When I first read that a CNN/Opinion Research poll showed that 68% of 935 registered voters said they were against building a mosque in New York City that met all zoning and environmental requirements, I was hopeful that CNN/Opinion Research had asked a trick question, a favorite technique of pollsters wanting to cook the results.

But much to my dismay at first, the question was direct: “As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand.  Do you favor or oppose this plan?”

And 68% opposed the plan, while only 29% were in favor; 3% had no opinion.  The survey breaks down the respondents demographically, and only among the group self-identified as liberals does a majority favor building this mosque, and that by a mere 51% to 45%.

My first, gloomy thought: What a sad day for the United States of America.  But then I thought again.  As President Obama reminded us over the weekend, the issue is not of favoring or disfavoring the mosque, but of granting all groups equal rights and protection under the law. 

I’m not saying CNN/Opinion Research was wrong to ask the question they did, but that they neglected to ask the other, more important question, “Do you believe that the group of Muslims in the U.S. planning to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand should have the legal right to go through with their plan?” 

Additionally, CNN/Opinion Research should have asked the like/dislike question first half the time and the legal/illegal question first half the time, since answering one question usually colors how people answer subsequent questions.

Only by asking both questions would we know if the citizens of the United States are turning their backs on the basic principle of religious freedom that has been a foundation stone of our civil society since before the Revolutionary War.  You see, it really doesn’t matter if people favor or disfavor the project; all that matters is if they accept the right to build the mosque at that location.

Those who started and are dragging out the campaign against the project have all said it is insensitive to the pain of the families of the people who died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  The factual basis of this statement is not exactly correct, since a number of families of the victims are enthusiastically supporting the project. (See the article about Mayor Bloomberg in the August 13 edition of the New York Times.)

More to the point, the premise behind the opposition to the project is patently racist: that somehow the burden of a very small number of terrorists falls on all Muslims and taints the entire Islamic religion.  As I and others have said before during this controversy, the vast majority of Muslims, including the backers of the New York mosque, are peaceful, hate terrorism and have had nothing whatsoever to do with Al-Qaida. 

Take this one example, from a report on Yahoo! news:

“This is not about freedom of religion, because we all respect the right of anyone to worship according to the dictates of their conscience,” US Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said on Fox News Sunday.

“But I do think it’s unwise… to build a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as a result of a terrorist attack.”

That would be true, Representative Cornyn, but only if all or a significant part of Islam staged the attack.  It would be true, but only if we really were in a Holy War with Muslims, and of course, we are not.

Or take Ross Douthat (please!).  In his opinion piece in today’s New York Times, Ross proposes that there are two American cultures (I think he means ideologies), one that believes allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences and the second which “looks back to a particular religious heritage.”  Douthat says these two ways of looking at the world are clashing on the issue of the New York mosque and that both “have real wisdom to offer.” 

Douthat goes on to say that the second America is right to press for something more from Muslim Americans.  “Too often, American Muslim institutions have turned out to be entangled with ideas and groups that most Americans rightly consider beyond the pale.  Too often, American Muslim leaders strike ambiguous notes when asked to disassociate themselves completely from illiberal causes.”

Now without some chapter-and-verse examples, all Douthat has done is engage in some cheap name-calling.  Douthat must know that lots of people will take this statement at face value without wondering who these Muslims are he’s accusing of supporting “illiberal causes.”  The words slide by so easily, but what we have here is a slanderous accusation for which Douthat provides not one shred of evidence.  And even if it were true, what does that have to do with the organization with plans to build the mosque?  By this logic, Douthat should want to stop American Jews from building a synagogue in Michigan because a few Israeli seamen went crazy and shot up a boat bringing humanitarian aid to Palestinians in refuge camps.  I suppose that Douthat would also protest the construction of a new “Sons and Daughters of Italy” club in any big city since many people associate the Mafia with Italians.

So make no mistake about it, this is not an issue of sensitivity to any group or a clash between two American ideologies.  It’s a matter of equal protection under the law and the attempt by the right-wing to deny such protection to a religious group.

