The difficulty of getting at the truth of a story was increased today by Wonkette, an influential political blog, then multiplied by Fox News, a conservative propaganda outlet.
Starting with the onion’s outer layer, here’s the headline and blurb from Wonkette:
An American state has decided to promote illiteracy? What, are they shutting down schools? Eliminating funding for teaching the Three R’s? Wait . . . according to the blurb, it’s not the state. It’s actually just the parents of New Hampshire. And they’re not shutting down schools, but pulling their children out of classes in protest over a book. Okay, that sounds serious and newsworthy.
Let’s peel off a layer by clicking on the Fox News link, shall we?
What? It’s not a movement? It’s only one couple, a mom and dad offended by a book that’s disrespectful of Jesus? Well, hell . . . that’s quite a comedown from the statewide protests implied by Wonkette. One mom and one dad. Shit, that sort of thing happens everywhere, all the time (see any of my Banned Book News Roundups for more of the same).
And notice that not only does the entire nature of the story change between Wonkette and Fox News, the nature of the offending book changes too. Wonkette calls it “socialist fag-literature.” Fox News calls it “Jesus Christian bashing” (I shit you not, that’s what the mom in the Fox News article calls it).
So let’s keep peeling away at the onion. At the end of the Fox News article, there’s a link to the original story in a local paper, the Union Leader:
The Union Leader gives the clearest picture of what the mom and dad are protesting, and it’s not “Jesus Christian bashing” but the book’s topic, the impossibility of surviving in America on a minimum wage job. From the Union Leader article, it quickly becomes clear the parents are conservative ideologues predisposed to read any discussion of poverty in America as a call to socialism. Yes, they mention the supposedly-offensive passage about Jesus (excuse me, Jesus Christian, who probably wouldn’t have been offended at all), but their anger is primarily political and directed along party lines.
Wonkette wants to grab readers, so they malign New Hampshire by misrepresenting the facts of an isolated case that could easily have happened anywhere in the USA.
This being War on Christmas season, Fox News wants to stir up the religious nutters, so they focus on one sentence from the offending book, turning their article into a fear-mongering report about an attack on the Baby Jesus.
Meanwhile, a local paper runs an article about one mom and one dad who oppose a high school finance class reading assignment on ideological grounds.
And this is why, children, you can’t trust the media. Every goddamn thing they do is agenda-driven, right and left. The only way to stay informed is to think critically, keep your bullshit radar cranked up to high gain, and dig out the story for yourself. You have to peel your own onions, because these days no one’s going to do it for you.