Burnt Orange Report

"Rather than weighing the contrasting sides of an issue, one side often is presented as the sole facts and the humanity of the opposing side is questioned, implicitly or explicitly"

Sounds to me like Mr. Irvin is referring to Fox News.

I have to disagree, as a student of journalism, with the entire premise of the letter.

Most liberal arts have abandoned (or at least acknowledged the weakness of) the classical notion of objectivity which Mr. Irvin claims is supposed to be at the core of academics. That is that there is one story that is supposed to get reported one way.

The consensus now is that the "true" news is a construction. Sort of like the parable about the blind men and the elephant, you can only get at it by pulling together lots of different news sources. Reporters still have ethics; the fundamental ethic is to accurately state what they have found to be true. Good reporters still get different sides of the story. Much the same way that intellectually honest academics admit the problems with their own arguments. But reporters and academics both start out trying to make a point and if they are honest, they should admit that.

Of course, the "fair and balanced" people never did that and don't do that. They know who they are. Incidentally so does the author of the previous comment. :-p

Power likes to make itself invisible so it can't be confronted.

Incidentally, I find it sad that conservatives can only whine about the media these days. They don't have a leg to stand on, and haven't in a long, long, time.

To play the devils advocate though (and its about damned time someone said this I think), it's pretty pathetic for anyone to complain about the media being hopelessly "biased" agaist them. Really, now, do you want to let the world know that all the smart, sociable people think you're in the wrong?

People like Mr. Irvin ought to stop blaming the media for their problems (or worse, create flak-factories like "Accuracy" in Media and pseudoacademic thinktanks like Heritage to colonize what they can't control) and start blaming their own dipstick leaders and antiquated ideas. People who hold grudges against the media usually do that, in my experience, because the newsfolk are actually doing their job.

That applies equally to both sides.

Of course, now that the media wars have reached full pitch, we "resistance" liberals have no choice but to counterattack...

In the words of Rodney King, "can't we just all get along?"