One or even two Supreme Court decisions don’t tell you if the court is drifting right or left.  It takes a few years of consistent decisions to suggest where the court is taking us.  And a Supreme Court can often give mixed signals as to where it’s headed; for example granting more rights to corporations while at the same time constraining the rights of individuals (see David Cole’s article on Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project in the August 19, 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books for a full explanation of this example).

In the same way, the fact that the media covered the Bush II Administration’s pre-invasion assumptions about Iraq or the death of Michael Jackson in a certain way, while certainly very interesting, may ultimately prove less useful to understanding our era than the broader news trend, e.g., how the news media treat all unproved government assumptions or celebrity deaths.

Over my first year of blogging as OpEdge, I have found myself seeing the same patterns in media coverage again and again.  These patterns manifest the emerging and continuing trends in the news and news coverage.  Over the past year, I have written more than a few times about each of these trends.  For example, the first trend on my list is the tendency of mainstream news media to allow right-wing news media to set the agenda for the discussion of issues.  Examples I discussed through the year included health care legislation, gun control, addressing the federal deficit, and coverage of non-mainstream candidates in primary elections (providing all the coverage to candidates of the right and none to progressive candidates).

This list by no means exhausts the enormous number of trends we can identify in the news media.  It’s only a list of the ones about which I wrote.  So, for example, I never wrote about the news media’s knee-jerk lauding of all new consumer technology, support of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels or the war against modernism (e.g., James Joyce and John Coltrane) on the cultural pages, all important trends.  Maybe I’ll get to them in the next 12 months.

In any case, here are eight of the more important trends in news and news coverage.  First four trends in coverage of political and economic issues:  

• Mainstream media allow the right-wing media to set the terms of the debate for virtually every issue.
• The mainstream news media consistently overestimate the impact of the Tea Party, and in effect, has become instrumental in creating whatever impact the Tea Party and its candidates have had so far.
• The mainstream news media actively try to keep alive the controversy over the very existence of global warming instead of focusing attention on what we should do about it.
• The mainstream media actively promote the ideas that free market solutions work best and that it is always best to act selfishly.

Now four trends in entertainment media (which includes TV, radio, movies, music, video games and the lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, consumer technology, health and other feature sections of print and Internet news media):

• There has been continued growth in the long-term trend of leisure activities and entertainment that infantilizes adults, that is, turns adults into children by having the scope of ideas and sophistication of entertainments from their childhood.  Just think of all the adults who go to a Disney amusement park for vacation or spend their free time playing video games.  Think of all the adults at Star Trek and comic book conventions.  Think of Harry Potter’s popularity among adults.
• There has been continued growth of false values marketing, which is the linking of a product to a cause or idea when it has nothing at all in common with the cause, for example giving healthy attributes to junk food or claiming a product is environmentally friendly.
• More advertising seems over the top or bizarre than ever before, but it turns out that these ads are invariably based on solid consumer research in the predilections of a special target market.
• The combined effect of the portability of media and the accessibility of equipment and venues for “do-it-yourself” art is resulting in the lowering of the production values and sophistication of thought in virtually all forms of communications.  Look to reality TV and the video game plots of blockbuster movies as ready examples.

Don’t hesitate to leave a message or comment at the OpEdge page on Facebook, or to make a comment on this blog, if you have identified any media trends that you think are worth noting or that you want me to explore in the coming months.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up this “annual blogport” with a list of some of the ideas with which I have been trying to brainwash my gentle readers.

In Saturday’s New York Times, Ron Lieber proposes that there is new class warfare in the United States.  Let’s allow Ron to do the talking:

“There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers.  Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions.”

In postulating a class war between public and private workers, Lieber follows very briskly in the footsteps of Tom Petruno of The Los Angeles Times, who made the very same point using virtually the same words two days earlier.

A class war is a war between classes or a war that one class makes against another.  Before World War I, class war often meant real fighting.  Nowadays, it’s waged solely economically.  The best example of class war in the contemporary world is the 30-year net transfer of income and wealth from the poor and middle classes up the ladder to the wealthy in the good ol’ US of A.   

Of course we’re taught in school that we live in a classless society, and most of the media we encounter assume that we are overwhelmingly a middle class society with aspirations to go higher.

