7
Sep
2009
Reporting Parental Outrage
At noon on the East coast on Labor Day 2009, CNN is doing a story about the president’s speech to school children. The story doesn’t come close to being objective. The controversy over the plan and the speech is being described as conservatives being “angry and afraid” that the president is going to “indoctrinate their children’s young minds.” Some parents are “going as far” as to keep their children home from school, CNN reports.
To illustrate the distress involved in Barack Obama speaking to the nation’s kids, CNN has a young, blonde, presumably conservative woman, crying on the television screen – literally – while “thinking about [her] children and how upset it truly makes [her]” that the president is going to speak to them. CNN clearly chose a person who is strongly overreacting to a controversy that is, nevertheless, legitimate.
That legitimacy isn’t even mentioned until the report is half over.
The gripe that all parents who are conscious of and concerned about constitutional lines, separation of powers and federalism have a right to make is this: the White House has no business distributing a lesson plan to schools. Education is a state issue, and the Department of Education is expressly prohibited from offering and imposing curriculum. The president’s initial request that students write about what they can do to help him was insult added to injury; it was not the sole injurious action. His removal of that request from the lesson plan does nothing to address how completely inappropriate and illegal it is for the Department of Education to offer a lesson plan at all.
This administration keeps finding new ways to try to insert the federal government into the lives of individuals without their permission. Doing so with children is doubly unacceptable. Parents therefore have a right to be upset about this scenario – no matter what the president says in his speech.
It’s not the worst thing the administration can do; it’s not as if the draft’s been reinstated and pre-teens in middle school are eligible. Still, when a national mainstream news organization strongly implies that outrage over this issue is just another fringe reaction of those who want to hate Obama regardless, it’s an inaccurate portrayal of the true nature of the controversy and therefore irresponsible reporting.
But the mainstream media can’t seem to do any better these days – and that’s something to be truly outraged about as well.