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 Opinion
Masquerading As News
Bias and prejudice drive the media’s liberal-left agenda…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 11/11/05
The media’s
techniques for smuggling opinion into what are supposed to
be news stories have been used so much that often we don’t
even notice. Here’s an example from the November 4 New
York Times, in a story about the Muslim riots in Paris. Most
of the article simply describes the events and the political
fallout for various French politicians.
It’s
in the last paragraph that the reporting of news gives way
to disguised opinion: “The continuing unrest appears
to be fueled less by perceived police brutality than by the
frustration of young men who have no work and see little hope
for the future.” To which any perceptive reader should
respond, “Says who?”
Notice the
use of the impersonal “appears.” Appears
to whom? The writer, the French politicians, the rioters? The
way this opinion is phrased obscures the fact that it is a mere
opinion, an interpretation of the events described, not a fact.
As such, the source of the opinion should be identified so we
can evaluate its usefulness and integrity. But to say it “appears,” as
though it were an act of God or nature, is dishonest. Surely
the reporter could find someone to give him a quote expressing
the opinion, so that at least we’d know whose ax is being
ground. Without attribution, however, the opinion then must be
that of the writer and the editors of the Times. At
which point we need to be asking why they’re putting their
opinion into a news story.
But it’s
not just the concealment of the opinion’s
source that is troubling. The opinion itself reflects a certain
ideology, a set of prejudices about human behavior. To attribute
the riot to “frustration” and “no work” is
to indulge a highly questionable view of human action that reduces
it to psychology or economics. This materialist determinism––the
idea that material causes in the environment, especially economic
ones, are the prime mover of humans––is not a scientific
fact but an ideological prejudice whose roots lay in pseudo-scientists
like Marx and Freud. It discards the fact of human free will
and ignores the many motivations of people that explain their
actions. Sometimes people burn and loot out of economic frustration
and hopelessness; sometimes they do so because of the innate
joy in destruction and in the power that such destruction temporarily
bestows; and sometimes they do so just because they can. After
all, humans are complicated, with many conflicting sources of
behavior.
Of course,
the interpretation chosen by the Times story
is one consistent with the liberal-left world-view which holds
that
notions like free will and unmotivated evil have been exposed
as superstitions by science. People in reality are passive
victims of the larger forces controlling their destinies. Thus
the unjust
economic system (i.e. capitalism) and its oppression are to
blame, for man does live by bread alone, and so if he acts
up it’s
only because he doesn’t have enough bread. All those Muslim
youths have no autonomous wills, no spiritual beliefs that justify
their actions. They are passive victims who can only react to
the injustice around them.
So pervasive is this
determinist prejudice, however, that I’m
betting the Times reporter and editors wouldn’t even think
that it is an opinion. It’s just one of those things that “everybody
knows.” And indeed, this prejudice has so infected the
schools and universities and government agencies that it does
seem to be a simple fact. But it’s not. It’s an opinion
about human nature, an interpretation based on questionable premises.
And such opinions have no place in a news story unless they are
clearly identified as an opinion and attributed to a source so
that the reader can make a critical judgment. -one-
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
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