The distortions of balanced news and a proof of the Critical Race Theory

A big story in South Dakota is what happened to a proposed set of curriculum standards for the teaching of social studies in the public schools.  The standards were generated by a panel of 46 educators and content specialists.  Their draft was drastically revised when it was submitted to the state Department of Education.  Those revisions include a drastic excision of content dealing with the Native American history and presence in the state.  Members of the panel have registered protests against the extent of the excisions.  The news reports, however, do not identify exactly who eliminated the Native American content recommendations.  The 46 panel members are identified in state documents. The Department of Education personnel involved are presumed to be operating under the authority of the Noem administration.

Noem has vociferously objected to the Critical Race Theory and any mention of it educational settings. She issued an executive order stating, “Critical race theory has no place in South Dakota schools.”  The theory posits that racial discrimination and oppression has shaped and been built into American organizations and their operative policies.  The excisions of Native American content from the curriculum standards by Noem's administration shows exactly how that is done.  In eliminating recognition of a group,  their history is denied.  And if a history is denied, the people who lived it are denied.

The news coverage of this act of excision, however, compounds the act of excision.  In the media's obsession with being balanced by quoting various viewpoints on the issue, it loses the central issue in a fog of verbiage.  Cable news now covers everything with panels of people who endlessly discuss what is being reported.  Instead of focusing on the events as they occur, cable news expends most of its efforts in talking about them.  Other journalistic forms have picked up this habit with the claim that they are providing balance.  As a result, news stories are filled with opinions about what has happened and  obfuscate what has happened.

That is what happened with the coverage of the social studies curriculum recommendations.  The stories carried comments by those who resented the deletions and those who justified them.  While some of the coverage did detail the excisions, those details were overshadowed by opinions about whether the Department of Education had the right to so abridge the recommendations.  That obscured the fact that materials dealing with cultural understanding of Native America were eliminated, and that the DOE's action diminished opportunities to contribute to that understanding.

The Noem administration committed the very kind of act that the Critical Race Theory hypothesizes underlies the racial discrimination in our social and government system.  And by forbidding the explanation of what the Critical Race Theory is in classrooms, the people will remain ignorant about what is going on when an example of it occurs.