Check out the new decor at Get Religion by reading "Perfectly Pedestrian Polygamists." The post reviews media coverage of a college basketball player's polygamous family. Interesting story, of course, but GR's focus is on how the media covers religion stories, and the point of the post is that, in the newspapers, everyone is normal. The more unconventional the relationship, the more "normal" the media will describe it. The GR post calls this "advocacy reporting." Interesting term. The media falls all over themselves this political season citing surveys and quoting conservative Christians that depict patriotic, monogamous Mormons as wacky pseudo-polygamous cultists. But when a real polygamist shows up in a story ... they're "normal."
Help me with some synonyms for "advocacy reporting." Biased reporting? Shallow reporting? Worthless reporting? I don't even bother to subscribe to a newspaper anymore. They just seem like a waste of paper to me.
Fox News. That's the first synonym listed in the dictionary. I just looked it up.
As for newspapers, with the advent of the Internet, if you actually do want to occasionally read a newspaper you certainly don't need to subscribe.
Posted by: Guy Murray | Mar 09, 2007 at 06:50 AM
The newspapers are the ONLY source in the United States for the vast majority of investigative journalism. TV news networks are more focused on aggregating existing journalism. Blogs largely just rehash what other news sources have already reported.
For example, once the newspapers go out of business, there won't be any investigation of local politicians. Even at the national level, it's papers like the Washington Post and New York Times that do the real digging and legwork. TV news really doesn't do that much of this kind of thing by comparison.
Dislike them or not, I'm not looking forward to the day the last newspaper dies out.
Posted by: Seth R. | Mar 09, 2007 at 07:12 AM
There is also some "lazy reporting" as well as "advocacy reporting": Reporters who can't be bothered to get both (or "all") sides of a story. Of course, there's some willful omissions to some reporting, and this glamorization of polygamy, or at the very least some whitewashing of some of its negative effects, is an example of this kind of bias by omission.
Posted by: Stpephen A. | Mar 09, 2007 at 10:02 AM
Hey, I just noticed that someone has published a book (this month) entitled A Mormon in the White House in referance to Mitt Romney. I'd like to hear some discussion and read some reviews in the next little while.
Anyhow, keep up the good work.
Posted by: Zach | Mar 09, 2007 at 10:06 AM
Zach, that's Hewitt's new book, due to hit the shelves next week. I'm sure there will be spirited discussion of it on LDS blogs.
Posted by: Dave | Mar 09, 2007 at 11:04 AM
I would perhaps suggest humanizing reporting, while it apparently causes backlash and is selectively applied, I don't see a downside to helping people understand eachother.
Posted by: Doc | Mar 09, 2007 at 01:18 PM
Dave, if you don't read the New York Times, and the Washington Post, you will NOT know what is going on in the world, end of discussion. I don't care what your politics are, if those two papers stop publishing, were all in trouble.
Posted by: Duff | Mar 10, 2007 at 07:51 PM