Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Not Even A Pretense of Impartiality

I received the September 2008 issue of the CTA birdcage liner, California Educator magazine, and knew it was going to be a doozy when I saw one of the cover stories: Teaching In An Election Year.

Here's how the article starts:

When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were in a tight race for the Democratic nomination....

The fourth sentence of the article contains the word "Democratic". The sixth sentence contains the phrases "Democratic Party" and "Democratic National Convention".

And so it continued for five pages. Reading this article, you'd never know that Republicans exist in this election. In fact, the word "Republican" doesn't exist anywhere in the article.

There were, however, two references to individual Republicans:

"This is a historical event, where the race is between a woman, an African American and the oldest candidate ever to run for president."


Reading it again, I can't be sure that the woman referred to above isn't Clinton, thereby bringing the Republican reference down to one possibly derogatory remark. In what I'm sure was the CTA's nod to balance, though, in one picture there were some student-made posters on the wall, including some for McCain.

I should be inured to this, but the sheer gall of the CTA continues to amaze me. I do despise that organization with every fiber of my existence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had exactly the same reaction both to the cover and to the article. My first impulse was to see if Republicans were even referenced, and was not at all surprised to find that they weren't. But you did leave out the most appalling line:

"Before the primary in California,
his students read through the entire voter information packet listing all the candidates -- including the Green, Libertarian (sic) and American Independent parties' candidates."

Let's see -- we've spent the entire first part of the article discussing the Democrats, so they're covered . . .was there something missing from the list of 'other' parties? (By the way, the sic was my petty nitpicking of the author's missing comma.)

It's especially funny since California has closed primaries, so none of those candidates were running against each other, and, with the exception of the Democrats and the Republicans, there were no real races. That just makes the civics lesson that much better, though.

Dan

Anonymous said...

Hello. My name is Edgar and I'm an editor at OpposingViews.com, the debate website. Since we both cover education issues, I thought I'd drop you a note. I would've e-mailed you but I couldn't find an address.
See, we're currently having a discussion about whether or not homeschooled kids are at a disadvantage. You can see it here:
http://www.opposingviews.com/questions/are-homeschooled-kids-at-a-disadvantage
Although vetted experts are the ones doing the debating, anyone can contribute by choosing a side and posting comments about the experts' arguments.
Check it out and, if you have the time, let me know what you think at eacosta@opposingviews.com
Thanks!