More on the Foley scandal
fabucat has some meta-commentary on CNN's handling of the issue:
> Seriously, I don't want a liberal media, and of course I don't want a conservative media.
> How about a media that doesn't assert the agenda of anyone? Whatever happened to Jack Webb's
> "Just the facts, m'am?"
anotheranon mentioned this interesting post in Orcinus, which speculates on things like the GOP response to the scandal and the long-term effect on the gay rights debate.
It also speculates on some psychological traits of "typical" liberals and "typical" conservatives, and how those traits might affect the development and expression of a gay person's sexuality. The reasoning might be interesting but it's also so stereotyped it makes my skin crawl.
I do think some psychological traits are more common in liberals and others in conservatives, but a system that puts so many people into just 2 categories is a very blunt instrument. Reducing the soft bias of "more common vs. less common" to a "100% vs 0%" division is stereotyping, plain and simple. The article probably didn't intend this, but I don't think it went nearly far enough to make that clear. Not to mention treating real people like stereotypes isn't exactly going open them up to your message.
I do think we can learn from the statistics of psychological traits within and between groups, but we also need to be very careful not to equate group statistics with any one individual, let alone all of them. I admit I'm sensitive about this, but I've seen too many media reports of medical or other scientific papers that oversimplified so much they were quite simply wrong about what the paper said.
> Seriously, I don't want a liberal media, and of course I don't want a conservative media.
> How about a media that doesn't assert the agenda of anyone? Whatever happened to Jack Webb's
> "Just the facts, m'am?"
anotheranon mentioned this interesting post in Orcinus, which speculates on things like the GOP response to the scandal and the long-term effect on the gay rights debate.
It also speculates on some psychological traits of "typical" liberals and "typical" conservatives, and how those traits might affect the development and expression of a gay person's sexuality. The reasoning might be interesting but it's also so stereotyped it makes my skin crawl.
I do think some psychological traits are more common in liberals and others in conservatives, but a system that puts so many people into just 2 categories is a very blunt instrument. Reducing the soft bias of "more common vs. less common" to a "100% vs 0%" division is stereotyping, plain and simple. The article probably didn't intend this, but I don't think it went nearly far enough to make that clear. Not to mention treating real people like stereotypes isn't exactly going open them up to your message.
I do think we can learn from the statistics of psychological traits within and between groups, but we also need to be very careful not to equate group statistics with any one individual, let alone all of them. I admit I'm sensitive about this, but I've seen too many media reports of medical or other scientific papers that oversimplified so much they were quite simply wrong about what the paper said.