majority leader - he needs to resign.

I imagine it will if it happens again.

It always surprises me when something like this happens, I would
think a professional politician would have better control over
the things they say publically.

Do I think that Byrd would have been run out of office? I don't know.
I sincerely hope so.

> I don't know how even a Democrat gets elected that had a past leadership
> role in the KKK, though. It just boggles the mind.

Agreed. I don't see how ANYBODY can get elected with that kind of
background.

> I think you are right, but it's been a while since I've heard from them. I
> think Arnold was considering running for some office at one point?

Yeah, that was the rumor, I think... I'm glad that he didn't. Not
because he's conservative, but because an entertainer has little
place in politics. I'm sure there's someone more qualified.

> It's been such a long time, but my memory is that the one channel my family
> could get (remote area, no cable) became the "All Ollie" channel. It wasn't
> like the story was buried. I'm fuzzy on the details of what happened, too:
> wasn't it about trading military supplies for hostages? I'm not sure which
> is worse, that or rape...tough call. One is definitely bad foreign policy,
> but the rape allegations, if true, are much more disturbing (to me).

No, the Ollie part got a lot of play -- but Bush and Reagan got a
pass on it. The press didn't go after them like they did Nixon, or
Clinton. (Yes, I'm aware that Nixon wasn't a Democrat, but the press
did -- eventually -- go after Nixon pretty hard.)

> Monica, on the other hand, sells copy - it's sex, no doubt about it. But
> hardly any attention was given to why she was even an issue - it's because
> of the Paula Jones case, IIRC. Much airtime was spent on talking about how
> it was "just about sex". So instead, it was focused on all the sordid
> details of stains and dresses cigars and the Tripp tapes, etc.  And hardly
> any mention of the alleged rape of Juanita Broderick, and little mention of
> Jones and Katherine Willey, either.

Actually, it's because the Republican-appointed prosecutor used
his appointment to look into Whitewater as an all-out license to get
Clinton any way that he could. That's something that is largely
overlooked. The American public financed a witch-hunt and the press
almost never brought up the fact that it was quite odd that a man
appointed to look into Arkansas land deals ended up going after
Clinton for lying about fooling around with an intern.

The Paula Jones case was a civil thing, not a legal prosecution,
and far from Starr's purview.

The allegations from Jones and Willey got more coverage than
they deserved, IMHO. I personally feel that they were people
dredged up by the Republican party as a last-ditch effort to
get rid of Clinton. I mean, it's not important enough to
come forward when the guy's a govenor of a state, but if he
runs for president, then it's suddenly imperitive to come
forward? Please.

> This may have been more about selling copy, though. You may be right on
> that. I still think that we would have heard *much* more about Clinton's
> various "-gates", of which Monica was only one, if he was a Republican.

I don't agree. Why didn't the media make a bigger deal out of Bush's
alleged drug use or drinking? What about the drunk-driving thing?
For God's sake, if Clinton had been a drunk driver we would have
known about it long before a week or so before the election. The
media didn't even try to find out about Bush's past.

(Interestingly, I've heard a theory that rumors about Bush's
cocaine use were floated because he hadn't used coke and the
GOP knew that the media would run into dead ends trying to follow
that lead -- and therefore distract them from his drinking problems.
Kind of clever, if evil...)

Why didn't the media crucify Gingrich for having mistresses and leaving
his wife while she was in the hospital for cancer? The so-called
family values man fought tooth-and-nail against paying child support
for his own children, but that hardly got the same play that
the Lewinsky scandal got.

There's another reason here, too. The GOP is a well-oiled machine
when it comes to digging up dirt on candidates and feeding it to
the media -- the Dems have been doing a lousy job of fighting
back and pushing forward their agenda.

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
http://www.dissociatedpress.net/