Excellent op-ed piece on media bias
Reader comment on: The Politics of News

Submitted by Katy, May 22, 2007 08:41

But get aload of this guy at cleveland.com, the site of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He's Ted Diadiun, a columnist at that paper, and he's a little annoyed the paper got some mail about why the Christian/Newsom murders weren't covered.

He explains tries to explain why the Cleveland Plain Dealer didn't cover this murder, but he can't say exactly why, so he just throws out a bunch of half-baked reasons and hopes something sticks. First, he says the murders weren't unusual enough - the editors just didn't feel it was a story their readers had to know about.. Then he said Knoxville, TN was too small of a market for the story to garner national exposure (and Durham, North Carolina, where the Duke lacrosse rape case was located, apparently is the center of the universe.)

But the real reason why the Duke case was on the news 24/7 for weeks? Because it had to do with CLASS CONFLICTS as well as race! It was a real two-fer kinda story!

But Ted preaches to us that it's "wrongheaded and divisive to make race the central issue. It takes more than the fact that the victims and villains were of different races to make this a racial issue."

Yes, the victims and the villains have to be of the CORRECT races, to wit: white-on-black crime, HUGE story; black-on-white crime....uh, could you repeat that? What did you say? Sorry, didn't hear you.

I don't know at all that these murders were race-motivated. What I DO know, though, is that Ted Diadiun is pathetic. His reasoning, if you could call it that, is pathetic. And the plain fact, as bald and glaring as Ted's hairless cranium, is that newspapers are so slanted, they not only don't care if they're slanted, they "celebrate the diversity" of their slantedness.

Yes, it's advocacy. It's the "new journalism." That's why guys like Ted are afraid of bloggers - not cause the bloggers are competent journalists. Not because they can write or know a story. But because they operate by common sense.

Now there's something Ted and his ilk haven't seen in a very, very long time.

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