Gwen posted yesterday about The New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as Muslim extremists. I have something to add.
In this clip from The Daily Show, Jon Stewart suggests that we think this cover is controversial only because media keep insisting and insisting and insisting that it is. And, further, that it is ironic that media would call out The New Yorker for a suggestive cover when media outlets have been spewing suggestive lies about Barack and Michelle Obama for months now (see the montage beginning at about 4:20):
Not to take away from Gwen’s point, but I think that this is an important question: Who gets to decide what we’re all talking about? (In sociology, we call this agenda setting. The Janet Jackson boob debacle is another good example.) A commenter on our previous post mentioned that the FOX News reporter who called the fist bump between the Obamas a “terrorist fist jab” was actually doing honest reporting. Someone had, in fact, called it that. But I don’t think this gets her, or the media, off the hook. Why was that news to begin with? Why does a media outlet privilege the idea of a fist bump being a “terrorist fist jab”? Why was that lunatic’s ideas broadcast into our living rooms? Media get to pick and choose what news they think is important. And so they are choosing, at least in this case, to privilege such voices.
Do wildly inaccurate delusions deserve coverage? Does “balance” mean giving equal time to completely outlandish claims just because they exist? For example, should Holocaust deniers be included whenever there is a story about the Holocaust? Creationists when there is a story about evolution? Conspiracy theorists who deny a moon landing every time we talk about space exploration?
Everything journalists, their editors, and their producers do is a choice. News doesn’t just exist. Nor does “balance.” What is newsworthy, and what looks like “objectivity,” is a result of decisions by certain people in powerful positions. And I think Stewart’s makes a good point: Why does media choose to freak out about the Obama cover when there are very serious issues that they could be addressing.
