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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

Dear Andrew,

Actually, NPR hasn't covered the Danish strike either, so far as I know. I wouldn't expect Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, to give much air time to a big strike story. It was the newspapers of record--the Times, Washington Post and other big-time respectable "objective" media (Time? Newsweek?)--I had in mind. I don't find the Danish story boring at all--to me, a car chase is boring, the busting of a chop shop is boring, the arrest of some drug dealers is boring. But in any case, you can't really argue that tedium is the reason these publications would overlook the story--they run tons of unscintillating news. No, I think there is a real failure of reporting when it comes to the worker and employee perspective. Thus, even on NPR we have "Marketplace" every evening--economic news from the investor and management perspectives--but no "Labor Beat."

I agree with you, sort of, that there are many sources of news--Thank God for the Internet, which is where I read up on Denmark and many other undercovered and ignored stories. But you do have to go looking for them. And most people aren't on the Internet.

I don't agree with you about crime coverage. Without wishing to minimize the seriousness of crime, I note that many studies have shown that the more people watch TV the more out of proportion to reality is their fear of crime, and the more automatic is their association of crime with minority perpetrators. I don't think a half-hour news program that devotes 22 minutes to crime and violence and 3 minutes to vulgar video games and NOT one second to law, politics, world events, health, science, art, education, economics, or city govt. is giving people much sense of what's going on.

Now it's laundry time,
Katha

PS. I forgot. Fox did have one city govt. story: the police chaplain (a Catholic priest) who is in trouble because at some big ceremonial dinner he referred to a gay assistant DA as a "fag." The good father claims he didn't know the man was gay and thought "fag" was a synonym for "jerk."

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