A story broke on 7 September about Charles Leaf of Fox News being accused of sexually assaulting a four-year-old child.
And I wonder: what is the real story here? Is it about Charles Leaf: The New Most Repulsive Fox News Reporter? Is it about this particular child and the attending epidemic of worldwide abuses against our children?
Or is the story some macabre parable of America (and maybe even the white western world) gone wrong?
Maybe the story is an allegory about the powerful (men like Leaf) and powerless (like the child), and what passes for “civilization” these days: an epidemic of woman and children sold into slavery, the rape and plunder of third world countries, and what plays as the pornographic orgasmic uberness of our own lives… in this bigger and more is better universe where everything has to be special, unique… it must be uber sex, uber religion, and uber partisan politics. Not to mention, um, uber consumerism.
trying to play a different game… writing in the rAw
But the title of this piece is “Journalism?” because I have to wonder how this story gets written and/or portrayed. Can we, despite our bent and biases, report this carefully, thoughtfully, and fairly? Do we have enough craft to leave the reader as the final decider of meaning, quilt, innocence, implications???
I first read about the story of Charles Leaf and this four-year-old child in diary at Daily Kos:
Fox News Reporter Arrested For Sexual Assault On A Minor.
The diary, in my read of it, is an effort to expose Leaf as one of the “bad guys” aka Rush/Glenn/Sean et al. The sexual assault of the child seems to be used as more “proof” to make the case of how bad this guy is.
The writer, KingOneEye, links to an earlier piece he’d written (also referenced above): Charles Leaf: The New Most Repulsive Fox News Reporter? writing that the article:
… details his aggressive, dishonest, and unprofessional behavior in covering real estate developers associated with the Park51 project in Manhattan (the non-mosque that is not at ground zero).
I’ve read KingOneEye’s article at News Corpse and find it more an opinion of Leaf’s aggressive, dishonest, and unprofessional behavior but I find it provides very little in the way of facts, links, or sources. I would not consider it a news story or even an editorial piece, which may be more opinion-directed but those opinions backed up with links and sources.
While Leaf may be a bad bad man, how do we report the story? Is it the job of journalists to label people? Is that it? Do journalists TELL readers what to think, how to vote, what and who is good and what or who is bad??? Is this effective? Do progressives start emulating the right wing with our own left wing innuendo?
Journalism? For me, it’s observers objectively (as is possible) reporting events and finding some mechanism to engage a reader’s willingness to think about what is being reported.
Journalism? For me, it’s observers objectively (as is possible) reporting events and finding some mechanism to engage a reader’s willingness to think about what is being reported.
Telling readers what to think about the subject of one’s news story is not high journalist form, imo. It may even inhibit a reader’s ability to develop new ideas , opinions, or think differently. Afterall, we do want people to think for themselves, don’t we?
What do you think?
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I read this at dkos but honest thinking is not something one can do there anymore. Dkos has become the epitome of emotional knee jerk partisanship and since the demise of the Republican’s rule it has gotten less focused on providing information that is reality based. It is delusional and paranoid to the point where real news, factual information or journalism is considered an affront to the carefully constructed two legs better narrative.
The last thing any form of American journalism online or off wants is for people to think for themselves. It’s sort it out for yourself these days as far as information and journalism goes. They used to have a fairness doctrine regarding the news but like everything else journalism and the news is free market meaning anything that makes a buck is allowed and you haven’t really got much of an alternative as the vandals stole the handles.
Online used to be a little better but oddly since the Democrat’s won the majority and became the governing party good journalism is even harder to come by. There are some venues that practice journalism, Rolling Stone, the Nation and a few place where you can get writers who give you room to think. Mostly all we get is propaganda and doublespeak. The Pakistan debacle is a good example. Part of the reason it’s worse information wise is that now we get the catapulting from both sides, using the same false narrative as a starting point.
as much as possible. That means just about everything electronically broadcast for commercial/society destroying WMD themes.
My news comes from the net now.
a small town in Saskatchewan and a small resort in Australia have in common?
MSM journalism
Answer: The local newspapers have the exact same local advertisements with the exact same addresses (but different phone numbers)for said businesses. Hmmm, quite interesting?!
IMO, the newswire feeds from the AP and the UPI are filtered through the same type of computer system/program as our email and phone calls. (Ref, Ref) The Narus STA 6400 Semantic Traffic Analyzer is capable of discerning the meaning and semantics of particular phrases and expressions.
is quite revealing. Then there is: Our major story tonight.
Personally, I don’t watch or listen to gnus. It’s also getting much easier to spot fiction, now that everybody’s doing it. In fact, we’re getting close to where fiction is truth. In fact, I’m not sure that that hasn’t always been the case. If we cease from being, and all our stuff vanishes, who’s going to write our story? I’d bet there’d be a lot of journalists fighting for that one.