Democracy Has Prevailed.

April 18, 2010

...And Potter Says,

From the Slag Heap:
Usually I leave deconstructing Tribune-Review articles to the good folks at 2 Political Junkies: God knows it's important work, but you know -- life is pretty short.
He then goes on to dig into a passage from this Tribune-Review article:
The tea party patriots have been given a bum rap, according to Tim Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa.

"They've been treated unfairly in the media," he said.
Chris Potter finds, to no one's surprise, that Professor Hagle is hardly the non-partisan disinterested academic the Trib paints him as being. Though, after looking at his CV, he's no strict ideologue either. There's more than a few papers for what look like strictly academic publications (Encyclopedia of Research Methods for the Social Sciences, for example).

I guess the test as to transparency is found in a simple thought experiment. Imagine if the P-G were to quote a poli-sci professor saying that Moveon.org is getting a bum rap in the media. And then it turns out that this professor's the faculty advisor to his/her university's College Democrats and/or "Pro-choice coalition" or was found to have given $7,700 to various Democratic Party PACs and/or fundraisers?

You guessed it, the Trib would be outright screaming the liberal media bias found in erasing such information from the reporting.

Thanks for the shout-out, Chris.

3 comments:

George Bullen said...

Yet another example of teabagging hypocrisy. At least you got the shout out though...no publicity is bad publicity right?

What we see and hear on TV may not be the majority of the Tea Party, but its enough to scare you. Studying the fringes can tell you a lot about a movement, and I definitely don't like what I see.

Check out my blog Young Politics for more on this.

Chris Potter said...

Yeah, perhaps I should have noted the guy's scholarly work as well. (At least, I assume it's scholarly -- I couldn't make heads or tails of what some of that stuff was about.) And I think you can hold down an academic day job -- and be good at it -- while still pursuing your political beliefs in your off hours. That's one of many areas where I disagree with the likes of David Horowitz -- I think a guy like Michael Berube can be a damn effective teacher, no matter what his political beliefs. I'd extend that to conservative profs as well -- I had a really good Classics professor who qualified.

But in this case, I think the question is, which hat is Hagle wearing when he answers the question? He's not in a classroom context here, after all. NPR and the Trib -- and I'm sure other media outlets as well -- only told us about one of those hats. Ideally, audiences would have known about the other hat as well.

Unknown said...

Hey folks. I just happened on the post and comments and thought I would add my two cents. When I get called to comment as a political or caucus expert I try to be as objective as possible. Of course, taking a middle ground will still make some folks unhappy, such as when I don't follow the main stream story line about tea party folks. Such is life. -TH