Blogs can be personal, biased and downright one-sided. So can Mother Jones, The Nation and National Review on occasion.
We wouldn’t want it any other way.
But mainstream news outlets too often lean left, something that became crystal clear to anyone who followed so much as a fraction of the presidential campaign coverage.
But that bias also seeps into entertainment reporting. It’s one factor that fuels this blog – not to be one-sided in the other direction, but to let people know the movie information they’re getting often doesn’t tell the whole story.
Disagree? Well, do you think a conservative version of Michael Moore would get a fraction of the accolades the real Moore receives?
Take the latest issue of Newsweek. In Devin Gordon’s otherwise fine review/feature on “Watchmen,” he clumsily inserts an Iraq War comment into his narrative:
“Just as with the war in Iraq, a lot more people now applaud themselves for recognizing the disaster right away than actually did at the time.”
A good journalist would be wise to steer clear of that kind of editorializing. You could argue he’s 100 percent right, or you can say that history will view the conflict through a far different lens. Why go there in the first place?
But Gordon wasn’t done.
Here, he describes how the movie hues too closely to the source material:
“Onscreen, the original tale’s Soviet-era dread feels dated, and it shouldn’t—not with religious terrorism offering such an able proxy for anticommunist paranoia.”
Hmmm. “Religious terrorism?” Are Jews and Buddhists up to no good these days? Christians? Or is it radical Muslims doing 99 percent of the terrorism? Well, this PC writer is afraid to say, so he opts for the more bland label rather than being specific.
One could argue biased film reporting won’t hurt us one bit. I disagree. The culture at large can be shaped by any number of factors, including the entertainment we take in. Or read about.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Agreed.
While the writer is at fault, the editorial hierarchy is not blameless.
Even though a film review by definition is an opinion, good reporting avoids such segues into subjectivity.
Yet another reason not to rely on a sole source for even entertainment information.
~ Dagnabbitt