Considering that they’re the majority, it’s odd that the media treats traditional marriage proponents as something between objects of scorn and gorillas in the mist.
I thought of this need when reading yet another laughable story in the Los Angeles Times, which is, these days, indistinguishable from an advocacy outlet. Written by Gale Holland, it is a remarkable piece of propaganda. The headline is “Lawsuit over gay-marriage speech at L.A. City College spurs reactions.” We first looked at coverage of that lawsuit here. Basically the suit alleges that a public speaking professor got very mad at a student who used a general speech-giving time as an opportunity to speak about religion and gay marriage. He refused to grade the student and told him to ask God for his grade. There was much more to the story but basically the professor didn’t win many accolades for how he handled things.
Anyway, for this LA Times story, we learn about the “reactions” to this story. Except the only reactions mentioned are, I kid you not, that some unnamed and unidentified protesters “backed” the student by holding up vicious signs and that someone who shares the professor’s name received death threats.
I mean, that’s one way to cover a truly troubling academic situation — pretend that only homophobes and murderers think the student’s claims are noteworthy. But it’s manipulative, lazy and one-sided. If you’re Pravda, this is what you do. If you’re the LA Times, not so much.
Check out the framing device used for the story’s lede:
Ruben Rivera was dropping off papers to charter a new gay unity club at Los Angeles City College one recent day when he spotted half a dozen middle-aged people milling around the campus quad.
“God Hates Gays,” their signs read. Memories came flooding back of fleeing New Jersey after his mother discovered his sexual orientation and threw him out of the family.
“I was almost transported to my adolescence in Vineland, N.J., feeling less than, feeling unworthy, feeling ashamed,” said Rivera, 36, of Los Feliz.
The protesters appeared in support of Jonathan Lopez, a Christian student who has sued the Los Angeles Community College District, alleging that an instructor kept him from finishing a classroom speech about his religious beliefs and opposition to same-sex unions. Lopez has said he was discriminated against because of his religious views.
Now this framing device isn’t bad in and of itself, but when it’s used in the lede and there are no opposing frames presented in the story, it comes off remarkably one-sided. It’s a bludgeon. We are given Rivera’s emotional account of adolescent pain … and that’s it. I mean, come on.
Here’s my personal favorite paragraph:
The suit, filed Feb. 12, has inspired a wave of blog and media commentary. Lopez’s lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund, co-founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family, has appeared on the popular Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Did you get that readers? We’re not going to describe the group, what it does, why it exists, or how successful it’s been in its work. We will tell you that it was founded by someone the media loves to hate and that a lawyer for the group had the audacity to appear on a despicable show. Seriously, how can you not love that paragraph? Also, I guess I can understand a really ideological reporter writing that but how — how — did that get through editing?
Read it all here.
1 comment:
This is weird. I mean, you nailed it: the piece did show only one side of the story.
But then, the article, created nearly a month after the lawsuit was filed and essentially titled Lawsuit Spurs Reactions, was about the *reactions* to the lawsuit, and not about the lawsuit itself.
So it was a piece commenting on how folks have reacted to the lawsuit, much like your blog post is a piece commenting on how an LA Times article reacted to the reaction.
We can all agree that the school/professor reacted poorly. And we can hope the 9th circuit sees this. But in reporting on how folks have taken it upon themselves to take direct action, has there *been* any similar reaction (like the wing-nut protests or the wing-nuttier misdirected death-threats) in support of the school? Or just more letters to the editor and blog posts, as the story stated at the start? It could very well be lazy reporting, if someone has threatened the student, or spray-painted "homophobe" on the lower court judge's car. But short of that, the article doesn't have anything more newsworthy than other instructors at the school being disturbed by the teacher's alleged actions.
As for mentioning-a-group's-founder-and-supporters being a form of bias that should have been edited out, I disagree. I'd agree the Times was trying to get across the ideological affiliations of the student's defense group. And they did this concisely, as well as giving the reader a pretty good idea of what the group does and why it exists. They also went on to mention a proferred success of the group, and let the student and defense group disassociate itself from the reactionary would-be allies.
I will say both that the Times didn't use the hateful adjectives you automatically associated with Dobson and O'Reilly. But also you're right that, if a paper mentioned the ACLU, and just thatits present legal head is denounced by its previous legal head, it would be similarly biased representation.
Post a Comment