6/29/2009

Biased Headline in NY Times Piece on New Haven Fire Fighters' case



Notice that the NY Times piece mentions only white fire fighters when the plaintiffs were both white and Hispanic firefighters. The same is true for their first paragraph. It isn't until the seventh paragraph that they mention Hispanics, and even then they mention only one Hispanic was denied promotion when there were actually two of them.

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posted by John Lott at 3:02 PM

4 Comments:

Blogger prblog4class said...

I'm sad to say that Fox News did the same thing.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/souters-day-court-rule-controversial-firefighter-case/comments/

6/29/2009 5:51 PM  
Blogger Martin G. Schalz said...

Ummm, Wade? Fox did mention the hispanic individual in their report.

"The 20 firefighters - 19 white and one Hispanic - who were denied promotions claimed city officials discriminated against them because they were more concerned about potential complaints of Civil Rights Act violations than their performance on advancement exams. The white firefighters argued discrimination is discrimination no matter what color it takes, and therefore, the city did violate the Civil Rights Act in not promoting them."

The second sentence did leave out the hispanic, but at least the first did not.

6/30/2009 2:30 PM  
Blogger prblog4class said...

I understand that Martin, but we are talking about the headline being biased. Both reports mentioned the Hispanic firefighter but neither headline did.

6/30/2009 6:55 PM  
Blogger Martin G. Schalz said...

Whoops! Got me there you did Wade. Thanks for the heads up. I'll do my best to pay closer attention next time.

7/02/2009 11:47 AM  

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