So why would the WaPo be lying like this?
Yesterday a government report came out that was reported on in the Washington Post that caused a lot of consternation in Left Blogistan, until cooler heads prevailed to read the report, and not just the report of the report.
The report, which seems oddly coincidentally timed to come out just after studies which have put the US in very poor showing when it comes to infant mortality rates in the developed world, is entitled Recommendations to Improve Preconception Health and Health Care --- United States: A Report of the CDC/ATSDR Preconception Care Work Group and the Select Panel on Preconception Care which is one of those brain-cell numbing titles that bureacracies have specialized in ever since someone figured how to represent a hundred cows quicker than drawing a hundred stick-figure cows on a piece of clay - and which, on the face of it, is pretty gender-neutral. I mean, whether you're talking gramnivores or humans, conception takes two different DNA contributors, right? (Leaving out the technology-assisted mess that is modern animal husbandry for simplicity's sake.) That's where the het in heterosexual comes from. Yes, the maternal parent does contribute more and more directly and prolongedly affects the health of the offspring, but the health of the paternal side of the equation is also important - just ask any stud farm about that.
And, indeed, the report does mention "men" specifically a few times as times, but it does fall down on the job of addressing the male health issues related to decreased fertility and increased chances of fetal damage, which have been somewhat documented and studied in recent decades but barely the surface scratched - exposure to chemical contaminants and other toxins being the most obvious, but smoking by fathers - even years prior to begetting - causing cancer in their children is another. It tends to treat the maternal interface as the sole physical factor in the bearing of healthy offspring. This is negligent, and seems to show a bias or blind spot to both scientific discoveries and common sense. (Sperm aren't ball-bearings, cast perfect and impermeable from the foundry, you know.)
But what it does not say is that all fertile women are potentially pregnant, and therefore should behave at all times as if we were pregnant already, and restrict our behaviour accordingly, not simply from truly unhealthy and dangerous activities (smoking, binge drinking, playing chicken with snowmobiles) but from all activities which might be harmful to the unborn baby we might not know we're carrying (attending a wine-and-cheese party, cleaning the catbox without a hazmat suit, jogging) so as to cut down on that dratted 5+ per 1000 infant mortality rate which is making us look embarrassingly more like "a third world country with a lot of money" than the Greatest Country In The World™. --Note how it's convenient for the Houston Chronicle in that linked article to pretend that poverty has nothing to do with it, it's just lack of education of - especially - those minority mothers, who just don't realize that they should have health care, health insurance or eat properly. (I mean, it was pure ignorance on my part that I didn't have insurance, didn't go to the doctor, and was living on ramen and rice when I was working two jobs, after all. Nothing else.)
But much of the CDC's emphasis in this document is on couples being informed, including undiagnosed health problems that could result in complications and - especially - planning their pregnancies and spacing them for optimum thriving of mother and newborn, by being aware of potential problems before they start trying for a child.
So, the big question which is demanding to be answered is, WHY did the WaPo choose to report the report as "Forever Pregnant - Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant"--? Why did they barely mention the report's repeated emphasis on family planning except briefly at the end, and why, especially, did they change the slant of it from essentially trying to keep all options open for women to trying to take away options for women?
Now, if they'd done it to get readers all incensed at the CDC, by willfully misrepresenting it as "the Bush administration wants you gals to have lots of healthy babies - Republic of Gilead right around the corner!" then they might deserve the "liberal media bias" claims. But - although that's the result for a lot of readers - that doesn't seem at all to me to be the intention. The tone - and I don't know if staff writer January W. Payne is male or female, but we know it doesn't matter, that any number of women can be counted on for this - is one of finger-shaking and nagging and worst of all, smirky nodding that you girls may think you don't want to have babies, but we know better, and we've got the scientists to prove it!
But the "half of all pregnancies are unplanned" factoid doesn't mean that all those people didn't want to have kids, so "you may not want kids now, girlie, but just wait until you get knocked up and then you'll learn otherwise" - it's that a lot of couples aren't specifically thinking about having kids one way or the other, they're just having sex. Which makes perfect sense from an evolutionary biology perspective: you don't want to eat sweet things because you know that they hold a lot of energy, you just want to eat sweet things, from infancy on. Once you know that they hold a lot of energy, you can then make an informed decision as to eat or not eat this or that specific sweet thing but that doesn't change the wanting of them, (which is much harder to reprogram and usually involves overwriting with massive amounts of disgust, occasioned not by the taste itself but by outside associations-you can fill in your own gross-out stories.)
