A Tale Told by an Idiot (Media coverage of Schiavo)

Wildly overplaying the Schiavo protesters, ignoring facts and giving Bush a free ride, the press was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

By Eric Boehlert

It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep.

Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate" nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a "furious debate" when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five Americans agree.

But the "furious debate" angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream.

(snip)

Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly, however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days: "You don't have any idea what you are talking about," Cranford said.)

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/31/schiavo_media/index.html

I wondered why we NEVER saw a pan shot of the hospice grounds. Now I know why. The press were embarrassed about how few people there were, and what a ridiculous spectacle they had created about a non-issue.

I'm glad the poor woman is finally gone.

the 50 idiots in the crowd with the most dispicable human beings as spokespeople literally dictated two weeks of non stop news.

.

that when they flocked to Mt. St. Helen's for the attraction distraction of the day that they whole herd would bravely edge closer and closer...until.. Kaboom!

Someone should move these stories away from luxury zones and at least make the press pack pay dearly for the herd migration of the Jeb Bush/Presidency mating Season.

Antarctica? But no. Someone might get bored and cover the obvious global warming.

And their desire to reverse the will of God and the role of nature be laughed at.

Not surprised that the Dominionists were able to lead The Press around by the naughty bits for the last several weeks.

"Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements."

Yeah, don't want to get beack to the office to find that your editor had been on the phone with an outraged RW "Phone Tree" for the last 5 hours because you got this bug up your ass to be a "Journalist" instead of a Corporate Lackey...

Duh....Fair and Balanced. We present ONE side of the story, YOU decide that must be all there is to it.