By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

The World Cup came to a close with Spain’s 1-0 victory over the Netherlands. A spectacle watched by millions – perhaps billions – around the world, the four-year tournament constitutes the world’s most popular sporting event.

In the United States, long a hold-out against football-mania, interest in the World Cup has been steadily rising. While still below Latin-American or European levels of enthusiasm, the number of people watching games has reached new degrees. In my hometown, for instance, a number of my peers expressed surprising amounts of enthusiasm about the latest soccer news. Even individuals one wouldn’t expect – 10-year-old kids, young teenage girls – displayed passion throughout the event.

My hometown is also fairly liberal place. Indeed, one could get away with describing it as one of the most liberal suburbs in America. Coincidence?

Perhaps not. When one thinks about the regions most intensely interested in soccer, Republican-voting areas generally don’t come to mind. People generally don’t imagine the good folk of Alabama or Utah as being passionately devoted to soccer.

Instead, most would probably characterize people in the West Coast and the Northeast as the biggest fans of soccer. They might point to places like Seattle, the Bay Area, or New York City. Liberal places, in other words. (One might also mention regions more populated by Latinos, such as San Diego or southwest Texas).

Media coverage also points in this direction. The New York Times, a strong proponent of American liberalism, blanketed its sports sections with the World Cup. Coverage included at least a couple of articles every day, a specialized blog, videos, interactive graphics, and even a travel guide to South Africa. Fox News, perhaps the best representation of the American conservative, took another direction. Conservative rock-star Glenn Beck slammed the World Cup:

It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early. We don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.

Fox’s evening show, Red-Eye, also aired a feature making fun of the very concept of football.

To be fair, all this constitutes little more than an educated hypothesis. There are no studies out there (that I know of, at least) proving that liberals are more likely to watch the World Cup.

But interest in soccer is just one of many differences between what liberals and conservatives do and like, no matter how seemingly unrelated to politics. Polls indicated that liberals were far bigger fans of Michael Jackson’s music, for instance. Fox News was also far more critical of the musician when he died – another strange, perhaps non-coincidence. The choice of who to vote for in the ballot box, it seems, may be related to far more than just political opinion.

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, “The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI.”

Yet the media’s growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media’s worldview of what society ought to be like.

Historically, the Catholic Church and the Western media have always had moments of tension. The two are almost naturally at odds; their philosophical foundations constitute polar opposites. The church is fundamentally a conservative institution, hierarchy-bound and traditional. It embodies a force – religion – which often works in a conservative direction.

The modern Western media could not be more different from this. If liberalism were to be characterized, describing the media could do the job well. The media sees itself as an agent of change, uncovering society’s injustices and working towards reform. Under this view, the world is consistently getting better, and media lies on the vanguard of the forces of progress. Religion, on the other hand, constitutes an obstacle standing in the path to a better world.

To many holders of this belief (i.e. the media), Pope Benedict XVI is moving the church backwards in the 21st century. Unlike his predecessor, Benedict XVI is not considered a hero, nor is he adept at media relations (or particularly photogenic, for that matter). Instead, Benedict XVI is an intellectual traditionalist who spent much of his career attacking liberal reformists in the church before becoming pope.

In many ways, therefore, the media’s negative coverage of the pope is not only due to the current sexual abuse scandal. Rather, it is a critique of everything the media dislikes about the pope – his conservative worldview, his reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass, his apathy towards dialogue with other religions, his lifting of Holocaust denier Richard Williamson’s excommunication, and his many writings condemning the forces of secularism which created the media.

This is not to defend Pope Benedict XVI nor to attack the media. The church’s mishandling of the abuse scandal does indeed merit substantial criticism; its response has been defensive and clumsy. There is plenty of material to justify the media’s criticism; the cases of sexual abuse appear quite outrageous. On the church’s side, the pope’s traditionalist views are genuinely felt while his critiques against moral relativism are often quite legitimate.

Rather, this is to look beneath the surface of the sexual abuse controversy. Its widespread negative coverage constitutes part of a deeper, long-standing conflict between a conservative church and a liberal media. It won’t be the last time the church and the media come into conflict.