The morphing anti-woke war
Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch.
“Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric.
“The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now — as was entirely predictable — morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday.
Slippery, meet Slope:
The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example. The article by Gregory Schneider, was headlined “Public libraries are the latest front in culture war battle over books“.
But this is not a story about concerned “community members” legitimately worried about “terrible violations of the social order, of sexualizing and brainwashing children,” as Schneider described it.
There has been no violation of the social order — unless that social order is mandatory cis heterosexuality, which, at least for the moment, it is not. There has been no sexualizing and brainwashing at these libraries.
The story is actually about a little library defending itself against steamrolling by homophobic zealots who call anything that isn’t heterosexual pornography.
Twenty-seven paragraphs from the start, Schneider finally offers readers a hint that virtually all the people behind the complaints “said they had not read the books, only summaries.”
It’s as if reporting on Ohio Republicans’ effort to raise the bar for amending the state constitution in the August special election treated it as a legislative debate rather than it being “100%” about blocking the abortion rights amendment on the ballot in November.
Yes, there’s more:
A New York Times story headlined “Bungled Hiring of Journalism Director Exposes a Rift at Texas A&M” dramatically underplayed the role of racism in both the “bungled” hiring and the alleged “rift”.
Kathleen McElroy’s job offer to be the tenured director of the journalism program at A&M was rescinded because she was Black.
This was euphemized by reporters Colbi Edmonds, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Marina Trahan Martinez, who wrote that the “shifting offers” were due to “a backlash over the Black professor’s views on race and diversity.”
Worse, they turned a story about a powerful racist subculture into one about a “rift” over “opposition to diversity initiatives”.
There is no evidence of such a rift. Indeed, faculty members, for instance, are appropriately aghast at the administration’s moral collapse in succumbing to racist criticisms.
To support their hypothesis that “some Aggies are questioning the direction of the university,” the reporters quote who? A conservative news website and the chairman of the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. That’s it.
The appearance of non-stories is something, like Froomkin, I’ve noticed lately, stories where at the end you ask yourself what the point was. Froomkin mentions one by the New York Times that suggests the Department of Justice is wasting resources investigating Donald Trump. It concludes, “These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations.”
Saguaro cacti are collapsing in the prolonged, record-high Arizona heat. Stories on the impacts are likely to chalk it up to a heat wave, to temperatures heating up “over time” and to failure of summer monsoon rains to arrive. If mentioned at all as a factor, climate change might appear in the last paragraph.
Mustn’t ruffle delicate feathers on the climate change-denying right.