People don't - contrary to the desires of amateur evo-psyche types to justify their own particular yens - pick sexual partners with a cold rationality based on long-range reproductive strategy; that's not how "survival of the fittest" works at all. They just go "Whoah, hot stuff! Hubba hubba, lookit me!" or just "Meh, s/he's here, I'm bored/horny, let's hop in the sack," in the language of their respective species, and then either have offspring or not, and either those offspring thrive or they don't, for a whole lot of different reasons some genetic, some environmental.
So there is this generally-positive promotion of the idea that doctors should tell their female patients that if you're in a relationship and you're having unprotected sex then you could get pregnant (big surprise, that) and if so you should stop and think about this and a) use contraception to plan if or when, b) be aware that contraception can fail, and lots of people decide to go ahead with their pregnancies (contra the anti-contraception propagandists), c) be aware of things that will have a bad impact on the health of any future children you may choose to have - if you won't take care of yourself for your own sake, but you want to have healthy children, then do it for them and start now. I know personally a good few young women who smoke[ed] like chimneys and brush[ed] off any warnings of lung cancer by saying "I'll stop when I decide to have kids."
Given that plenty of people - male and female - won't do or stop doing things for their own health, until it's too late perhaps, but will modify their behaviour for the sake of their children - start wearing seatbelts; stop driving recklessly; lay off the drugs; stop getting disgustingly, uncontrollably drunk; give up dangerous sports; get a real job - as well as start exercising and eating healthy, so that their kids will have a good life with their parents around to be there for it - this isn't a bad way of motivating people. It just shouldn't be limited to mothers. (Of course, lots of people, men and women, couldn't care less and go on ignoring all the advice on safety and kid-care and personal health regardless.)
But it's a far cry from "okay, you won't stop ignoring your hypertension and smoking a pack a day and chugging down the Everclear to save your own life, but you're willing to do it for your future potential kids when they come along, so you really should start now because after they're already conceived will be really too late" to say "all women should take care of their health because they're going to have babies, and should take care of it only in such ways as will protect the potential sprog, regardless of their own quality of life, or else they're selfish and negligent" - which is the way the WaPo reporting on the report comes off.
So the question becomes why exactly? If this were the Washington Moonie Times or one of Murdoch's joints, there would be no question, because that's always been their policy (tailored to local norms for Sir Rupert, because I don't think the Sun woiuld dare to have someone doing Gibson's gag as Women of Britain, outbreed the Brown Hordes, even if they do peddle the War on Christmas™ meme over there, any more than FOX could show the Page 3 Girls on this side of the pond.)
But the Post is not self-identified as a conservative paper, and is widely assumed by conservatives here to compose a core part of The Liberal Media™, and certainly they are occasionally willing to criticize Bushco's handling of the war and the economy, (a low bar granted) and don't have either David Brooks or John Tierney on the editorial page - unlike the NYT, which is also supposed to be part of the liberal media, despite so much evidence to the contrary, and that they are in fact the media of the corporate elite, particularly that bit of it which works in Manhattan and lives in the pricier parts of Long Island and vacations internationally.
And while the WaPo has essentially been coasting on its glory-thrust-upon-them from Watergate for the past 30 years, and a largely-unearned reputation as being anti-Establishment speakers of truth to power, they haven't been as servile as the NYT was in the run-up to the War what with Judy Miller et al. So why are they jumping on the female-biology-is-destiny bandwagon? We expect this sort of thing from Concerned Women of America and the Independent Women's Forum; that it is breaking out into the mainstream is a cause for concern, and that this is as far as I know a new vector for it, even more so.
Now, granted, this is the same WaPo whose ombudswoman had a fit of the vapors when confronted by commenters who pointed out incongruities and an apparent-pro-administration bias in a story on the morass of fiscal scandals in the Capitol, and whose editor made a fool of himself subsequently likewise insulting Firedoglake, so maybe this is just a failure of reading comprehension on their part. After all, since the very editorial staff don't understand how the internet works, or to use Google, there's no way to be sure it isn't.
OTOH, it could be the zeitgeist that makes them sound so much here like Bobo Brooks telling women to give up their jobs, checkbooks, and self-will to become mothers now before it's too late and our eggs expire, and this seems to me far more likely than that we have a Natalist or even Dominionist presence on or behind the editorial board of the Post. But again, who really knows? All kinds of creepy things are coming out of the woodwork.
