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Post by ck4829 on May 5, 2018 12:18:10 GMT
Imagine a group of people who believe that manatees are destroying civilization. Even though there is abundant evidence showing that humans endanger manatees and not vice versa, this hypothetical group continues to insist that manatees are a menace. Imagine further that reporters are assigned to cover this group. But instead of including facts about manatees in their articles that would contradict the claims of this anti-manatee lobby, they don’t. Instead, they quote someone who hates manatees, quote an environmentalist, and then as media critic Jay Rosen might say, just “leave it there.” That would be a ridiculous dereliction of journalistic duty. Yet something similar has been happening with too much reporting about transgender people in the Trump era: Journalists omit facts in ways that make public debates over supposedly “controversial” issues—like transgender restroom use, or transgender military service, or transgender health care—seem less settled than they really are. They present quotes from anti-transgender voices without providing the necessary information to assess the claims being made therein. They give equal weight to the opinions of anti-LGBT groups and to the positions of major medical associations, or the conclusions of independent studies. This lazy “both sides”-style reporting is ill-fitted to the task of capturing the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to drive an already-endangered population out of public life. And it’s only becoming a more glaring problem as those attacks continue. www.thedailybeast.com/how-both-sides-journalism-is-failing-transgender-people
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