As just about everyone knows, the man who exercises the powers of the presidency was in New London yesterday, attempting to inject another shot of fear into the body politic. There were a lot of demonstrators on hand, and this morning my wife and I were treated to what passes for editorial “fairness and balance” these days.
Let us pause, just briefly, and recall the indifference shown by the press to those who demonstrated against the 2000 stolen election and the incipient war in 2003.
All that has changed. In this morning’s Day we see that each side was represented in New London. There was a fairly massive demonstration against the war, covered here, and a very tiny contingent of war supporters, equally covered here. The latter appears to consist of people who haunted VFW halls during the Vietnam war and still can’t get past Jane Fonda.
If you look hard enough you will see, in the caption under one picture, that “Opponents of the Administration and the War outnumbered administration supporters by a wide margin”. Nonetheless, in order to be fair, the Day feels compelled to give them equal coverage. In fact, if you count the pictures, there is one more picture of the war supporters than of the war opponents (1 picture must be characterized as neutral). The balance, or inbalance, extends to the web, where the article about the war supporters is rather prominently displayed on the front page, while the article about the opponents is relatively hard to find.
Imagine the reverse, a large demonstration in favor of Bush and his policies, with a small contingent of anti-Bush folks. Any chance they’d get equal coverage? We know the answer to that-there were millions of us before the war and no one paid the slightest attention. Massive demonstrations never made the papers.
This from a paper that has editorialized against the war. It’s a shame that, with the recent retirements, the Day has not lost its reflexive compulsion to cater to the right, in order, by showing right wing bias, to disprove the allegations of left wing bias. The charges will continue nonetheless, and the Day will break its spine bending backwards to please. It is quite obvious that an editorial decision was made to give both sides equal coverage, despite the reality on the ground. In this way our media legitimates the marginal, in the same way they legitimate the global warming deniers by giving the kooky 1% as much space as the rational 99 in every article on global warming.
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