Cut-and-Paste
Propaganda Infiltrates Opinion Pages
By Paul Farhi
Reader, beware! Some of America’s newspapers have become
unwitting conduits for campaign propaganda. Thanks to some nifty Internet technology, the campaigns of President Bush and John F. Kerry are making it easy for their supporters to pass off the campaigns’ talking points as just another concerned citizen’s opinion. Pro-Bush or pro-Kerry letters bearing identical language are flooding letters-to-the-editor columns.
I always find it fascinating how different news outlets cover the same story. As
an example, here are four stories, two from Reuters and two from AP. Notice the
distinct differences in tone and presentation.
Frail Pope Struggles Through Lourdes Mass (Reuters)
Pope Struggles Through Lourdes Sermon, Needs Water (Reuters)
Frail Pope Celebrates Mass at Lourdes (AP)
Pilgrims Crowd Field for Mass With Pope (AP)
There’s been a lot of talk lately of the potential effects on mainstream journalism by blogging. One improvement I’d suggest is linking to source material!!! It drives me nuts when a journalist posts a story about some survey, poll, website, research, or whatever and doesn’t tell us where to find it!
To any journalists reading this (yeah, right), if you’re going to summarize someone else’s work, please tell your humble readers where to find the material in its entirety. Thank you.
Here’s an example. Would it really have hurt to provide a link to Vote for Change or Rock for Life?
As bloggers go, I’m still basically an infant. I haven’t been doing this very long
and I don’t really associate with the blogging crowd outside of a few sites on my
blogroll. In other words, I’m still learning a lot about this crazy little thing
called blog.
For instance, I’m just now discovering just how important comments are. I don’t
get many, so I suppose it’s understandable that I missed their full worth. Anyhow,
it seems clear that a blog without a comments system is only half a blog.
There is, IMHO, a fascinating discussion going on at GetReligion
about the impact, or lack thereof, of stories about the global priest scandal in
the Dallas Morning News.
There a few folks on my blogroll who I’d love to see weigh in on the issue, including
(but not limited to) Narwen,
Pontificator,
Fr. Mike, and
Jeff Miller,
The
Catholic gun didn’t go off: Silence greets Dallas News series
Once there was a man who lived in a lighthouse on the foggy Atlantic.
That’s the start of a very, very old sermon illustration. I thought of it this past
weekend as I read the first chunks of the sprawling Dallas Morning News reports
on the globalization of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.
Catholic Light has illuminated another example of media bias. In this case, it’s
not a matter of what is newsworthy and why, but what apparently wasn’t
newsworthy.
Karzai lauds U.S. war on terror – a top story on washtimes.com but unreported on
the front page of the Washington Post (online edition, cnn.com, foxnews.com and
abcnews.com.