Boone
Gold Member
Re: You might be a liberal if (chapter V)
My reply was in response to your second question. Here is a take on your question about the rape and murder of the child. Click the link and read the full story.
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Despite the disparity in the number of stories about Matthew Shepard and Dirkhising, that in itself is not ironclad proof of bias in the mainstream media. Suggestions that the mainstream media downplayed the Dirkhising story because of a pro-homosexual bias are circumstantial and not proof of bias in and of itself. The media has reported on other homosexual murderers; as Rich (1999) notes, “it’s sure done a poor job of keeping Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan, among others, a secret.” Cunanan was accused of killing five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace, and a manhunt for him generated significant media coverage; Dahmer killed 17 men over 13 years.
Roberts (Barrett, 1999) suggests that “all news is relative to what else is going on at the time. ... You can argue that happenstance should not play a role in these things, but they do.” The ongoing debate over “hate crime” laws likely helped to drive coverage of the Shepard story, and it’s not a stretch to conclude, as Sullivan does (2001), that his death was exploited for political purposes. But it is also as easy to conclude that Dirkhising’s death was promoted by at least some conservatives in order to achieve political goals; the case has been used as a reason to defeat “hate crime” laws (Jacoby, 1999) and oppose greater participation of homosexuals in public life (Irvine, 2001). And it could be argued that using the case to paint the mainstream media as “liberal” and pro-homosexual is another part of a conservative political agenda; Sheldon (2001) suggests that the Dirkhising story was "spiked by a journalistic community co-opted by radical sex groups."
Conservatives have implied that both the Shepard and Dirkhising deaths both involved homosexuals, the two are equivalent, and therefore Dirkhising's death should have received the same coverage that Shepard's did. But the nature of the deaths themselves are different; Shepard's death has been classified as a hate crime which, generally speaking, tends to get attention from the mainstream media, while Dirkhising's death has been classified as a sex crime, which rarely gets national media attention. One of the few murder cases to receive national news coverage in which sex played a major factor was the "preppy murder" case of Jennifer Levin, who died in 1986 during apparent rough sex in New York's Central Park with Robert Chambers, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter. As Shipp (1999) writes, "A hate crime homicide such as Shepard's and, four months before that, James Byrd's in Jasper, Tex., is, 'a special kind of killing,' The (Washington) Post has editorialized. 'It tells a segment of American society that its physical safety is at risk.' Arkansas authorities have not characterized the Dirkhising death as a hate crime."
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2002/dirkhising3.html
My reply was in response to your second question. Here is a take on your question about the rape and murder of the child. Click the link and read the full story.
------------------------------------------------------------
Despite the disparity in the number of stories about Matthew Shepard and Dirkhising, that in itself is not ironclad proof of bias in the mainstream media. Suggestions that the mainstream media downplayed the Dirkhising story because of a pro-homosexual bias are circumstantial and not proof of bias in and of itself. The media has reported on other homosexual murderers; as Rich (1999) notes, “it’s sure done a poor job of keeping Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan, among others, a secret.” Cunanan was accused of killing five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace, and a manhunt for him generated significant media coverage; Dahmer killed 17 men over 13 years.
Roberts (Barrett, 1999) suggests that “all news is relative to what else is going on at the time. ... You can argue that happenstance should not play a role in these things, but they do.” The ongoing debate over “hate crime” laws likely helped to drive coverage of the Shepard story, and it’s not a stretch to conclude, as Sullivan does (2001), that his death was exploited for political purposes. But it is also as easy to conclude that Dirkhising’s death was promoted by at least some conservatives in order to achieve political goals; the case has been used as a reason to defeat “hate crime” laws (Jacoby, 1999) and oppose greater participation of homosexuals in public life (Irvine, 2001). And it could be argued that using the case to paint the mainstream media as “liberal” and pro-homosexual is another part of a conservative political agenda; Sheldon (2001) suggests that the Dirkhising story was "spiked by a journalistic community co-opted by radical sex groups."
Conservatives have implied that both the Shepard and Dirkhising deaths both involved homosexuals, the two are equivalent, and therefore Dirkhising's death should have received the same coverage that Shepard's did. But the nature of the deaths themselves are different; Shepard's death has been classified as a hate crime which, generally speaking, tends to get attention from the mainstream media, while Dirkhising's death has been classified as a sex crime, which rarely gets national media attention. One of the few murder cases to receive national news coverage in which sex played a major factor was the "preppy murder" case of Jennifer Levin, who died in 1986 during apparent rough sex in New York's Central Park with Robert Chambers, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter. As Shipp (1999) writes, "A hate crime homicide such as Shepard's and, four months before that, James Byrd's in Jasper, Tex., is, 'a special kind of killing,' The (Washington) Post has editorialized. 'It tells a segment of American society that its physical safety is at risk.' Arkansas authorities have not characterized the Dirkhising death as a hate crime."
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2002/dirkhising3.html
