Education or propaganda?

IU School of Journalism Professor Mike Conway published a 2007 work with a title linking Bill O’Reilly to “propaganda techniques.” 

The study claims that O’Reilly engages in “name-calling” 8.88 times a minute on average. This may seem extreme, but when you read Conway’s criteria, you can easily see how he came up with this high number.

Conway defines name-calling as giving “a person or idea a bad label to make the audience reject them without examining the evidence.”

He writes, “The terms conservative, liberal, left, right, progressive, traditional, or centrist were treated as name-calling, if they were associated with a      problem or social ill or if coupled with a derogatory term.” 

This coding system is outstandingly broad; Conway’s study deserves further critique. For example, where is the line between education and propaganda? It is easy to label information as propaganda when one disagrees. However, students accept information in their classrooms daily because there is an assumption of validity and little encouragement to challenge the information. 

To his credit, Conway expresses interest in exploring left-leaning communicators. He also states, “Every communication zone – from opinion to hard news – has a spin.” I couldn’t agree more.

In many ways I commend Conway for his interest in exploring the topic, and I hope he has the opportunity to do such research. Academia is an overwhelmingly liberal enclave. The university structure enables the promotion of liberal ideology. This ideology comes conveniently packaged as a desire for harmony, making it difficult to oppose. 

Perhaps Conway and his colleagues should spend some time examining biases close to home.

The political science faculty here at IU, a group of professionals who could benefit the most from a “fair and balanced” distribution of political attitudes and perspectives, is overwhelmingly Democratic.

Research into the primary voting patterns of the IU Political Science faculty in 1996 revealed that not a single professor had regularly pulled a Republican ballot in primary races from 1983 to 1996. And, although this data is 13 years old, 19 of the 25 professors and associate professors researched are still on the faculty today. These 18 professors – one of the 19 teaches in SPEA – make up 47 percent of the political science faculty today.

Bill O’Reilly is going to keep doing what he does best: informing and entertaining his viewers. Our professors will continue to educate us as they always have. However, we must hold our professors to the same high standard that we have held Bill O’Reilly to.

If we desire diversity and a free and open exchange of ideas on our campus, let us start by truly embracing differences of opinion – not just preaching about it. In many ways, conservative students have benefited from the ideological challenges posed by their professors. My hope is that their liberal counterparts will one day have this opportunity as well.

It is not a crime to be offended. In fact, it might do you some good to become outraged every once in a while – it gets stuff done.

True diversity of thought expands our individual knowledge and thickens our skin.