Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Blogburst for Terri: Academy Awards Parallels
These two posts are instructive on why the Left and MSM are opposing Terri's right to live
The first from John Hockenberry:
One can barely imagine how relieved the movie critics now climbing over themselves to defend Clint Eastwood were to see the right-wing media going after Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Suddenly they were free to set the dispute into a broad culture war context as Frank Rich did last week. They were free finally to ignore the true outrage of the movie. These same critics failed millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives. No, these critics would much prefer to talk about offenses against poor victimized directors, comparing Eastwood to last year's besieged Michael Moore rather than to talk about their own failings or about a group which has never had any standing in the culture wars.
Mary Johnson hones right in on the moral dyslexia.
IN HIS ACCOUNT OF The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells of handing Dr. P. a magazine, on its cover "an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes."
"What do you see here?" I asked.
"I see a river," he said. "And a little guest house, with its terrace..."
Sacks's recounting comes to mind every time I read a new critic or columnist pontificating on the flap over Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Media pundits typically leave out mention of disability rights opposition to "right to die" issues -- they do it with coverage of Terri Schiavo, too -- or mass it with opposition from the Christian Right, as though it's capable of no real agenda of its own.
But in the case of the buzz over Baby, the omission seems positively Sacksian.
Should conservatives and anti-abortion forces stay out of the "right to life" debate? Are we taking the focus off the issues and creating more opposition?
I don't believe we should be cowed by this tactic, or cater to the way the Mainstream Media is framing the debate. Instead we have to attack the premise of the "right to die" position with facts, the way the blogosphere brought down Dan Rather.
Based on this recent piece by Keith Olbermann, there is already a dread creeping through the Mainstream Media that they may actually have to to work at their craft.
What wore me out, of course, was the idea that because I was presenting news that a viewer didn’t like, I had to have sold out to one party or another, and/or fabricated it. The woman presumed that I had created a fictional character, was stupid enough to quote him on national television, and was guilty of both these crimes and had to get a note from John Kerry that I wasn’t making it up.
If this is the ultimate impact of the blog on the MSM, we’re only going to have a newscast once every few months. We’ll be spending the intervening time preparing the footnotes and the affidavits. [Thanks to Ward Cleaver for that]
Hey Keith, let's see you try to be factually accurate and hold down a day job. No sympathy here. To be fair to Keith it was a Kerry supporter who was torturing him, and by his own account was attempting to fact-uncheck him. But if in addition to being pressured by the conservative blogosphere to be more accurate, the moonbat faction of the blog world is insisting they be more biased, then the fate of the MSN is sealed. And we'll be happy to contend with the Left on a more level playing field.
And of course the other reason for not shying away from the debate is simply that for Terri and others soon to follow, it is a matter of life and death.
The first from John Hockenberry:
One can barely imagine how relieved the movie critics now climbing over themselves to defend Clint Eastwood were to see the right-wing media going after Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Suddenly they were free to set the dispute into a broad culture war context as Frank Rich did last week. They were free finally to ignore the true outrage of the movie. These same critics failed millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives. No, these critics would much prefer to talk about offenses against poor victimized directors, comparing Eastwood to last year's besieged Michael Moore rather than to talk about their own failings or about a group which has never had any standing in the culture wars.
Mary Johnson hones right in on the moral dyslexia.
IN HIS ACCOUNT OF The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells of handing Dr. P. a magazine, on its cover "an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes."
"What do you see here?" I asked.
"I see a river," he said. "And a little guest house, with its terrace..."
Sacks's recounting comes to mind every time I read a new critic or columnist pontificating on the flap over Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Media pundits typically leave out mention of disability rights opposition to "right to die" issues -- they do it with coverage of Terri Schiavo, too -- or mass it with opposition from the Christian Right, as though it's capable of no real agenda of its own.
But in the case of the buzz over Baby, the omission seems positively Sacksian.
Should conservatives and anti-abortion forces stay out of the "right to life" debate? Are we taking the focus off the issues and creating more opposition?
I don't believe we should be cowed by this tactic, or cater to the way the Mainstream Media is framing the debate. Instead we have to attack the premise of the "right to die" position with facts, the way the blogosphere brought down Dan Rather.
Based on this recent piece by Keith Olbermann, there is already a dread creeping through the Mainstream Media that they may actually have to to work at their craft.
What wore me out, of course, was the idea that because I was presenting news that a viewer didn’t like, I had to have sold out to one party or another, and/or fabricated it. The woman presumed that I had created a fictional character, was stupid enough to quote him on national television, and was guilty of both these crimes and had to get a note from John Kerry that I wasn’t making it up.
If this is the ultimate impact of the blog on the MSM, we’re only going to have a newscast once every few months. We’ll be spending the intervening time preparing the footnotes and the affidavits. [Thanks to Ward Cleaver for that]
Hey Keith, let's see you try to be factually accurate and hold down a day job. No sympathy here. To be fair to Keith it was a Kerry supporter who was torturing him, and by his own account was attempting to fact-uncheck him. But if in addition to being pressured by the conservative blogosphere to be more accurate, the moonbat faction of the blog world is insisting they be more biased, then the fate of the MSN is sealed. And we'll be happy to contend with the Left on a more level playing field.
And of course the other reason for not shying away from the debate is simply that for Terri and others soon to follow, it is a matter of life and death.
papijoe 7:46 AM
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