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Sir John Templeton, the wildly-successful mutual-fund manager who pioneered international investing died Tuesday at the age of 95. He was also well-known for giving away much of his fortune to scientific and religious causes.
There is nothing the media like more than to sensationalize undeserving stories. Usually this involves either the disappearance of young, attractive white women or alleged revelations about Jesus. in the latter category, we’ve read that Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water), that he wasn’t crucified in the manner in which people think, that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera, not Joseph, and that Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up.
After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.
A reporter writes about a controversial cultural issue such as contraception or abortion. Opponents are identified by their religious denomination. Supporters are not. The lesson for readers is plain: opponents are motivated by religious zeal, while supporters are motivated by humanitarianism and sweet reason.
I realize that it is Father’s Day. Still, I think that one of the most interesting stories that the mainstream press missed — or seriously, seriously underplayed — during the past few days was the death of a truly revolutionary mother.
So I’m reading Washington Post reporter Rob Stein’s article on the latest frightening report to come from the Centers for Disease Control and Research. The latest report is that efforts to get teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is “faltering.” But by frightening and faltering, they mean that the data suggest we’ve hit something of a plateau after years of improvements.
Being in the media criticism game, I like to read the various ombudsmen and press critics out there. I’m pretty sure Jack Shafer at Slate is my favorite. His criticism is unconventional and thought-provoking. His latest column looks back at novelist Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that mass media would die within a decade. When the decade came and passed and media remained strong, people thought Crichton misguided. But now that the media giants are faltering, Shafer revisits the issue with Crichton.
Back in March, we criticized some of the stories that came from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that one in four teenage girls had a sexually transmitted disease. Many of the stories were thinly veiled advocacy pieces. They argued that this sad statistic was the result of a national policy of abstinence education.