A quick Google search revealed that before Petruno-Lieber, virtually all mention of class war assumes conflict between the rich and poor, or the rich and everyone else.  So, these guys really are breaking new ground in creating “new speak.”

The logic of both these writers is haywire.  Both public and private workers are part of the same class: the working middle class.  These two writers try to recreate the definition of class warfare by pitting two parts of a class against each other.  It’s the old divide-and-conquer strategy that wealthy ruling elites have used for centuries; usually it’s a matter of making the middle class afraid of the poor, or of making the poor of one color afraid or resentful of the poor of another color.

Just like virtually all other stories recently that have proposed or considered gutting the pensions of public workers, both Lieber and Petruno praise the courage of legislators who take on the public unions.  And I’m sure that their courage is amply rewarded with campaign contributions from those who want to destroy public unions and reduce the wages of all workers.

These two articles are representative of the latest tactic for moving money up the economic ladder: Instead of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for pension obligations, Republicans and many centrist politicians, think tanks and the mass media are proposing to screw the public workers.  I’ve written before about how this new war on public workers is another phase in the 30-year program to redistribute income upwards.

It’s befuddling to me why the New York Times is doing so much to keep the public from considering the issue of what to do to confront global warming. 

The way the Times keeps us from thinking about what we can do to stop global warming is by keeping in the news the bogus controversy, “Is global warming taking place.”  From a succession of warmest decades on record to a documented rise in temperatures over the past few centuries to the melting away of glaciers and snowcaps, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the theory that our globe is getting warmer at an alarmingly fast rate—fast when judged by the slow action of the Earth and Nature.

Yet the Times once again has focused on communication about global warming to keep alive the controversy, this time in the smarmy article by Tom Zeller Jr. titled “Is It Hot in Here? Must be Global Warming” in the Sunday “Week in Review” section. 

The premise of the article is that when it was cold this past winter, opponents of global warming cite the cold weather to say that it doesn’t exist, and now that we’re seeing record heat, proponents of global warming are saying that proves global warming exists. 

The problem is, Zeller never documents the premise, even though he says he does.  He spends the first third of the article citing one example of someone using the snow to make fun of the theory of global warming.  Somehow he ignores the explicit comments against global warming made last winter by right-wing propagandists Rush Limbaugh, Marc Shepard, Mark Finkelstein, Ralph Reiland and Yates Sealander (see my blog dated January 19, 2010), and instead selects the erection of an Igloo with the sign “Honk if you *HEART* global warming” as his one example of someone using the cold weather to deny global warming. 

But at least the example is an explicit statement asserting (wrongly) that the cold weather disproves global warming.  The only statement or action that Zeller can find of anyone using the hot weather to say that global warming is occurring is the following:

“As Washington, D.C., wilts in the global heat wave gripping the planet, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has abandoned the effort to cap global warming pollution for the foreseeable future,” wrote Brad Johnson of the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.”

But read the sentence carefully: Johnson never says that the heat wave is evidence of global warming, he just points out the irony of the Senate abandoning its effort to pass legislation to address climate change during the hot weather.

Both one of my associates and I looked on Google for a real reference to someone saying this year’s hot weather proves global warming and could find but one article with a Russian source in which the claim is made.  We did find a number of articles in which various people say that this year’s hot weather does not prove global warming.

As far as I can tell, then, disbelievers used the cold weather again and again to make the false claim that global warming is not occurring, but Zeller is dead wrong to say that those who know global warming is occurring are citing a few sweltering hot days as additional proof.

With the premise unproved, there is no real need for the article.  But write on, Zeller does, quoting experts in psychology and communications to analyze the “why” behind his false premise that both sides use brief weather spells to prove trends that occur over decades, centuries and millennia. 

Zeller could have used much of the information he gathered in the story to write a piece on the psychology of why the weather of a few days or a few weeks will make people question scientific evidence.  In other words, he could have assumed what scientific evidence and virtually all scientists tell us is true and composed an interesting discussion on this one aspect of the problem of convincing people of its validity.  That would have been responsible journalism.  Instead he chose to keep the public discussion going on whether or not global warming exists long after the scientific evidence is in.

