journalism

As a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracyâ„¢, I am obligated to sniff out media bias wherever it may lie.

This finely-honed skill helped in my assertion that the Associated Press’ coverage of Elder Oak’s talk was in large part to blame for the civil-rights analogy kerfuffle this week. In anticipation of his talk, Elder Oaks gave the A.P. an interview and his talk’s text to accompany its coverage of his address. With his cooperation and a despite a very substantive talk, the A.P. reporter framed a news story based on one sentence aiming for maximal controversy.  And it worked.

The A.P.’s coverage is not too surprising.  I’ve long thought it covered the Church unfairly, (recent egregious example). But this week, it has also been interesting to see the local Utah media reaction behind the scenes.

The City Weekly jumped on the Deseret News for not covering the civil-rights analogy issue as did all the other news outlets who followed the A.P.’s lead.  In its view (and by way of Twitter, the view of other area reporters), if the D.N. didn’t follow the A.P.’s lead, it wasn’t being fair and balanced. So much for original reporting.

Most remarkable was another post at the City Weekly about an executive news producer at the local Salt Lake Fox affiliate, Fox 13 who violated the Church’s embargo with a tweet. Perhaps not a big deal but her blog about her phone call with the Church’s Public Affairs office and her feelings towards the Church as a former member and its involvement in Proposition 8 is quite an eye opener (to read a sanitized version just read the Weekly’s version, there you can click through to read the very crude and psychodrama-rich original if you dare, but beware). Quite astonishing to realize that this is someone who deals with and reports on the Church as a journalist.

Fox 13 news doesn’t strike me as biased, or anti-LDS.   I do think that it did stoke up the controversy a bit online by tweeting up the story over and over and over and over and over and over again (and no, Elder Oaks did not claim that “Mormon backlash after Prop. 8 [was] similar to treatment of Southern blacks”). But the controversy probably sent them pretty good traffic.

As for their news producer, it’s nice to see news folk let it all hang out and not pretend that they are impassive robots unburdened by the silly squabbles the rest of us mere mortals deal with. Perhaps in such a small news operation she can’t recuse herself from stories when she loathes the subjects she covers. But for her own mental health it might be for the best.

As for the City Weekly, its interesting to read some of the local inside baseball of the journalism scene. But after reading its own coverage and the tweets from other reporters, its laughable to single out the Deseret News as unbalanced. And soliciting for more LDS Public Affair horror stories to confirm your own biases? That’s not high-minded journalism, it’s called blogging. Join the club.

Even more see, “Dallin H. Oaks: Calling for fair reading, fair thinking, fair commentary“