Fictional Swingers
by digby
So, it looks like the Religion Industrial Complex managed to place another bit of propaganda in the NY Times.
Here’s Perlstein:
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of front page articles in the New York Times. The excrescence entitled “Abortion Issue Again Dividing Catholic Votes” appearing in the September 17 Times (the same number featuring Institute for America’s Future’s full-page ad) opened by introducing us to Matthew Figured, a Sunday school teacher at the Holy Roman Rosary Roman Catholic Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania—a member of the classic swing voting bloc in a classic swing city in the classic swing state of Pennslyvania, a town where, it’s not unreasonable to believe, thousands of voters are on the bubble between voting for the Democrats because of Central Pennsylvania’s mounting economic anxieties, or the Republicans because of the Central Pennsylvania’s long-standing cultural anxieties. This Matt Figured, for one: he’s an economic liberal, down the line. But after his local bishop “plunged into the fray, barring Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, from receiving communion in the area because of his support for abortion rights,” the Sunday school teacher began leaning McCain. “People should straighten out their religious beliefs before they start making political decisions,” the Sunday school teacher explains to the Times . How well the Democrats honor Catholic voters’ antipathy to abortion, runs the article’s argument, may just determine the outcome of the presidential election. You would never know reading this article, though, that there is no objective basis for this conclusion whatsoever. The underlying narrative is simply made up, a figment of pundits’ fervid imaginations, fed by right-wing propaganda.
I’m sure this is part of the Times’ recent commitment to being useful idiots for social conservatives. But at least they could get the basic facts straight before they distort their meaning — as kind of a gesture to respectable journalism, if nothing else.
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