Always give me both sides!
Posted: 28 September 2004 at 23:35:03
Okay... this is a Fozzolog entry I wrote three days ago, but I’ve been polishing it up for a while now.
Most of the time, I can understand why The Drudge Report features news stories on their news site. Occasionally, however, they include something that really puzzles me. Why, I ask, do they think this merits the attention of the information-addicted public craving for pointers to the next controversy?
This afternoon, after running around the Salt Lake valley visiting clients, I sat down to get my much-delayed dose of Drudge and in the middle of stories about hurricanes, presidential races, earthquakes was this headline: Scaife paper touts anal sex tips....
Curious, I tried to follow the link and I got a username and password prompt. None of the other stories written by Pittsburgh Live “Sex In The Afternoon” columnist Melissa Meinzer are password-protected—q ust this one. Just this one article that is linked from The Drudge Report. Something smells a bit funny here.
“So, what’s the controversy?” I asked myself.
I found the story linked by Google News and discover the headline is The back-door sport and the lead paragraph is the question portion of a typical ask-a-columnist story: “I'd like to try anal sex with my girlfriend, but I'm afraid if I bring it up, she'll think I'm (gay). Plus, I don't want to hurt her.”
Ms. Meinzer addresses this question that undoubtably every sex columnist in the country gets at least once a month. In fact, a quick search of such stuff on Google News shows that many sex columnists address this topic.
Why does someone at The Drudge Report find this so controversial?
Maybe it’s this Scaife issue, I wondered. Who is Scaife?
CNN has one answer. According to CNN, Richard Scaife is an evil rich republican who owns magazines and newspapers. Okay, they didn’t call him “evil” but they didn’t have anything nice to say about him.
Alright, so this makes a little more sense. A paper owned by a well-to-do conservative has a sex column (Some might think this by itself is a controversy) in which the columnist addresses a question from a man who wants sex tips on... unconventional practices.
I still don’t understand why this is “news” to The Drudge Report.
The underlying message I’m getting here is that a newspaper that is owned, managed, or controlled by someone claiming to be a conservative shoudln’t run stories that conservative people would find offensive, explicit, or racy.
That just seems hypocritical to me. Just about every political pundit on the right (Drudge included) complains about how liberal-biased the media elite are; They only cover the liberal perspective of stories; They spin the news in self-serving ways to promote liberalism.
A column in New York’s Village Voice on unconventional sexual activity would be considered the norm — I know because I’ve read some of Tristan Taormino’s columns in the Voice. I doubt, however, a story in the Village Voice about Christian-based community-outreach programs would attract such controversy or Drudge Report coverage as Meinzer’s sex column.
My point is that despite the fact the Pittsburgh newspaper Michelle Meinzer works for is owned by a outspoken conservative, the newspaper might still be beholden to the basic fundamental tenets of journalism: non-bias.
I don’t know anything about the management or policies of the publication Meinzer works for. I’m just pointing out that this “controversy” suggests the whiners on the hard right may be as much at fault as any liberal editorial journalist for propogating the belief that liberal-owned media can only serve liberal masters and conservative-owned media can only serve conservative masters.
I don’t like it. Drudge’s link to this story seems almost to be saying to Pittsburgh Live, “Hey! You’re a conservative publication. You can’t be doing that. Get back in line!”
Regardless of who owns or manages operations of a media outlet, the highest emphasis should always be on vetting everything and making sure there is an overall non-bias in reporting, in content, etc. IMO, anyway.