Blatant media bias - Let him die in windshield case

Great Debates
81

Dude, have you ever actually been to a gun show? Because I’d like to know where you get the idea that ‘possibly most’ sales at a gun show are from private citizen to private citizen.

The reality of them is really quite different from that, and if you’re in doubt, please just go to one so that you can see for yourself how they are organized and where the sales occur.

As for the statistics that say there is a high percentage of ‘vendors’ at gun shows who do not have FFLs, this is true. What they don’t tell you is that those vendors sell things like holsters, bags, war memorabilia (patches, uniforms, hats, pins, insignia), food, clothing, canteens, knives, camping equipment, safes and other non-firearms items.

I get the feeling you’ll discount this as anecdotal evidence, but since every gun show I have been to (probably 50 gun shows in three states) does not allow cameras inside, I can’t offer much more than the suggestion that you check one out firsthand.

82

Sure, I’ve been to a couple gun shows. I’ll take your word for it that most sales there are by licensed dealers, though my experience is that a significant number of sales just occur between guys who’ve brought their own weapons to the shows, whether they’re setting up a table or just wandering around. In the early 90s, doing that was a great way to be able to choose from a lot of guns in one place without having to go through the 5-day waiting period, and it still permits the browsing of a bunch of guns without a background check if you purchase from any of the private sellers. That’s anecdotal, however, so feel free to do whatever you like with the observation.

Personally, I wish the media and the politicians would just start referring to it as the private sales loophole. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with gun shows, but it damn sure is a loophole if you want to require people to submit to a background check.

83

Minty, you are doing a great job at addressing the posts of Catsix, but can you please respond to my posts as you have promised?

84

Actually, I think my previous reply summed up most of my response: proving that reporters have political opinions does not prove the news they report is biased. But if you’d like me to get specific, here it is.

The ASE survey only shows the politics of the grunts, not the editors, producers, and media owners.

Chandra Levy: Huh? Aside from the pure tabloid speculation aspect, I don’t know why that was news anyway. A missing person, and no evidence that a famous person she knew had any involvement whatsoever with her disappearance = lead story for two months? Besides, if anything, the media frenzy there shows conservative bias, since the guy who was getting pilloried was a senior Democrat.

Peter Jennings: Notice he said “have an effect on policy,” not “destroy the vast righ-wing conspiracy.” Uncovering news is perfectly consistent with having an effect on policy, regardless of what that effect might be. See, e.g., Watergate and Lewinsky, Monica.

Walter Cronkite: No context for the quote. Was his next sentence “But there is no bias in news reporting”? Was it “But everybody is wrong”? If he’d claimed reporting was biased, that would have been a big story. Your source certainly doesn’t report that he said anything like it.

Jennings again: " I work very hard to make sure that we are as objective and as fair as possible. It’s not always the case. Sometimes we tilt one way or the other, but it’s almost always inadvertent, based on what is going on that day, and I ask the audience to make an investment in us for the long haul and for the big picture and for the information that they feel, after a period of time, that they can trust and rely on." Speaks for itself. Isolated instances of stories slanted one way or another is not evidence of a persistent bias.

85

Catsix, you are looking at the “gunshow loophole” from a particular perspective that allows you to see it as a small issue. If the goal is to regulate gunsales then, assuming your characterization is correct, only a small proportion of sales are missed. If you view the background check law as an attempt to keep guns out of the hands of certain people then the situation shifts considerably. From the perspective of a person who can’t buy a gun from a dealer the loophole looks like a barn door.

In any case, your problem is far more complicated than a simple matter of bias. While it is acknowledged that there is power in naming the debate one example does not demonstrate that bias is an important issue in determining who’s name sticks. Probably the most important factor is who is first to raise an issue. Sticking with my previous example, which I see you have failed to address by the way, in the world of loaded terms “gun show loophole” doesn’t even register on a scale that contains “partial birth abortion.”

86

I see Ned has gripe with the example I picked of reporters using biased and/or not entirely honest language in reporting ‘news’.

