Shot In The Dark: Their Own Petard

February 02, 2005

Their Own Petard

The left - and a fair chunk of the right - is distrurbed that one in three US high school students would seem to approve of one kind of censorship or another:

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys “too much freedom,” not enough or about the right amount, 32% say “too much,” and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

The temptation is to say "thanks for nothing, liberals - your speech codes and a monolithically leftist educational academy and education system have finally done what the right has been warning you about for decades; created a generation of students that have no idea about this country's civic traditions, beyond an ability to regurgitate key facts about the civil rights movement.

Of course, the USA Today story presents none of its methodology. More on that later.

Chris Dykstra echoes a lot of leftybloggers in solemnly intoning that it represents the "Birth of Fascism". But remember - births involve parents.

The study's methodology page doesn't say what these students' teachers know about the subject, or whether the subject is even taught in their schools.

Judging by what my kids - in sixth and eighth grade - tell me, it's never really come up.

So - is this the "birth of fascism", or just a "dawning realization that our school system doesn't teach democracy very well?"

Posted by Mitch at February 2, 2005 06:36 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Some of this might be inherited from the 'rents unarticulated contempt for the media, e.g., Jr sees Dad throwing his beer at the TV when Dan Rather is on.

It's not that govt should be regulating the media as much as a vague feeling against the talking heads on TV.

Posted by: Gideon at February 2, 2005 08:47 AM

It could simply be that the MSM have done such a p*ss-poor job of policing themselves that it would be an improvement having *anyone* monitor what they say.

Can it get worse than Martha Raditz looking like she'll soon burst into tears over a plastic doll being held hostage, or a CBS 'news' show flogging forged gov't documents in an effort to disrupt a Presidential election, or Eason Jordan, head of a national TV network, claiming that dozens of (unnamed!) journalists were deliberately targeted and killed by US forces in Iraq, or that a column by a Dean partisan in a local newspaper can b*tch about a lack of fact-checking on an Internet column ("Methinks they doth protest too much"), or perhaps that even a hack columnist in the same town can continue to draw a paycheck because he "knows stuff".

Where would "any worse" fit in here?

The phrase, "hits bottom and start digging", comes readily to mind.

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