The only really liberal part of the WaPo article was the acknowledgement of the correlation between poverty and poor health, and how this disproportionately affects black families. There's no call for massive overhaul of the health care system to rectify its waste and inequity, no indictment of the callous and brutal "welfare reform" that requires mothers to work shit jobs that don't pay enough to pay their rent, absolutely none of the soul-searching "Why is socialist Europe doing so much better at keeping their babies alive than we are?" that you would expect if it really were part of the Liberal Media. (We are the liberal media, or most of it, in America.)
That the fundamental reaction of so many readers, and not just women, to that column was "Gyah! Bushco=Gilead, dammitalltohell!" was not really off the mark in terms of being a stupid or unwarranted assumption, given that Bushco has previously put a "Christian" gynecologist who advised prayer as the solution to menstrual cramps and anally-raped his semi-conscious wife, on the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, and then briefly put a veterinarian in charge of the FDA's Office of Women's Health before the outcry caused them to defer to Minitrue on this.
But it did turn out to be mostly (not entirely) wrong, and this was because the reporting newspaper's staff writer and editorial staff were either incapable of, or unwilling, to reveal the report's real slant, and either accidentally or deliberately used it as a platform to lecture women about our primary life purpose as breeding vessels.
So, for the third time, I ask - what was the point of so profoundly misrepresenting a publically-available report? If this is how they manage the easily-checkable stuff, how do you think they're doing with things that it's harder to verify? And why does anyone, anymore, on the Left or not, still give the benefit of the doubt to the media on anything yet? Someone joked on dKos a while back about trusting Ahmed Chalabi, with a poll where one of the answers to "would you trust him if he said it was raining" was "no, he probably has a flunkey standing off to the side with a hose!" And that's pretty much how we have to treat the corporate media, especially the op-ed, and the editorializing within news stories, because that's where they make the Narratives right before our eyes. The facts alone don't matter, they can be pruned out of context and grafted onto other facts and used to create chimeras right in front of us.
Eyes on the ball, folks. We need to figure out what they're up to at all times - and who's calling the shots.
hat tip to s.z. for the amazing "humans aren't grizzly bears" column.
The report, which seems oddly coincidentally timed to come out just after studies which have put the US in very poor showing when it comes to infant mortality rates in the developed world, is entitled Recommendations to Improve Preconception Health and Health Care --- United States: A Report of the CDC/ATSDR Preconception Care Work Group and the Select Panel on Preconception Care which is one of those brain-cell numbing titles that bureacracies have specialized in ever since someone figured how to represent a hundred cows quicker than drawing a hundred stick-figure cows on a piece of clay - and which, on the face of it, is pretty gender-neutral. I mean, whether you're talking gramnivores or humans, conception takes two different DNA contributors, right? (Leaving out the technology-assisted mess that is modern animal husbandry for simplicity's sake.) That's where the het in heterosexual comes from. Yes, the maternal parent does contribute more and more directly and prolongedly affects the health of the offspring, but the health of the paternal side of the equation is also important - just ask any stud farm about that.
And, indeed, the report does mention "men" specifically a few times as times, but it does fall down on the job of addressing the male health issues related to decreased fertility and increased chances of fetal damage, which have been somewhat documented and studied in recent decades but barely the surface scratched - exposure to chemical contaminants and other toxins being the most obvious, but smoking by fathers - even years prior to begetting - causing cancer in their children is another. It tends to treat the maternal interface as the sole physical factor in the bearing of healthy offspring. This is negligent, and seems to show a bias or blind spot to both scientific discoveries and common sense. (Sperm aren't ball-bearings, cast perfect and impermeable from the foundry, you know.)
But what it does not say is that all fertile women are potentially pregnant, and therefore should behave at all times as if we were pregnant already, and restrict our behaviour accordingly, not simply from truly unhealthy and dangerous activities (smoking, binge drinking, playing chicken with snowmobiles) but from all activities which might be harmful to the unborn baby we might not know we're carrying (attending a wine-and-cheese party, cleaning the catbox without a hazmat suit, jogging) so as to cut down on that dratted 5+ per 1000 infant mortality rate which is making us look embarrassingly more like "a third world country with a lot of money" than the Greatest Country In The World™. --Note how it's convenient for the Houston Chronicle in that linked article to pretend that poverty has nothing to do with it, it's just lack of education of - especially - those minority mothers, who just don't realize that they should have health care, health insurance or eat properly. (I mean, it was pure ignorance on my part that I didn't have insurance, didn't go to the doctor, and was living on ramen and rice when I was working two jobs, after all. Nothing else.)
