Tapsearch Com EditorMedia condescends on Holocaust denial
December 13th 2006 14:59
Typically, the media tries fairly hard to stay balanced; they just fail and slant left from time to time. But when reporters cover Iran's Holocaust denial conference, they don't even try. If they don't tell us we're supposed to despise these people, you see, we won't figure it out ourselves.
Don't worry, the media is there to hold your hand and inform you Nazis are bad. In case you missed that, or anything.
Mind you, this is in no way, shape or form a defense of Holocaust denial. This Wikipedia analysis is good for the curious (though it's not very encyclopedic and might get deleted), and for a college paper I pointed out that even one Holocaust denier's own case doesn't really make the Germans look any better: He says Nazis rounded the Jews up, and then disease, not controlled genocide, ripped through the population. The "Final Solution" was Jewish deportation, not extermination. Laughable, but again, it was still the Germans' fault.
This post is just a case that the media doesn't trust us to come to the right conclusions on the matter.
Fox News puts "researchers" in scare quotes, even though the people at the conference are researchers -- they research ways to deny the Holocaust. AFP gives a similar treatment to "revisionists," even though the nutjobs are, in fact, revisionists.
The whole thing reminds me of this AP article, which called eugenics a "phony science." Eugenics may be morally reprehensible -- at least when carried out through killing rather than selective mating; few would lament the decline of Tae-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews.
But it's not psuedoscience. If your goal was to decrease the number of brown-eyed people, and you shot all the brown-eyed people, you would in fact see a lower proportion of brown-eyed people in the next generation. That's disgusting, but it's also a scientifically validated way to achieve the goal. We have Darwin to thank for that.
It's understandable that the media doesn't feel the need for objectivity when it comes to Holocaust denial and eugenics. Both have undeniably bad consequences for society, of course. But loaded terminology isn't helping anyone understand evil better; it only talks down to readers by implying they can't discern good from evil themselves.
"Just the facts, ma'am," is good advice for reporters, whether the subject is the local fair, abortion or ethnic cleansing.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
Don't worry, the media is there to hold your hand and inform you Nazis are bad. In case you missed that, or anything.
Mind you, this is in no way, shape or form a defense of Holocaust denial. This Wikipedia analysis is good for the curious (though it's not very encyclopedic and might get deleted), and for a college paper I pointed out that even one Holocaust denier's own case doesn't really make the Germans look any better: He says Nazis rounded the Jews up, and then disease, not controlled genocide, ripped through the population. The "Final Solution" was Jewish deportation, not extermination. Laughable, but again, it was still the Germans' fault.
This post is just a case that the media doesn't trust us to come to the right conclusions on the matter.
Fox News puts "researchers" in scare quotes, even though the people at the conference are researchers -- they research ways to deny the Holocaust. AFP gives a similar treatment to "revisionists," even though the nutjobs are, in fact, revisionists.
The whole thing reminds me of this AP article, which called eugenics a "phony science." Eugenics may be morally reprehensible -- at least when carried out through killing rather than selective mating; few would lament the decline of Tae-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews.
But it's not psuedoscience. If your goal was to decrease the number of brown-eyed people, and you shot all the brown-eyed people, you would in fact see a lower proportion of brown-eyed people in the next generation. That's disgusting, but it's also a scientifically validated way to achieve the goal. We have Darwin to thank for that.
It's understandable that the media doesn't feel the need for objectivity when it comes to Holocaust denial and eugenics. Both have undeniably bad consequences for society, of course. But loaded terminology isn't helping anyone understand evil better; it only talks down to readers by implying they can't discern good from evil themselves.
"Just the facts, ma'am," is good advice for reporters, whether the subject is the local fair, abortion or ethnic cleansing.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
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Comment by Damo