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Apr. 1st, 2005
Friday Morning
Apr. 1st, 2005 08:40 amFirst of all, Mom and I have tickets to see Sin City (which, for some reason, I keep typing "Sim City") tonight at 7:40pm.
Second, Eric Boehlert of Salon.com suggests that the number of people protesting around Schiavo's care facility were really not that large in number:
Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate" nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a "furious debate" when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five Americans agree.
But the "furious debate" angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream.
Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did.
What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned "Schiavo" more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned "tsunami" approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)
Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly, however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days: "You don't have any idea what you are talking about," Cranford said.)
I would be inclined to agree. Furthermore, Delay is making rumblings that the Florida judges who were UPHOLDING THE LAW, should be impeached. I can only hope that the Republican party divorces themselves from this baloney soon. Congress passed a law in two days to try to force a feeding tube in a woman, overturning a civil dispute, and Delay wants the judges to be impeached. Brilliant. Meanwhile, in Delay's own state, infants are put to death in similar situations if the family cannot afford the care. Morality, Mr. Delay? What morality? Is life only sacred when you're not a solder or when you can't afford medical care?
Ridiculous. Florida judges were merely upholding the law, and yet the folks like Jeb, Delay, and crowd trying to break all the rules call the judges the activists. I want a free bottle of snake oil whenever I hear these guys talk.
Second, Eric Boehlert of Salon.com suggests that the number of people protesting around Schiavo's care facility were really not that large in number:
Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate" nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a "furious debate" when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five Americans agree.
But the "furious debate" angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream.
Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did.
What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned "Schiavo" more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned "tsunami" approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)
Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly, however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days: "You don't have any idea what you are talking about," Cranford said.)
I would be inclined to agree. Furthermore, Delay is making rumblings that the Florida judges who were UPHOLDING THE LAW, should be impeached. I can only hope that the Republican party divorces themselves from this baloney soon. Congress passed a law in two days to try to force a feeding tube in a woman, overturning a civil dispute, and Delay wants the judges to be impeached. Brilliant. Meanwhile, in Delay's own state, infants are put to death in similar situations if the family cannot afford the care. Morality, Mr. Delay? What morality? Is life only sacred when you're not a solder or when you can't afford medical care?
Ridiculous. Florida judges were merely upholding the law, and yet the folks like Jeb, Delay, and crowd trying to break all the rules call the judges the activists. I want a free bottle of snake oil whenever I hear these guys talk.