But much of the CDC's emphasis in this document is on couples being informed, including undiagnosed health problems that could result in complications and - especially - planning their pregnancies and spacing them for optimum thriving of mother and newborn, by being aware of potential problems before they start trying for a child.
So, the big question which is demanding to be answered is, WHY did the WaPo choose to report the report as "Forever Pregnant - Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant"--? Why did they barely mention the report's repeated emphasis on family planning except briefly at the end, and why, especially, did they change the slant of it from essentially trying to keep all options open for women to trying to take away options for women?
Now, if they'd done it to get readers all incensed at the CDC, by willfully misrepresenting it as "the Bush administration wants you gals to have lots of healthy babies - Republic of Gilead right around the corner!" then they might deserve the "liberal media bias" claims. But - although that's the result for a lot of readers - that doesn't seem at all to me to be the intention. The tone - and I don't know if staff writer January W. Payne is male or female, but we know it doesn't matter, that any number of women can be counted on for this - is one of finger-shaking and nagging and worst of all, smirky nodding that you girls may think you don't want to have babies, but we know better, and we've got the scientists to prove it!
But the "half of all pregnancies are unplanned" factoid doesn't mean that all those people didn't want to have kids, so "you may not want kids now, girlie, but just wait until you get knocked up and then you'll learn otherwise" - it's that a lot of couples aren't specifically thinking about having kids one way or the other, they're just having sex. Which makes perfect sense from an evolutionary biology perspective: you don't want to eat sweet things because you know that they hold a lot of energy, you just want to eat sweet things, from infancy on. Once you know that they hold a lot of energy, you can then make an informed decision as to eat or not eat this or that specific sweet thing but that doesn't change the wanting of them, (which is much harder to reprogram and usually involves overwriting with massive amounts of disgust, occasioned not by the taste itself but by outside associations-you can fill in your own gross-out stories.)
People don't - contrary to the desires of amateur evo-psyche types to justify their own particular yens - pick sexual partners with a cold rationality based on long-range reproductive strategy; that's not how "survival of the fittest" works at all. They just go "Whoah, hot stuff! Hubba hubba, lookit me!" or just "Meh, s/he's here, I'm bored/horny, let's hop in the sack," in the language of their respective species, and then either have offspring or not, and either those offspring thrive or they don't, for a whole lot of different reasons some genetic, some environmental.
So there is this generally-positive promotion of the idea that doctors should tell their female patients that if you're in a relationship and you're having unprotected sex then you could get pregnant (big surprise, that) and if so you should stop and think about this and a) use contraception to plan if or when, b) be aware that contraception can fail, and lots of people decide to go ahead with their pregnancies (contra the anti-contraception propagandists), c) be aware of things that will have a bad impact on the health of any future children you may choose to have - if you won't take care of yourself for your own sake, but you want to have healthy children, then do it for them and start now. I know personally a good few young women who smoke[ed] like chimneys and brush[ed] off any warnings of lung cancer by saying "I'll stop when I decide to have kids."
Given that plenty of people - male and female - won't do or stop doing things for their own health, until it's too late perhaps, but will modify their behaviour for the sake of their children - start wearing seatbelts; stop driving recklessly; lay off the drugs; stop getting disgustingly, uncontrollably drunk; give up dangerous sports; get a real job - as well as start exercising and eating healthy, so that their kids will have a good life with their parents around to be there for it - this isn't a bad way of motivating people. It just shouldn't be limited to mothers. (Of course, lots of people, men and women, couldn't care less and go on ignoring all the advice on safety and kid-care and personal health regardless.)
But it's a far cry from "okay, you won't stop ignoring your hypertension and smoking a pack a day and chugging down the Everclear to save your own life, but you're willing to do it for your future potential kids when they come along, so you really should start now because after they're already conceived will be really too late" to say "all women should take care of their health because they're going to have babies, and should take care of it only in such ways as will protect the potential sprog, regardless of their own quality of life, or else they're selfish and negligent" - which is the way the WaPo reporting on the report comes off.
