Death by Journalism? One Teacher's Fateful Encounter with Political Correctness

Rating:
Summary: Deserving of more attention than Goldberg's Bias
Review: This is the outrageous story of a newspaper reporter that turned a continuing education class at a small community college into a controversial issue. Mr. Bledsoe, once a reporter on the same paper, has done a great job exposing the distortions and outright lies used by the paper in order get a class taught in the "politically incorrect" way closed down, while at the same time vilifying the school and the instructors. The primary instructor died of a heart attack during the "controversy." It is a book which will raise your blood pressure. Unlike the self congratulatory book by Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Bledsoe leaves himself out of the book almost completely. Whereas Goldberg only told us things we already know, Mr. Bledsoe details a story which few of us know and shows how the media deliberately destorts the "news." A must read for anyone interested in the media.

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Frightening Story...
Review: Whether you're liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, the one thing we all have in common as Americans is the right of free speech. Over the decades extremists on both sides - liberals and conservatives - have tried occasionally to intimidate or even oppress those who dare to hold different ideas from their own. The Salem Witch Trials and the infamous "Red Scare" inspired by Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950's are just two of the better-known examples. In "Death by Journalism", Jerry Bledsoe, the bestselling author of true crime books such as "Bitter Blood" and "Blood Games", takes aim at a case of "political correctness" run amok in his own hometown. A native of rural Randolph County, North Carolina, in the middle of the state, Bledsoe has retained strong ties to his native region. He once worked for the Greensboro News and Record, which serves nearby Randolph County and which is one of the state's largest daily newspapers. Although Bledsoe enjoyed working for the paper years ago, he argues in this book that the N&R - like so many other papers across the nation - has been taken over by people who wish to shove their own political views down everyone else's throats, and who care little for the "old-fashioned" notions of fairness and journalistic ethics. In "Death by Journalism" Bledsoe brilliantly exposes a truly frightening story - that of Jack Perdue, an ordinary, well-meaning, middle-class fellow who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A local historian and Civil War buff, Perdue also happened to be a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a Civil War "re-enactors" group dedicated to "preserving Southern heritage" as it related to the war. Although the SCV has been controversial, Bledsoe proves beyond all doubt that Perdue was no racist, but simply a guy who loved Civil War history and loved talking about the battles, the armies of both sides and the generals who led them. The trouble started when Perdue was hired by the local community college to teach a course in Civil War history. Perdue's course soon became very popular, and his class was very large. It was then that an ambitious and politically-correct reporter for the News & Record went to the class unannounced. According to all of the students, as well as Perdue, the reporter got into a shouting match with some of the students and angrily left. He then wrote a completely bogus article for the News & Record in which he accused Perdue of defending slavery and claiming that slaves were "happy" on Southern plantations, and other racist comments. Bledsoe, through interviews with students who took the class, college administrators, and others, proves beyond a doubt that Perdue NEVER taught that slavery was justified (he actually said the opposite), nor any of the other things the N&R reporter accused him of. But the News & Record's vendetta didn't stop there. Columnists for the N&R ridiculed the entire county, claiming that Perdue's "racist" views (which, of course, the reporter had fabricated) were shared by almost all of Randoph County's white population, and that the people of Randolph were all a bunch of backward, ignorant redneck hicks. The story by the reporter was picked up by the Associated Press and printed nationwide and even overseas, causing a firestorm of controversy to descend upon the quiet little community college. Perdue and the school tried to defend themselves, and pointed out the reporter's "lies", but no one in the media even tried to double-check the "facts" in the article. Perdue himself was so stressed and personally devastated by the controversy that he suddenly died of a heart attack - Bledsoe basically accuses the News & Record of indirectly killing him. Given the falsehoods the paper deliberately spread about him, this does not seem to be an unfair assessment. To this day the News & Record has never admitted to a "mistake" in allowing the article to be printed (they did indirectly admit to their guilt when they "disciplined" the reporter for another "problem" several years later), nor has it apologized to the family of the late Jack Perdue. The point of Bledsoe's story is not to defend the Sons of Confederate Veterans, or even to defend Perdue's class (harmless and non-racist though it certainly was), but to point out how a large newspaper with no ethics or standards of fairness can easily subvert the practice of free speech and destroy lives. Whether you're a liberal or a conservative, or simply a concerned citizen, "Death by Journalism" should be considered a "must read" - an engrossing, highly convincing, and very disturbing story that is far more chilling than any of Bledsoe's "true crime" books. Recommended!