Bigots on parade

There was a time when I was a working journalist and I can attest to the fact that stories are a whole lot more fun when you can find a wind bag who disagrees on the story you are working on.

An example. I was working in Southeast Alaska and in one of the small towns that I often found myself, the community seemed to be made up of two types of people, long time conservative older people who wanted to mine, cut timber and use the natural resources of the land to bring money into the region and the other wise was hippies, these neo-liberal folks who had moved from the lower 48 to build their utopia.

So, what was nice about this was that there was always at least two out spoken sides to every story, no matter how banal. I could attend a meeting for a large copper mine that would have polluted and damaged one of the most scenic rivers in the world, and there they would be, hippies on one side, demanding no mine because of the harm the developers promised to bring and the ultra right wing, who wanted copper because god wanted us to have copper. End of story, I swear they could write themselves.

The problem is with all this sort of story development, is that sometimes the opposing sides are not really informed, they are not really sharing any information, they are just spewing the same nonsense they would no matter what the story. Journalists get lazy thinking that every story needs one whacko, and another whacko from the other side. This happens all the time, and if you have an agenda, like Fox News, you always find the whackiest of whackos to debate the issue.

Not CNN though. They found a nice former gay soldier to debate a moron on the recent DADT vote. The problem with groups that are set up to basically spend every waking moment asking for donations to fight something scary is that they are not credible, they are often just nutty. Below you will see the soldier speaking the truth, that studies have been done, soldiers are ready and the military has done this before with integration. Then there is the white guy with the died hair, talking fear and nonsense, as if his opinion is equal to that of the former soldier.

Again, sometimes the other side does not need to be heard from because they are bringing nothing to the table. The debate for gays in the military, or for that matter, gay marriage, is about equal rights, nothing more, nothing less. Whenever I hear these types of debates I think about my time in Alaska and how easy and fun it was to do a story and pit hippy against conservative and just let them spew silliness. Obviously in this case, CNN has found a whacko to claim the whole gay agenda is out to ruin the country. Lazy lazy lazy.