PressEthic

Mary Madigan at Dean’s World posted about a warning label:

A mosque has been firebombed in Paris. The riots continue and some of the unrest has spread to Belgium. According to the Brussels journal, European censors don't want Americans to pay attention to this. They don't want Europeans to pay attention to it either. They don't want to know about it themselves.

At first, I thought the Brussels Journal was a newspaper; on reading the article in question, it looked more like a blog, so I checked out their mission statement, which notes:

We are not an organisation; we are a coalition of individuals. Our contributors do not necessarily share every view represented in the articles of this website, but we know they all write with an earnest desire for the truth. What binds us is our defence of liberty and the conviction that the state exists to serve man and never the other way round.

A news blog of sorts, then. All right.

Paul Belien wrote an article on the Paris riots. He adds the following note to the beginning of his piece:

Perhaps our attempt to provide information qualifies us as “extreme-right” too. To avoid legal problems our lawyers advise us to put up a warning:

Political Content Warning

If you are a Socialist or a Liberal, please stop reading NOW.

Emphasis his.

The problem with the written word is that I can’t tell if he is being facetious or not. My gut instinct is that the warning is tongue-in-cheek, but I just can’t tell. And that’s sad.

It’s not just sad because my sense of humor isn’t sharp enough to pick up on this (though that is pretty sad, I admit). It’s not sad because his humor, if it is humor, is unclear.

It’s sad because the idea that it might be genuine suggests something new.

Sure, there’s the idea that, worldwide, newspapers have political bias and readers are aware of this and choose their news sources accordingly. But if this practice goes extends to using warning labels, that’s just too far.

Can you imagine the New York Times wrapped in brown paper with a sticker on the front reading, “Not suitable for conservative consumption?” Or Fox News running a banner under The O’Reilly Factor reading “The No-Spin Zone is not intended for a liberal audience.”

Actually, that last one might be funny. But it’s still frightening.

The media chooses which stories get told, and how they get told. But the media doesn’t get to tell me what should make me angry.