Reliable Sources Debate On Coverage Of Marriage Equality A Pointless Mess

On Sunday morning’s Reliable Sources, a speaking over the media’s treatment of New York’s fresh passed Marriage Equality Act, between conservative radio patron Dennis Prager and AmericaBlog’s Evangelist Aravosis apace devolved into a program of tangents and interruptions that missed the whole saucer of host Howard Kurtz’s question. Kurtz wondered if there was anything wrong with the news media’s “relentlessly positive” news of the law’s passage. At the heart of this discourse lies a pivotal distinction most the persona of journalism, a persona which the media has consistently abdicated in souvenir of false balance. It’s a familiar criticism; the facts irresistibly support digit conclusion, but the media decides to also throw in a “some feature the sky is actually pink” clause to equilibrise things out. In the housing of wedlock equality, the discourse should be, did the media training good sentiment in its coverage? Is there a compelling “other side” to the story?

Instead, Aravosis opens with a undignified premise, locution that “whenever you hit a political contest, and digit side wins, they cover the victor.”

Not only is that postulate false, it papers over the relevant fact, that news of the Marriage Equality Act is a thin warning of the media doing its job. The media’s news of Proposition 8 (which Prager aright cites), and modify more recently, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, did not pore on the so-called “victors,” but on the perverse consequences of apiece of them. Aravosis does saucer discover that anti viewpoints intend plentitude of airtime in every of these cases, but misses the saucer that the tenor of the news in these cases wasn’t the termination of some “cover the winner” default, but of good editorial judgment.

In the housing of wedlock equality, it appears that journalists hit prefabricated the sentiment that, some your individualized beliefs, the disparity between the rights of merry and straight people to unite is unjust. It’s the same sort of sentiment that journalists hit prefabricated most another forms of discrimination, long before they were codified by law, and which shew digit of journalism’s most essential functions: to behave as our domestic conscience, to stop the wrongful accountable.

That duty was mostly abdicated in the run-up to the Irak War, and has gradually eroded in souvenir of horse-race political news and he said/she said “balance.” Kurtz and his guests missed a quantity to saucer that out.

From there, the “debate” got sidetracked into a communicating of Prager’s reasons for anti wedlock equality, and Aravosis’ unceasing interruptions of same. Even here, he doesn’t engage Prager’s easily-rejoined objections. Prager seems to conceive that the media ought to cover the fact that some churches would kinda take their adoption intelligence and go home, kinda than treat same-sex couples as equals. Instead of pointing discover how this says more most those churches than it does most wedlock equality, Aravosis opts for transparent straw-man arguments, bizarrely saying, at digit point, that “Now, Dennis is talking most I’m trying to invoke him into a woman.”

Here’s the clip, from CNN’s Reliable Sources: