You know sometimes I think criticism of the WVU campus paper goes a wee bit too far. It's not necessarily a fine paper, but it's no worse that many other campus dailies, and is better than some. But today they deserve tons, tons, TONS of criticism. The lead story starts off as follows - "New Jersey became the second state to recognize gay marriage last Wednesday ...". Uh-huh. Except of course ... they didn't actually do that. In fact the majority opinion explicitly stressed it wasn't doing that. Kathryn Gregory (who wrote the DA story) might want to actually look at a judicial opinion before she writes about it. To get something so basic so wrong, and in her first phrase ... lousy journalism.
Posted by armand at October 31, 2006 09:14 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Media | West VirginiaIt gets better! I'd stopped reading after the lead - but moving forward ... she's relating all her fact from an article in the Lawrence Journal-World (ummm, if that's your approach - why not just reprint that article?) - and in paragraph 3 she states that "according to the same article" there are now only 5 states that don't have a law or constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I'm almost sure that's wrong. There are 5 states that recognize rights for certain types of same-sex unions, but are there really 45 that explicitly don't?
Posted by: Armand at October 31, 2006 09:30 AM | PERMALINKOK I'm done with it ... and yes it got even worse. She started interviewing sociologist about likely political behavior, and sociologists who clearly have no knowledge of how this issue has played out in NJ so far.
DA - next time, just run a wire story if you are going to embarrass yourself like this.
Posted by: Armand at October 31, 2006 09:33 AM | PERMALINKstill, though, it illustrates my point: marriage by any other name will ultimately come to be perceived as marriage.
of course, i'd rather that perception held off until after election day . . .
Posted by: moon at October 31, 2006 12:03 PM | PERMALINKoh, and i wouldn't be surprised if 45 states had either an express ban or amendment, or identified marriage in express terms as a union of a man and a woman simply as an historic artifact rather than recent legislative action, in which case the statement wouldn't be wrong.
Posted by: moon at October 31, 2006 12:04 PM | PERMALINK