He’s also decided to make a case for closing the incorrectly named ‘loophole’, which is not the focus of this discussion. This is about the media, and specifically journalists/reporters themselves.

Ok, Ned, you’ve brought up the issue of perspective in regards to how big an issue the ‘gun show loophole’ is. Since I assume that perspective is a human characteristic inherent and different in each individual, I consider individual reporters to often be baised (they use their perspective and this colors the news they report), and when a siginficant number of like minded reporters work for one media outlet, the bias shown by them tends to fall in one direction or the other.

The word ‘loophole’ in and of itself is problematic. It has heavy connotations revolving around people ‘getting away with things’ that ought not be happening. As in: people get out of paying taxes by exploiting loopholes in the tax code. Also, a loophole is generally something that is not intentionally written into law, but an accident of wording that creates an unintended, but legal, situation. This is apparent from looking up the definition of loophole. A ‘means of evading compliance’, ‘means of escape or evasion’, ‘ambiguity (especially in the law or a contract) that makes it possible to evade a difficulty or obligation’.

So by repetitiously using the term ‘loophole’, the slant is that the private sales specifically allowed for in the law are simply a means of gun sellers and buyers avoiding their legal obligations. This is very disingenuous on the part of those who continue to use the term, because it’s a misrepresentation of the actual facts of law.

Some journalists are likely using this word to describe legal gun sales because they actually do wish to sway public opinion and attempt to change laws; however, if this is the case they should be honest about their motivations and not claim that this is merely objective fact reporting. The fact of the matter is that it is legal for one private citizen to sell a long gun to another private citizen without a background check provided that the gun is not currently listed as the inventory of a federally licensed firearms dealer. It is also a fact of law that a private citizen cannot legally sell a firearm to someone he knows to have a criminal record. ‘Loophole’ Is not the term for something explicitly provided for in federal law.

As for ‘failing to address’ the point you brought up, I didn’t respond to it because I was already engaged in a discussion and because of limited time was resonding only in the context of that discussion. You obviously want me to address it, so I will.

You are absolutely right that the term ‘partial birth abortion’ is highly loaded term. If the perspective of an individual reporter is such that they are pro-life and said reporter calls the procedure ‘partial birth abortion’ in all of his/her reports, that does tend to filter the news through that reporter’s perspective - which means that the ‘news’ itself (the actual events) are not biased, but that the reporting of the news contains the reporter’s individual bias. Now, if that reporter works at a media outlet in which all of the other reporters share the same opinion on the topic, then the general trend of perspective is toward the ‘pro-life’ side, the news is filtered through those reporters, and is affected by the perspective they share.

So what you have, it’s a lot of unbiased actual events that are filtered through human beings who, as humans, have a natural perspective and opinion on most issues. As it is relayed through a person, by the words that person chooses in the description of the news event, the reporter’s perpsective is also conveyed to the listener.

Consider the two statements:

The car hit the truck.
The car slammed into the truck.

Now as pedantic as I might be, I recognize how the choice of the verb in that sentence affects the mental image the reader will get about the collison. The first could appear to be relatively minor, while the second seems to be of a more serious degree. However, both statements could be said about the same exact collision by two different people who stood side by side and watched it. The listener here would also receive some ‘slant’ on the events by the reporter’s choice of words.

This happens, I think, because of human nature. Everyone has perspective, everyone imparts a little bit of that into the events they relate to other people. A ‘good’ reporter can minimize this by consciously trying to avoid loaded words like ‘loophole’ or ‘partial birth abortion’ in his or her own descriptions of events, but I think it is impossible to remove all perspective filtering from a recount of events. The goal should instead be to minimize such coloring as much as is humanly possible when one is charged with relating facts and events.

I hope that made some sense.

87

It made perfect sense but you completely failed to address the points which were relavent to the discussion.

88

Read it again.

I addressed BOTH of the things you claimed in your last post that I didn’t address.

Oh, and have a nice day.

89

What I am hearing is that no one here is disputing that the majority of media personalities are more liberal than the american public.

