News

When reporting both sides is bias disguised

When Alberta's government began, last year, to respond to the problem of sexually-explicit materials on public school library shelves, it might have seemed to some that the media coverage was fair. After all, both sides were given space to have their say.

So, for example, when CBC ran the headline, "Alberta bans school library books it deems sexually explicit," it stated as fact that the government was banning books – how's that for politically-charged terminology? – but they did include, in a smaller sub-head, that the "Education minister says province's new standards aren't about banning books."

Not quite equal time, but... fair-ish, right?

In CBC reporter Emily Williams' piece "The Handmaid's Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools" she shared the public schools' objection: "As a result of the ministerial order, several excellent books will be removed from our shelves this fall."

But Williams also included Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides' response that his government wasn't trying to ban The Handmaid's Tale, but was instead trying to get sexually-explicit sexual content off public school shelves.

So, both sides, right?

Well, as Christian journalist Ted Byfield noted, there's not just two sides to the story. And one of the sides the media didn't report on here is telling, and much more important than what they focused on.

Williams' article included the list of the more than 200 books the Edmonton Public School (EPS) system said they were going to have to pull of their shelves to comply with the government's mandate. This wasn't a list the government made; this was the list the EPS made and then used to characterize the government's efforts as book banning – going after famed and problematic classics like Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged and, yes, The Handmaid's Tale.

Still, EPS's list was there, available for anyone interested to peruse. And isn't that what reporters do? Peruse, investigate, uncover? Well, some perusing was done, but almost exclusively in one direction. CBC and other outlets reported on the aforementioned famous books that made the government look like book banners.

But what reporters didn't do is look into how much filth there actually was on the list. The press didn't look for books that'd confirm the need for winnowing. They didn't question why the public schools were being so negligent as to expose our children to pornography. They didn't highlight the outrageous examples of available comics that had pages of nudity, graphically depicted oral sex, showed a child being stripped for abuse, and showed another being sexually humiliated. Those details were made available by the Minister of Education, but they didn't show up in any of mainstream media accounts I read.

So I did some of the work they wouldn't, checking up on the list's first 25 books as they were presented alphabetically. I discovered that 15 were clearly and wildly inappropriate. These were all books that, had they been read aloud or shown at a public school board meeting, would likely have gotten the presenting parent booted. The 15 books were:

• 9 books from Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black Bird manga series
• Kentarō Miura’s graphic novel Berserk, Vol. 3
• Talia Hibbert’s Act Your Age, Eve Brown
• Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods
• Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
• Daria Snadowsky‘s Anatomy of a boyfriend
• Emily Henry‘s Beach Read

15 out of 25 amounts to 60%. And that's just the titles that were clearly crazy, with secular reviewers describing them as "rapey" and "sexually obsessed." The other 10 weren't necessarily good either; it was just that in my research it wasn't as clear that they were so blaringly bad.

The mainstream media made this about the 5 or 6 "classics" at risk. I don’t know if that 60% rate would have held up, but if so, then that would have amounted to more than 100 obscene books – 60% of 226 works out to 135– being pushed on kids via the province's public school libraries. Where were the "Edmonton Public Schools own up to being porn-peddlers" headlines?

While Christians should attempt to be fair – reporting on others as we would want to be covered ourselves (Matt. 7:12) – Reformed Perspective doesn't pretend to be unbiased. We have our bias firmly in place: the Earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. And with that bias comes a different sort of way of looking at the world, where teachers and schools entrusted with acting in loco parentis – acting in the place of parents – should, like a parent, be eager to protect the children in their care. That was the story here. And that was the story that was almost entirely missed by the mainstream media.