News stories don’t just pre-exist somewhere out there, walking around intact and whole, waiting for an equal chance to step through the door of a media outlet and into the public arena.
They exist in tiny bits and pieces, among heaps of junk and distortions and agendas — and the bits are selected, assessed, ranked, and assembled, according to the rigour and professionalism, or the whim and worldview, of the journalists and outlets involved.
Barry Soper chose to construct a pretty ugly beast out of their scraps. The Herald chose to parade it. Then they stepped back and let everyone else feed it, until the whole thing became something big and real-seeming enough to cause genuine uncertainty and fear, and to prompt genuine attempts to do the proper journalistic work of understanding what this new health initiative is all about.
Nah, the reporting on this was factually accurate. The author seems to have expected our media to justify the course of action our health departments are taking, and was shocked and appalled when they didn’t.
It included some accurate facts, and excluded a bunch of other facts that contextualised what was happening. Framing is important as it helps to influence how an article is read and what takeaways a reader has.
While accurate (race is a factor), how it was framed, how it was presented, and how little additional information was given was intentionally done to promote outrage by misleading the entire situation. I do not think it was presented in a factually accurate way.
Race is one of many factors. It is an independently clinical factor, just like age, socioeconomic status, pre-existing conditions, and more. We don’t see any outrage about any of that, do we? To present it as it was in the initial media attention framed the entire situation in as negative a way as possible. They intentionally left out parts of the situation to make it seem worse than it was. If not intentional, than incompetent.
You can’t expect a news article to provide context and back story for everything, or every news article would be a novel in it’s own right.
Besides, our media frames and presents things in a certain light all the time, it’s just this time it wasn’t the angle they wanted them to take.
Besides, our media frames and presents things in a certain light all the time, it’s just this time it wasn’t the angle they wanted them to take.
This time the take was designed to appeal to the racists and of course the racists reacted predictably. Hilariously both ACT and National dropped their facade and started spewing their racism out in the open.
In order to be factually accurate it would have to present all the facts. It didn’t.
The fact that maori and pacifica were being forced to wait longer for operations and that the doctors were not treating them and sending them to the hospitals instead.
But your white replacement paranoia kicked in and you reacted in the most racist way possible. It really highlighted how deep and virulent racism is in this country so I guess the article was good for one thing.