So the question becomes why exactly? If this were the Washington Moonie Times or one of Murdoch's joints, there would be no question, because that's always been their policy (tailored to local norms for Sir Rupert, because I don't think the Sun woiuld dare to have someone doing Gibson's gag as Women of Britain, outbreed the Brown Hordes, even if they do peddle the War on Christmas™ meme over there, any more than FOX could show the Page 3 Girls on this side of the pond.)
But the Post is not self-identified as a conservative paper, and is widely assumed by conservatives here to compose a core part of The Liberal Media™, and certainly they are occasionally willing to criticize Bushco's handling of the war and the economy, (a low bar granted) and don't have either David Brooks or John Tierney on the editorial page - unlike the NYT, which is also supposed to be part of the liberal media, despite so much evidence to the contrary, and that they are in fact the media of the corporate elite, particularly that bit of it which works in Manhattan and lives in the pricier parts of Long Island and vacations internationally.
And while the WaPo has essentially been coasting on its glory-thrust-upon-them from Watergate for the past 30 years, and a largely-unearned reputation as being anti-Establishment speakers of truth to power, they haven't been as servile as the NYT was in the run-up to the War what with Judy Miller et al. So why are they jumping on the female-biology-is-destiny bandwagon? We expect this sort of thing from Concerned Women of America and the Independent Women's Forum; that it is breaking out into the mainstream is a cause for concern, and that this is as far as I know a new vector for it, even more so.
Now, granted, this is the same WaPo whose ombudswoman had a fit of the vapors when confronted by commenters who pointed out incongruities and an apparent-pro-administration bias in a story on the morass of fiscal scandals in the Capitol, and whose editor made a fool of himself subsequently likewise insulting Firedoglake, so maybe this is just a failure of reading comprehension on their part. After all, since the very editorial staff don't understand how the internet works, or to use Google, there's no way to be sure it isn't.
OTOH, it could be the zeitgeist that makes them sound so much here like Bobo Brooks telling women to give up their jobs, checkbooks, and self-will to become mothers now before it's too late and our eggs expire, and this seems to me far more likely than that we have a Natalist or even Dominionist presence on or behind the editorial board of the Post. But again, who really knows? All kinds of creepy things are coming out of the woodwork.
The only really liberal part of the WaPo article was the acknowledgement of the correlation between poverty and poor health, and how this disproportionately affects black families. There's no call for massive overhaul of the health care system to rectify its waste and inequity, no indictment of the callous and brutal "welfare reform" that requires mothers to work shit jobs that don't pay enough to pay their rent, absolutely none of the soul-searching "Why is socialist Europe doing so much better at keeping their babies alive than we are?" that you would expect if it really were part of the Liberal Media. (We are the liberal media, or most of it, in America.)
That the fundamental reaction of so many readers, and not just women, to that column was "Gyah! Bushco=Gilead, dammitalltohell!" was not really off the mark in terms of being a stupid or unwarranted assumption, given that Bushco has previously put a "Christian" gynecologist who advised prayer as the solution to menstrual cramps and anally-raped his semi-conscious wife, on the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, and then briefly put a veterinarian in charge of the FDA's Office of Women's Health before the outcry caused them to defer to Minitrue on this.
But it did turn out to be mostly (not entirely) wrong, and this was because the reporting newspaper's staff writer and editorial staff were either incapable of, or unwilling, to reveal the report's real slant, and either accidentally or deliberately used it as a platform to lecture women about our primary life purpose as breeding vessels.
So, for the third time, I ask - what was the point of so profoundly misrepresenting a publically-available report? If this is how they manage the easily-checkable stuff, how do you think they're doing with things that it's harder to verify? And why does anyone, anymore, on the Left or not, still give the benefit of the doubt to the media on anything yet? Someone joked on dKos a while back about trusting Ahmed Chalabi, with a poll where one of the answers to "would you trust him if he said it was raining" was "no, he probably has a flunkey standing off to the side with a hose!" And that's pretty much how we have to treat the corporate media, especially the op-ed, and the editorializing within news stories, because that's where they make the Narratives right before our eyes. The facts alone don't matter, they can be pruned out of context and grafted onto other facts and used to create chimeras right in front of us.
Eyes on the ball, folks. We need to figure out what they're up to at all times - and who's calling the shots.
hat tip to s.z. for the amazing "humans aren't grizzly bears" column.