VA: FOX News Slants Coverage of School Board Meeting
Meeting attendants quoted by the right wing mouthpiece were mostly opposed to protections for transgender youth, but do the chosen quotes fairly represent the attendees?
by Evan Urquhart
Right wing media behemouth FOX News today has a story on a Loudoun County, VA school board meeting by reporters Gabriel Hays and Kristine Parks. Last year the school board adopted guidelines under a Democratic governor which directed teachers and staff to follow trans students’ lead on the names and pronouns they preferred, along with other trans-affirming steps. With an entirely different set of guidelines having been put out by anti-trans Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin (a controversial move which sparked mass walkouts of students across the state), Loudoun County’s school board is discussing whether to take up the new guidelines or continue using the old.
The FOX News story centers the comments of parents and others at the meeting who oppose the current guidelines and would prefer the school board to use the new, Youngkin-endorsed, transphobic ones.
In all, FOX quotes six opponents of trans-affirming policies, including parents, a Canadian transphobe who travels the US attending meetings like this, and former Trump DOJ official Ian Prior, in his role as the executive director of Fight for Schools (a local parents rights PAC in Loudoun).
For the trans-affirming side, they quote a former teacher, a Loudoun resident, and one parent.
FOX News, however, does not say that opponents of trans-affirming measures outnumbered defenders in the meeting. Consulting another source on the meeting, the Center Square (a newswire service which also leans right), describes the meeting as having been divided between supporters and opponents. The Center Square story includes six quotes from three parents on each side.
It’s unclear whether the skew towards anti-trans speakers in the FOX coverage fairly reflects the sentiments expressed in the meeting, much less whether meeting attendants are representative of parents with children in Loudoun schools.
