straight to the pointless

Aaaand, carrying on the “truth in journalism” theme and how mainstream media promotes false truths:

Não é a falta de isenção, esse velho mito do jornalismo, que incomoda e desacredita determinados órgãos da imprensa, mas seu farisaísmo.

“It’s not the lack of objectivity, this old myth of journalism, that bothers and undermines the credibility of certain media outlets, but their farsical-ness.”

Segundo o ex-presidente Jimmy Carter, que já monitorou 92 eleições mundo afora, o processo eleitoral na Venezuela é o melhor do mundo. Essa informação, apesar de corriqueira e ainda não desmentida, nunca foi veiculada, nem sequer levada em consideração, pela imprensa conservadora americana, que trata a Venezuela como uma ditadura igual a outros regimes autoritários para os quais, por motivos ideológicos, faz vista grossa.

According to ex-president Jimmy Carter, who has monitored 92 elections all over the world, the electoral process in Venezuela is the best in the world. This piece of information, however common and so far unproved to be wrong, is never mentioned or even taken into consideration by the conservative media in America [editor’s note: just the conservative media?], which treats Venezuela as a dictatorship in the same line as other autocratic regimes that it ignores for ideological reasons.

What I forgot to say in the last post is that not even The Newsroom is free of these false truths that are so often taken for granted in American journalism, especially the naive ones about journalism itself, spoutedad nauseumon CNN commercials.

Disclaimer: we are not necessarily defending Hugo Chávez here, but we are criticizing how “journalistic objectivity” doesn’t apply to him or several other “accepted truths”, such as this assertion heard during the Veep debate by the moderator: “Iran is the greatest threat to U.S. national security.”

Brilliant analysis that touches on several points, ranging from journalism’s habit to chose the wrong accepted truths and the wrong debates to present both arguments (“the real task, ignored by the anti-“he said/she said” crowd, is to decide which issues are valid debates”), to the fact that the South hasn’t always been inherently Republican (and how the GOP would have NO chance were it not for its racism-driven hold on those Southern states).

Report the debates! Not to declare truths as if bearing them down on stone tablets from Sinai, but to clarify and sharpen the questions, investigate the hidden agendas, the underlying theories, the potential consequences of each side of a contested issue. Without necessarily declaring a winner.

(…)

Really, just about everybody knows this—that the new solid GOP South is a gift from the legacy of racism—but few say it outright anymore, except a scattering of opinion columnists. It’s been “priced in” you might say, taken for granted, or avoided for fear of offense—i.e., telling the truth.

Even The Nation, which recently devoted a cover story to attacking the GOP, focused on the party’s greed (as opposed to the non-greedy groveling to Wall Street by Democrats, of course). The issue did not focus on overt, structural racism as the GOP’s distinguishing—and delegitimizing—sin.