11 Nov 2007
Unfair and Unbalanced

The folks at Fox are at it again, serving up this offering from their Chicago affiliate "proving" the connection betwixt Heathenry and racism. Complete with archival footage of Adolf and a recent interview with a skinhead leader, this is bound to be seen by more folks over this weekend than our own outreach efforts have gotten to in the last five years.

Ironically, the video featured some bits by members of The Troth, which is denigrated in some heathen circles for being too "fluffy" and too "universalist" (read: non-discriminatory)! This is akin to criticizing Catholics for being racists because Mormons wouldn't take black members until the 60's.

Are there really racists involved in modern heathenry? Absolutely. There are also racist Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and even Buddhists. And while there doesn't seem to be any reliable source of statistics for the religion of racists, I daresay that the numbers are all pretty small, percentage wise.

This tripe comes up pretty regularly, we get tarred with the racist brush, Wiccans get the Satanic feathers. And as regularly as it gets vomited up from the mainstream media, I get pissed off over it. But I ran into another article this morning, on a completely unrelated subject, that helped put this latest incident (and all the earlier bits'o'tripe) into some perspective.

The headline read "Teacher sex abuse cases reveal patterns", and it was a backgrounder on the latest scandal of a female teacher absconding with an underage male student. These incidents have gotten a lot of press in recent years, with some outlets going so far as to characterize them as epidemic .

What was interesting about this mornings piece was the inclusion of some statistics:

The AP found that states took action against the licenses of 2,570 educators from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misbehavior, and that investigators and academics who study the problem believe it is badly underreported. There are about 3 million public school teachers nationwide.

For the mathematically challenged, that works out to less than 1/10th of 1%. Which hardly counts as an epidemic.

Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that news consists almost entirely of the unusual and the bizarre - and so does the media. The continually serve up tales from beyond the pale as though they were everyday occurrences, and we lap it up and believe.

Heathens are not, by definition, racists, any more than teachers are, by definition pedophiles. The baseline is that in their continual quest to serve more sensational stories and drive readers, the news media is apt to mischaracterize any group to serves their purposes.

For a long time I believed that the best response to these media barrages was to fire back, rapidly and often, with accurate information. I'm not so sure, anymore. I note the decline in media credibility, and wonder if by responding vigorously to such baseless accusations we're not encouraging them. Perhaps the people are smarter than they're generally credited with being, and can see through the yellow journalism that passes for news these days.

I can hope, can't I?

09:37 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link

Government seeks to redefine privacy

Newspeak has left the pages of literature and entered the real world. Want more fat people? Redefine obesity. Need to read and track everybody? "Privacy" gets the treatment.

Maybe someday we'll get lucky and redefine politicians as "non-existent".

AP - A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

09:34 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link