Let’s take Mr. Peabody’s WABAC (Wayback) Machine to the not-too-distant past of September 2006, when George Bush II and John Kerry were just entering the final sprint of the presidential campaign.

Dan Rather, the most well-known and well-respected television anchor in America, fronted a report prepared by experienced and well-respected TV news producer Mary Mapes in a show called “60 Minutes Wednesday.”  The topic: some memos purported to be written by a Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian that proved conclusively that Bush II shirked his National Guard duty during the Viet Nam War era.

Too bad the memos were forgeries.  After defending Rather and Mapes for about two weeks, CBS admitted that the news team had inadequately investigated the memos.  Mapes was fired almost immediately, and Dan rather, who was set to retire anyway, went more quickly and less elegantly than previously planned.

Fast forward to today and the Shirley Sherrod scandal, in which Andrew Breitbart, an RWRBB (right-wing rich-boy blogger), edited the speech of an African-American employee of the federal Department of Agriculture (DOA) to make her sound like a “Black racist” and posted it on his site.  Fox ran the clip numerous times.

Now that we know that the RWRBB doctored the clip, why hasn’t anyone been fired at Fox?  Not the anchor, not the producer, not a research assistant who might be responsible for fact-checking or sourcing video.  Now why is that?  Is it because journalistic ethics have declined over the past six years?  Or does Fox have a lower standard of professionalism than CBS?  Is Fox perhaps more interested in building a case for its political bias than it is in factual reporting?

If Fox wanted to be a serious news-gathering operation, wouldn’t it publicly put someone’s head on a platter and announce a new protocol for authenticating videos? Instead, Murdoch’s network has been pressing the attack, supporting Breitbart and making fun of the firing and offer to rehire.

Another question: why hasn’t the mainstream news dumped on Fox?  Maybe because without Fox, they wouldn’t have a source for the many right-wing spins on issues that mainstream media is currently using to define and cover issues.  

I’ve already covered the failings of the news media in establishing Breitbart’s credibility and then in not excoriating him, at least symbolically, for his unethical use of a favorite technique of Nazi propaganda—and Soviet as well now that I think about it.  I understand that an article in the latest issue of Nation will detail the news media’s history of treating Breitbart with kid gloves.

A short take: I ranted against Parade Magazine some weeks back for publishing an article on “What Independence Day means?” in which seven out of eight people answering the question were actors.  In focusing on entertainers, sports stars and other celebrities, the news media trains both children and adults to participate in celebrity culture.  Celebrities thus become the aspirational role model, as opposed to scientists, engineers, elected officials, fine artists, literary writers, classical musicians, inventors, or university researchers.  It dumbs down society and makes us more susceptible to mindless consumerism, which after all is the point of celebrity culture.

 Parade is far from being the only media outlet to revel in celebrity culture.  The August-July 2010 issue of AARP Bulletin, AARP’s 48-page Parade-for-seniors, has an article titled “99 Ways to Save,” which details tips for saving money, some submitted by readers.  Included are photos of four famous senior citizens and the most youthful-looking female AARP member imaginable; next to each is his or her tip for saving money.

The four famous senior citizens: actress Pam Greer, actor Harrison Ford, actor Alan Alda and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright (whose new book came out last September, so she was a little bit in the news when the article was being planned).  I guess one out of four ain’t bad.

Another short take:  On July 20, I analyzed a July 19 article by Ross Douthat in the New York Times in which he used a recent study on the admissions practices of eight colleges to explain why he says poor whites feel abused and look unkindly on minorities and immigrants.  In my blog entry, I demonstrated that even if Douthat was correctly interpreting the study that his article was full of logical holes and that his conclusion made no sense.

Yesterday, Time Magazine published an interview with the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshale who authored the study.  As Time so demurely puts it, Professor Espenshale “was quick to point out that the newspaper article had overreached its data.”

In other words, Douthat misinterpreted a study to get results that would allow him to perpetrate a completely illogical conclusion based on a dubious overstatement, i.e., that poor whites dislike minorities and immigrants.  A truly shameful performance.