"most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates into which they plug each day's events."
Seeing the world through this template has resulted in some incredibly awful reporting on the Duke case and the Imus slur.
The bottom line is the traditional news media has a view of the world where conflict must exist between rich/poor, white/black, religious/nonreligious, man/woman etc. When there is evidence to the contrary, these media outlets simply ignore the evidence and reports on the same template.
An example, Terry Moran who wrote a piece on his blog "Don't feel sorry for the Dukies" which essentially states that the rich boys may not be charged with rape but they're still guilty of being white & privileged men victimizing a poor, disadvantaged black girl. He just cannot give up his paradigm of the world.
The same template held true this past fall when NBC decided to do a piece on how white middle class people are hostile to Arab looking Muslims. They baited the piece by having Muslims dressed in Arab gear show up at a NASCAR race and pray.
You know why you never saw the piece.... because it was never produced. They could never elicit a response from those good old boys to harass the Muslims. See, it never occurred to NBC producers that the good old boys don't really care if you are a Muslim as long as you like Earnhardt.
What would have been nice would be to see a piece about journalists' preconceptions about fly over country but don't hold your breath. We'll get that piece when you start seeing apologies to the "Dukies".
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