Self described “Democrat”, Orson Scott Card, doesn’t think the media is doing their job. He thinks they are biased in favor of Democrats and against Republicans. Here’s a link to a recent “column” he wrote defending this viewpoint, giving numerous examples of how the liberal media ignores Democratic scandals while promoting scurrilous stories about Republicans. One in particular caught my eye:
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.
Hmmm. Something about that didn’t seem right. I don’t remember the Bristol Palin story getting near the play in the media that the Edwards’ adultery story did. So I checked the Google (News category) and here is what I found:
For the search “john edwards affair” there are 1,370 entries.
For the “Bristol Palin pregnancy” search there were only 782 entries.
In other words, there was significantly more coverage of John Edwards’ adulterous affair once it came to light than Sarah Palin’s unwed daughter’s pregnancy, even though Edwards was no longer a candidate for any office at the time the affair was discovered, whereas Sarah Palin, Bristol’s mom, was a candidate to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency. Somehow that doesn’t seem to me like a the media went overboard in attacking Sarah Palin and letting John Edwards off the hook. But then I prefer objective quantifiable facts regarding the news coverage the media actually provides various stories, whereas you just seem to find your facts from deep within that place where Karl Rove’s turdblossoms originate.
Damn, Orson. Maybe you should use the Google (or any other search engine of your choice) to verify your “factual claims” once in a while, rather than just repeating Republican talking points, ad nauseam. Just sayin . . .
If one further analyzed the Bristol stories, we’d see that a significant portion of them were fawning dreck about how wonderful it all was, what a great Mom Sarah was to support her kid, blablabla. Edwards enjoyed no such slack from anywhere, and most of the attacks came from the left.
Card is clearly lying about being a Democrat. He joins the ranks of scifi writers like Hubbard, Crichton, Heinlein who should have stuck to fictional fantasy and not tried to apply it to politics.
how to do grassroots politicking based on personal experience.
And yay for Heinlein’s opposition to to any encroachment of religion into government!
Yeah, he was much more complex than the likes of Crichton and Card, for sure. Stranger in a Strange Land seemed to contradict all of his militarist/fascist bull. He was the kind of writer whose imagination trumps his stated ideology — the best kind, in other words.
Borking? So, she doesn’t really deserve public vetting before running for the second highest office in the land? It’s not like her running mate did any vetting prior to her selection.
If we’re going to vet Palin, I sure wish wish we’d vet Obama.
Wait a minute! Is this the Orson Scott Card who writes SF&F? There can’t be two people on the planet with that same name, can there? No way. If so, I remember him being a notorious Libertarian of the anti-government, anti-welfare programs, free market, Mormon variety. He’s a homophobic prude and the possibility that he now claims to be a Democrat gives me shivers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card#Political_identification
Ah, yes, it’s the same man.
His S F is very juvenile and simply less well written Heinlein imitation fascist militaristic BS. “Ender’s Game” is COMPLETE DRIVEL (note: My personal SF library is somewhere in the 4000-5000 range).
That being said, he is not a democrat. He is a RINO.
I thought Enders Game had some kind of interesting points, though it read like stuff that’s on the “young readers” shelves at the library. So I went on to try his other books and drivel doesn’t begin to describe their amateurish tedium. He was never near good enough, to my eye, to merit the adulation he still gets among some SF fans.
revenge without guilt.
of whatever bit of political frothing he happens to be on about at the moment for years. For many in the field his contrafactual views and raving right wing frothing are a serious source of embarrassment. It’s particularly sad in light of the fact that he was once a pretty good writer and thinker.
You’re assuming that Steven has done his fact checking, which he hasn’t see my post below for the real facts.
It’s curious that this “newspaper” claims that Orson Scott Card is a “Democrat” when all of Card’s most recent writing and his persistent bashing of Kerry in 2004 in all media would indicate that he’s a Republican of the most wingnut variety. That the paper would record he’s a Democrat without investigation or that Card would claim he’s a Democrat reveals the ethics of the folks publishing this drivel. Republicans can’t keep themselves from lying – to others or to themselves. It’s in their blood.
He BEGINS this collection of Republican talking points by blaming the entire housing crisis on high-risk loans. It goes down from there.
Crap. I’ll never buy another of his books. Of course “Ender’s Game” was such moronic bullshit that I never bought one after that, but this just confirms my opinion.
I’m not even sure I’d call Card a RINO… He’s a Mormon, in good standing..which strongly suggests he’s a registered Republican. He’s spoken/written in support of Republican candidates and policies in the past, making his partisanship more than ‘in name only’, IMO.
insofar as his fiction goes–different folks, different strokes. I found the treatment of child prodigies in his SF pretty realistic, and not far from my own experiences with the prodigies I have known in my life. That said, not all his work has resonated with me, and several others of his books bored me to the point of not completing them (something I almost never do).
It might be over-reacting, but these days, I view Card’s opinion pieces similarly to what has come from Michael Crichton of late (and even Larry Niven, sigh)…looks like one need not be progressive themselves to write interesting SF. If the style depends more on individual character development (Card), or in gadgets and larger-than-worlds histories/constructions, then one can avoid politics, and therefore not reveal too much of themselves in the process…..
It’s not only OSC that regurgitates these noxious talking points. There are more SFF writers than you can count on your fingers and toes that truly believe the far right propaganda.
They write fantasy, ergo, they believe fantasy. It’s a shame in a way to waste such intelligent minds with such hateful spew.
There’s been a major generational shift in f&sf with the vast majority of f&sf writers under about 50 who are firmly liberal. In the older group it’s probably closer to fifty-fifty.
Part of the shift is probably due to so many of the younger writers being scientists and academics, while the older ones seemed to have strong military backgrounds — or at least obsessions.
Card is no Democrat. He came to speak at a local bookstore years ago, primarily for the benefit of middle school kids who were brought in for the privilege of hearing him speak about one of his new books. I took my oldest son to see him, and was appalled that Card started spinning off on a tangent about what a jerk and failure Bill Clinton was and how society had suffered under his administration. I took my son out of the store. It was supposed to be a friendly discussion of sci-fi and it turned into a political sermon.
I love his work very much but don’t pay attention to his politics. Stories like this are the reason why.
Steven,
You’re ignorant of how Google works … or … your just like the rest of the media that Card was talking about. Your “john edwards affair” and “Bristol Palin pregnancy” is a complete fraud. Very few of the press would have used Bristol’s name, they would have mentioned Palin’s daughter. So … if you do it right and enter, with the quotation marks, “”edward’s affair” you get 5,790 hits, while if you enter, “”palin’s daughter” you get 462,000 hits. How does it feel to have your facts checked?