Obama, Davies... and the news media.
While wading through the buckets of coverage on the upcoming US election [does anybody else just LOVE Michelle Obama?] I came across Anne Davies in today's Age:
"In this election, the blogosphere has become the front line for smear and innuendo, whether it be allegations that Senator Obama is a Muslim or that Mrs Palin is a book-banning, gun-toting bigot."
This bothers me on so many immediate and deeper, need-to-be-thought-out levels that haven't even occurred to me yet. What leaps off the page is equating "Islam" with "smear and innuendo - or at least inferring that some people are using it in that way - without ANY thought, reflection or analysis of some of the inherent problems with that automatic assumption. One kind of smear: being a bigot. Another kind of smear: being a Muslim.
I suppose I wanted something - a sentence, anything - on the incredibly problematic nature of this equation, where culture or religion is essentially equated to intolerance or narrow-mindedness. [This isn't to say that Sarah Palin IS any of those things, but rather that a discourse that equates the two as similar kinds of allegations is deeply troubling.]
So do we just give up on the hope that the mainstream news media can be capable of this kind of deeper analysis, a place to draw out power relations, assumptions and social structures? Or perhaps that's an unrealistic expectation to begin with, and that's where research and scholarship comes in?
All I know is that this kind of reporting, which blends 'news' and 'analysis' and 'observation' is certainly not helping.
posted by deep in thought @ 9:13 PM
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