5/12/2005 02:57:00 PM|||Nathan Moore|||

We were up in College Park, Maryland the last few days visiting Sarah's family. It's always nice to go back up to the DC area after having lived there for three years, and then understanding after about 48 hours why you love Nashville so much.

But anyway, there we were. I attempted to do as much work as possible remotely, thanks to some nifty little gadgets I'd invested in over the last few months. Every morning, I had the dubious pleasure of reading the Washington Post. It's all relative - since my best source of news in Nashville is The Tennessean, the Post is worth the time. It's the same liberal spin, but with approximately 10 billion times the content.

There was an article in yesterday's Post that especially caught my attention (registration is required). It was discussing the effect known as "white flight" on Calvert County in Maryland. The article goes into sufficient detail, such that I will not dote over cumbersome statistics in this post. However, after reading about half of it, I began to get a queasy feeling. Then, with about a quarter of it left, I began substituting "white" for "black", and vice versa. Then I reread it doing just that exercise. If it had been written the way I was now reading it, the journalist who wrote the piece would have been strung up as the Washington media equivalent of David Duke.

For instance, do this exercise on just this segment

"I spent days traveling around the county when I didn't see a single minority (*white person)," said Spencer, 65, an African American (*white woman) who moved to Calvert five years ago. "I was in total cultural shock."

How absurd! The trouble with this is that there is a clear double standard. It may not be intentional, but it is certainly institutional. If you get a chance, read the article, and do my little exercise. This, in its purest form, is the epitome of the media bias we in the Republican Party so often complain about. It's not purposeful, but it's there, and it's rampant.

|||111592860996359634|||Frustrating