What minty and others are saying is that the conservatives on Fox and other places are affected by their personal feelings and allow this to enter their reporting of the news. But for the majority of journalists and reporters who vote democrat, this rule no longer applies. They are able to suppress any personal beliefs and report just the news without any bias involved.

I disagree.

Everyone is biased. No intelligent person lacks an opinion on issues such as gun control, abortion, and the many other “great issues of our time”. My thesis is this: The only way for the news to properly reflect the diverse range of ideas of all Americans is to have people with different beliefs contribute to the news.

Fox attempting to have many liberal and conservative journalists is an example of this. I have said all along the actual success of Fox in succeeding in this is debatable, but at least they are making an attempt. I see most major newspapers and network newsrooms attempting to keep the status quo of leaning leftward with their reporting. This is reflected by the fact that most of them are democrats… and everyone has a bias one way or the other that inevitably comes out in their reporting.

I hate to post and run, but I will be out of town for a while. Hopefully this thread won’t be gone in a few days when I get back.

90

The conversation is about whether the media is biased.

I was not taking a position on the “gun show loophole” and have no wish to debate it, I was merely demonstrating that the point is debatable and you have no claim to absolute truth and objectivity on the issue.

The important point however was that you bring this up as evidence that the media is biased yet I can point out other issues, like the coverage of partial birth abortion, that applying your analysis would indicate that the media is right wing. Please explain why a liberal media would do that.

91

Maybe because I never said the media was biased only in one direction?

I picked one example of media bias, said that it was one example, and many times in previous posts said that the media shows bias over different topics in different ways.

I’ve even explicitly said that bias shows in both directions, and really it depends on who’s reporting and what topic they’re reporting on.

So, no, I will not sit here and try to debate the position you insist on attributing to me. I’m growing rather bored with a conversation that goes like this:

catsix: The media has bias in both directions.
Ned: Prove that the media shows only liberal bias. 'Partial birth abortion.
catsix: My position is that the media has bias. Here is one example which just so happens that when it comes to guns, these examples are left-leaning. ‘Partial-birth abortions’ are another example where the bias goes the other way.
Ned: But you said the media is liberal.
catsix: I said before that the media has bias in both directions.

It’s getting old.

92

Except your theory of bias is irrational and ignores the fact that there are other factors effecting the way news is reported which are far more easily demonstrated. Simply picking an issue which is important to you and demonstrating that it doesn’t get the best press doesn’t prove political bias whether you allege it comes just one way or in the bizzarre fashion you imagine it to happen.

Both our examples are explained far more easily by the bias towards simplicity and against complexity in News coverage. Assertions are easy to make and easy to cover and even they get abreviated. Answering the assertions is almost invariably more complex and they get even worse treatment. Those who raise the issue have the best shot of labeling it and news likes labels because it frees them from explaining the issue every time it comes up. These factors provide a complete explanation for the coverage of both stories.

93

Here we go again.

I also said previously that ‘bias’ was encountered as the way an individual reporter choses to report a story having consciously or subconsciously filtered the events through his or her own personal perspective.

If you want to debate my points, you’ll have to stick to points I actually made and not start picking things of your own to try to get me to assume a position I don’t really hold.

In case you missed it again:

The reporting of the news is tinted by the fact that journalists and reporters are human beings and it is impossible to remove all traces of individual perspective from the retelling of events. The exact specifics of the tint are determined by whose mouth the words are coming out of.

94

Except you aren’t making any points. You are making assertions unsupported by evidence. Partial birth abortion is a term used ubiquitously and it or the way the debate is reported simply cannot be explained away by a preponderance of prolife reporters. Neither it nor gun show loophole were coined by reporters and the deficits in the reporting you complain about can be easily traced to fundamental principles of journalism rather than political bias.

You don’t seem to see the leap you are taking between the bias you see in a story and the political leanings of the reporter. This is nothing but a hypothosis for which you have provided no evidence whatsoever. In order to establish that perceived bias in a story comes from the political bias of reporters you would need to eliminate alternative potential sources and examining other types of stories to see if patterns can be established that confirm or refute your political hypothosis.

95

And again.

