At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Accuracy in Media held a reception to bestow the Reed Irvine award for excellence in journalism. M. Stanton Evans was the recipient of the 2009 Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media lifetime achievement Award for Investigative Journalism, for his groundbreaking research into the media’s vilification of Senator Joe McCarthy. Evans is the author of seven books, a contributing editor at Human Events and a co-founder of the National Journalism Center.
After being presented with the award Evans gave his acceptance speech and said, “I would like to thank all of you and it’s great to be here with you and to receive this award, I’m honored indeed.” Evans went on to talk about the audience and said he was pleased to see all the young people. He then went on to talk about being a conservative and said “I’ve also said anybody who has his head screwed on right should be conservative when he’s young and as he grows older gradually become more conservative,” which brought the audience to laughter.
Evans also discussed media bias. Evans said “don’t forget the incompetence, that’s huge and it interacts with the bias exponential effect.” Evans then told two stories that gave examples of how incompetence interacts with media bias.
In the first example Evans told a story about a friend of his, Pat Korten, who was traveling around in the Midwest in 1994. Evans said “I remember it was the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the landing of Normandy.” The Normandy Landings were the first operations of the Allied invasion of Normandy, also known as Operation Neptune and Operation Overload, during World War II. The operation was the largest single day invasion, with over 130,000 troops landing on June 6, 1944. Evans continued with his story and said “there was a young lady who was reading a news account of this wherever Pat was visiting and referred to World War Eleven.” The audience immediately burst into laughter and Evans said, “that suggested to me that maybe were not teaching history very well in our schools and are obviously not teaching Latin although you would think after all these Super Bowls we would know something about roman numerals, but apparently not and that’s the story.”
Evans continued with his next example and explained that he was watching a financial news channel and the co-anchors were interviewing guests. He said “I don’t know why these guests were on a financial channel but they were and they were two cross dressers.” The audience again began to laugh and Evans explained how he thought cross dressing and transvestite was the same thing but he learned from this show that they are different. Evans said a “transvestite is trying to look like a woman and a cross-dresser is just a guy wearing a dress.” Evans continued with his story receiving laughter from the audience as he went on and said the guests were being interviewed about why they do this and they said it made them feel better and they felt more comfortable in women’s clothes. Evans said “it really sounded kind of good, a real positive thing to do.” He said “one of the co-anchors asked an incisive journalistic question which was, is there any downside to this very positive cross-dressing experience?” The guests replied yeah, sometimes when you’re in a bar weirdoes come on to you. Evans then said “I was thinking why is this being shown to me? And I realized I was an enabler because I was watching it.”
After his two examples Evans said to the chairman of AIM, “so you have to factor that into the mix too, Don [Irvine], it’s just not the bias, it’s just not the incompetence, the weirdness whatever, I don’t know.” Evans said “these are the things that suggested maybe our media are not living up to the highest standards of journalistic excellence and that’s why we need Accuracy in Media and the great work of Reed Irvine and has been done subsequently by Don.” He continued by saying “I see a lot of folks here who have been working on these problems for a number of years and it’s urgently needed.”
Alanna Hultz is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
