Liberal Language

I really like our local paper, the Smoky Mountain News, in spite of its very clear liberal bent. They do good journalism and get the facts right. It is wearisome having every single story described in that liberal context, but compared to the way that far wealthier outfits don't even bother to get the facts right, it's good for what journalism has become. 

The problem is that the profession has become such an echo chamber that they can't even be fair when they're trying to be fair. It's not as if they don't make an effort to be. They just can't.

For example, here's a story about the abortion issue. The headline is  as "Roundtable sheds light on threat to abortion care." So (a) the opposing view is a threat, and (b) abortion isn't just abortion, it's a form of "care." The story is literally an attempt to describe a roundtable that discusses the issue, and the news involves giving the views of each side. And they try:

Right to life advocates view abortion as an attack on human life.

It's not the opinion, i.e. 'view,' of right to life advocates that abortion is an attack on human life. It is an indisputable fact that abortion necessarily involves the destruction of a human life. The view is that it is wrong to destroy an innocent human life absent some very compelling reason to do so -- usually even right to life advocates are willing to accept genuine medical necessities arising from things like intratubal pregnancies, where a refusal to perform the abortion would not save the baby but would ensure the death of the mother. 

You don't have to take that view, but you can't reasonably reject the fact. 

A lot of right-to-life advocates even think that rape and/or incest are good enough reasons to allow killing the innocent human being. The guy they are citing as an example, Mark Robinson, takes that view. They credit him for that view, and say he has "softened" his stance over time. Softness and caring are on the pro-killing side. Hardness and uncaring is, unconsciously I believe, associated with the side that is opposed to the killing of human beings. 

Here's another story where they legitimately are trying to be fair, and just can't quite. This one is about the new Pride festival in Haywood County's seat of Waynesville, for some reason scheduled after Pride month. (The one in Sylva is much later still -- they've taken over Labor Day weekend for it, even though Labor Day was a good left-wing cause already. The burly union man has been getting less and less popular among this crowd for a generation or so, though once the mainstay of their political influence.)

For many, a Pride festival is a fairly straightforward event, a celebration of unity among people marginalized for who they are and who they love. But in a purer sense, Haywood County’s historic first Pride festival and a competing prayer meeting held the night before were both compelling exercises of constitutionally protected rights, suggesting maybe — just maybe — that Americans can, in fact, disagree without being disagreeable.

That's not a bad opening. It does suggest that the normal opinion, "for many," is that Pride is "straightforward" and about love. It does allow the "competing prayer meeting" to exist in an permissible category of constitutional activity that can even be respectful. 

They go on to frame the story in terms of the one LGBTQ advocate who showed up to the prayer meeting, and offered a biblical citation in support of her position -- a citation they don't bother to quote, but that they do praise as a "courageous speech." Later on they mention it involved citations from Acts 10, but they don't offer the citations or the argument so that it might be evaluated. Why would you? They don't quote anyone else's biblical citations either; the only approved use of biblical citations is to defend left-wing political positions, and it's not really important whether those citations are plausibly constructed. Nobody serious believes in the Bible anyway, not really. 

They did quote her as saying "I just wanted to offer it to you, with an open heart, to consider that maybe that which you are calling 'unclean' God does not call 'unclean.'" Thus, I'm guessing it was this passage:

9 About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. 10 He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. 11 He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. 13 Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

14 “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

15 The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

So the argument would be something like: just as God can make clean for eating animals that the Jews were previously told in clear scripture were unclean, so too God could make homosexuality clean even though earlier scripture held that it was not clean. 

It's a reasonable parallel. One could argue that no similar vision has been sent to a prophet to inform them of the new status of the previously unclean, but who knows if that's true or not? It's very hard to identify true prophets, and we haven't necessarily heard if God sent that message to one. The argument does show that the clearly and demonstrably unclean has been made clean once; why couldn't it happen twice? 

The piece would have been stronger if the journalists had included that argument, without becoming an editorial because it would have just been straight news about what the advocate said at the prayer meeting. But they didn't include it, because it never occurred to them to think that a biblical argument was actually important. 

The piece goes on to talk about the Pride festival, giving parts of what it calls the "rousing speech." Again, language on their side is "courageous" and "rousing." The other side is mostly quoted as warning itself not to be hateful, which shows that side is constantly tempted to hate. 

It's a good newspaper, really. We're lucky to have it. They're trying their best, too. They just can't do it.