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Nov. 25, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Conservatives don’t like the media.

I’ve noted before that the Right and the Left have managed to construct nearly air-tight bubbles for people, in which they only ever read or hear things that confirm their point of view. FOX News versus MSNBC, the cable news networks versus AM radio, Salon.com versus The Blaze. The 24-7 non-stop ideology outrage machine has helped create a chasm between conservatives and liberals that is often impossible to bridge with facts—which is why the Left doesn’t care that Hillary Clinton is a phenomenally corrupt hack who lies to committees and in hearings as a matter of course, and a certain segment of the Right doesn’t seem to care that Donald Trump has no idea what he’s talking about, and is making things up as he goes along.

The divide goes deeper. Conservatives don’t trust the media because for a very long time, the media hasn’t shown any interest in accurately telling their stories. Pro-lifers, for example, are almost always painted in caricature. I’ve seen TV reporters go from door to door, looking for someone who was upset with pro-life literature being distributed, and refusing to interview those who said the literature had changed their mind about abortion. We’ve been told point-blank by reporters that when it comes to pro-life issues, “We don’t cover those kinds of stories.” I’ve had reporters ask me the same question—word for word—four or five times in order to see if they could get me to stumble. They weren’t interested in our point of view, they were interested in making us look bad. That is why pictures of abortion victims will inevitably be labeled “obscene” and “inappropriate” by the media, but drag queens waving their genitals at crowds filled with children and families during Pride Week will be labeled “celebratory” and “exuberant.”

Other times, reporters will show up to cover pro-life rallies or pro-life outreach, interview people, take pictures, take camera footage, and then never run a story. If the pro-life movement is going to look good, you can bet editors are going to spike the story. And if the pro-choice movement is going to look bad, you can bet that editors are going to spike that story, too. When the Planned Parenthood scandal broke a few months ago, a reporter from CBC Saskatoon called me to ask whether I thought that the abortion industry was providing baby body parts to researchers in Canada, as well. I directed him to statements made by Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada admitting that yes, they do. The reporter was stunned. “Wow. I didn’t think this kind of thing happened here. I’ll talk to my editor and call you sometime next week.” No, you won’t, I thought. And he didn’t.

It’s not that the Left is never outraged about anything and the Right is. We’re just outraged about fundamentally different things. Leftists work themselves into a hysterical lather over “cultural appropriation” in the form of people doing yoga or wearing sombreros at Halloween. Conservatives like myself see a lot more to be angry about when we hear that Planned Parenthood is shipping cases of chopped-up fetuses to research labs. Conservatives are often incredibly frustrated by liberals, because while liberals find racism everywhere and manage to interpret virtually any statement as a dog-whistle alerting us all to the seething racism just below the surface of society, they refuse to see brutal realities unfolding right in front of them. Abortionists killing babies and selling their corpses. Porn fueling misogyny—and yes, even racism and rape culture. Horrific sexual violence celebrated in mainstream television shows. You know, real problems.

To be fair, many journalists are as much lazy and incompetent as they are ideologically driven. When it comes to stories about conservatives or pro-lifers, it seems as if the barest minimum of research is done, if any. The pro-life organization I work for, the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, has been covered by the media around 150 times so far this year. Only once did a reporter—from the National Post—call me back to fact-check something an abortion activist had said about us. I appreciated it, and told him so. “Well,” he replied, “reporting the facts is just our job.” That may be true, but many journalists don’t care to make the calls or Google searches it takes to confirm facts before reporting them.

Beyond that, the Left-Right divide also breaks down over more fundamental differences. The enormously popular content aggregator Upworthy, for example, seeks to push feel-good stories and activist material and help certain good causes go viral. At the end of the day, though, they would have a much different definition of the word “good” than a Christian would. They push abortion, for example, as well as the sexual anarchy currently being propagated in the form of dozens of new “orientations.” When we’ve polarized to the point where we can’t even agree on whether or not something is “good” or “bad,” you know that the chasm is long and deep.

And one final point: Why does almost every news outlet, from the Huffington Post to Salon.com to even FOX News seem to think that nonstop articles titled “176 Tips for Mind-Blowing Sex” are somehow news? Scrolling through my newsfeed, I sometimes feel like I’m looking at Cosmopolitan or some other soft-core smut rather than the news sites I actually signed up for. Sex tips are not news. Stories about that one weird sex thing you did is also not news, and writing about it makes you a weird exhibitionist. Reporting on what people are doing in the bedroom every day is getting tiresome. If only our infantile culture could stop playing with themselves for five minutes, maybe they could pay more attention to the important things going on.

To be well-informed, read beyond the headlines. Read both sides of every story, and then fact-check it. I’m tired of conspiracy theorists who think George Bush blew up the World Trade Centre because it’s easier to watch a video on YouTube than it is to read the brick-sized 9/11 Commission. In the Information Age, it’s essential to find rigorously researched sources that you can depend on. 

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.