RESPOND TO: ABC's Assist to Campus Conservatives

[NVMojo]

WASHINGTON -- February 3 -- On February 1, ABC's World News Tonight offered an uncritical platform to conservatives who complain that their free speech is being curtailed on college campuses across the country.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson introduced the segment by saying that conservatives "claim they are victims of a double standard on college campuses," and seemed to boost that notion by saying, "There certainly is evidence to suggest that colleges are bastions of liberal thinking.
Seventy-two percent of faculty members in one survey identified themselves as left of center."

ABC correspondent Dan Harris ran down a series of examples to back up this storyline, beginning with a community college that wouldn't allow a screening of the movie "Passion of the Christ" because it had an R rating. Harris went next to a soundbite from David French of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: "You're going to get more political and intellectual diversity at your average suburban mega-church than you are at an elite university." Harris prefaced that statement by calling French's group "non-partisan," seemingly an attempt to make an obviously ideological soundbite seem less so.

Harris then moved on to Columbia University, "where Jewish students complain about harassment from pro-Palestinian professors." ABC included a clip from a documentary that makes a series of claims about allegedly anti-Israel professors, but made no attempt to balance that with a source who might challenge the arguments advanced in the documentary. The New York Civil Liberties Union, for example, has concluded that "the major academic-freedom problem arising out of the current Columbia controversy is that a film produced by a Boston-based advocacy group has provoked public officials and others to demand the punishment of certain identified Columbia professors based largely on the ideological positions that these professors have advanced in their writings and lectures." (NYCLU letter to Village Voice, 2/2/05)

snip...

ACTION: Contact ABC and ask them why their report on conservative complaints about free speech infringement did not evaluate the validity of those complaints, and did not offer any experts who might challenge those claims.

CONTACT:
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: [phone]
mailto:[e-mail]

more...

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11827

[LostInAnomie]

1. Conservatism is the antithesis of higher learning

It shows a great lack of education that anyone would believe that critical thinking and conservatism could have the same message.

What are these professors supposed to teach, "Never mind the glaring contradictions between what is known and the status quo of society. The status quo is always right." Complacency has no place at a university, a professor must be inquisitive.

[Joe Power]

2. My e-mail

Dear Mr. Jennings,

Why were “conservatives” given yet another unchallenged platform for espousing their claims of discrimination? ABC presented no evidence that they had evaluated these claims in any way, nor were any experts featured who might contradict or challenge the idea that these poor souls were being persecuted. This is yet another concerted effort by a right wing group to try and force themselves on the country. The Presidency, the Legislature, the Courts, and the Media aren’t enough for these people, now they have to control Academia, as well?

Is ABC so cowed by the right wing in this country that they have abdicated their responsibility as journalists, or are you folks just in their pocket?

Sincerely,
Joe Power

[NVMojo]

3. excellent, on the money, and now I must get mine written and out the door.