Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on media coverage of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks:
In his testimony before Congressional committees, Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize for Facebook’s pattern of blocking Catholic pages from being posted. As I pointed out yesterday, no one asked him about blocking anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim pages. Why? Because that just doesn’t happen at Facebook (save for clear instances of hate speech). If it did, the media would be all over it.
There was one newspaper in the United States that wrote about Facebook’s Catholic problem: the Washington Times. And there was one editorial mentioning it: Investor’s Business Daily. That was it.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield prodded Zuckerberg on racial diversity, saying Facebook should be doing a better job in hiring. Zuckerberg said this was “an important issue,” and he pledged to work with him on it.
Neither Butterfield nor anyone else claimed that Facebook discriminates against blacks, or blocks African American pages from being posted. Perhaps racial diversity can be improved, but that is a far cry from the problem of bigotry and censorship. Yet the issue of racial diversity merited coverage in the New York Times, the New York Observer, NPR, and Time. None of these four elite media outlets mentioned Facebook’s history of blocking Catholic pages.
When it comes to the media, not all expressions of bigotry are equal.
