The "papers please" law in Arizona has brought a lot of attention to the state. The media, always with an eye out for conflict, has spent most of their time looking at what both sides are saying about it, but very little time looking at the law itself. Someone in charge of the teevee machine decided to invoke the "equal time for nutjobs" rule. So we get one side saying one thing, another side saying something completely contradictory, and close to zero factchecking to see which side is right. So for the sake of argument, if one person points out that the law is unnecessary, while another says that illegal aliens are stealing peoples' brains to build a robot army, the TV media would treat these as equally valid points -- because that's "fair" and "unbiased." Television journalists must never allow themselves to be biased by the facts.So, we don't find out that the law is, in fact, most likely unconstitutional. Or that the concern is about the rights of legal citizens, immigrants, students, and tourists -- not about protecting criminals from the consequence of crime. See, those things aren't as much fun as boiling the story down to two simplistic points of view, casting it as a difference of ideological opinion (rather than a difference in independent fact), and putting the whole thing across as a war of personalities, in the form of talking heads yelling at each other. So one side says one thing, the other says something completely different, no one bothers to point out what is and isn't true and, by the time the segment is over, you're just as uninformed as you were before you watched it. Oddly, watching two people with contradictory talking points isn't all that enlightening.
But if the media is doing a crappy job of reporting what's actually in the new law, they're also doing a bad job of showing who both sides actually are. The Republican Party itself is torn on the issue, making the left vs. right/"he said, she said" reporting more than a little dishonest. It's not left vs. right, it's left vs. half of the right, with the rest of the Republican Party running away from the issue as fast as they can. One reason for this is that many Republicans see the Hispanic vote slipping away rapidly. Another is that they know who a lot of the people behind the law are -- and they don't want to have anything to do with them... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