I’ve already said everything I need to say. Conscious or unconscious, human beings put subjectivity into everything we write or say. That’s it.

You keep putting arguments in my mouth that I’m not making, and I really do not have to prove your case for you.

For the last time, stop adding things to my point that aren’t there. If you want to prove that subjectivity comes from some specific source, go for it, but it’s not my job to prove your assertations. I’ve said time and again that various things cause bias, the total of those things are ‘perspective’. But you keep changing things around and then telling me I said them or that your characterizations are what I think. You’re not furthering discussion, but you are succeeding in making me frustrated at the fact that you can’t seem to take anything I say for what it is.

Make your case, whatever it is, and leave me out of it. I’m not interested in being told what I think and then how you want me to present it.

96

Actually you stated quite clearly that perspective stems from reporters opinions on the subject they are reporting. I pointed out that the particular complaints you are making are far more likely to be the result of the normal strictures of journalism which effect the reporting of stories in predictable ways regardless of the perspective of the journalist. This is quite different from the interjection of subjectivity into the story.

A journalist would tell you that you need to look at the totality of the reporting to make a judgement on whether both sides were fairly presented. You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about the “gun show loophole” and given that it is an issue I try to stay away from I have to assume that overall the mainstream media did a pretty good job informing me in spite of your complaints over individual articles.

I have no problem with the concept that there is media bias. It is often quite easy to see, for instance my local paper had a noticible drop in grow house stories and a sudden glut of drug legalization articles following the hiring of a libertarian editor. What I have a problem with the idea that the mainstream media is demonstrably liberal (which I understand you are not making) or that bias can be demonstrated with nitpicking analysis that will only serve to confirm your preconceptions when most of what you are seeing is just normal lousy reporting.

97

ahem When really they are just conservatives in liberal clothing! (I’d like to insert a rolleyes, but that seems to be a little more harsh than I want, but a winkie smilie simply would be too light, so you are left smile-less)

I think the issue revolves around several lines. One, the individual reporters and other decision makers’ inherent political bias. Two, these persons’ recognition of what they feel is newsworthy regardless of tilt (that is, a matter of relevance). Three, what actually happened. Four, what we hear from the newscasters through our own political filter. Five, what we dismiss from the news as irrelevant.

The ultimate goal of any newscaster is probably to utilize one to affect four, perfect two so five isn’t an issue, and still somehow manage to be able to retain what most would consider an honest representation of three. Given the nature of language, and the time with which news stations have to report, I think the entire media generally performs as well as can be expected, and if anyone were to take the time to dig into any particular broadcast they could find a tilt for just about anything they felt paranoid enough to look for.

98

This debate has drifted quite a way from the OP and the original hit and run case. May I bring it back to rhe nuts and bolts of the Mallard case for just a moment?

The Dallas medical examiner has issued his report, and it now appears certain that the homeless man Miss Mallard hit died within a few hours of the accident- NOT several days.

Now, obviously this does NOT exonerate Miss Mallard, who is still a stupid drunk, and is still guilty of vehicular manslaughter. But the medical evidence shows that, contrary to what most of us first heard in the media, she did NOT have a bleeding, crying, suffering man in her garage for days. It’s quite likely that the man was dead long before Miss Mallard was sober enough to realize what she’d done.

My take: she’s a poor excuse for a human being, and deserves severe punishment… but she’s not quite s bad as we were led to believe by the media.

It strikes me that, in THIS case at least, the media’s great crime was NOT being biased to the left (though I’m quick to pounce on them when I perceive that bias). Rather, the media were far too quick to publish/broadcast a sensational, lurid story, and to offer quick, cheap, easy commentary without having all the facts.

99

In defense of the media (this ought to be a sound position), I did see footage of an interview with a Ft. Worth police lieutenant where he told the media that the victim took several days to die. In hindsight, this should have seemed suspiscious when I the prosecutor assigned to the case seemed surprised by the 2-3 day figure and said something to the effect that he did not know where it came from.

I would agree with you that this makes Mallard not as bad as I first thought.

100

That’s nice that you disagree with a position that I have not taken. I have said nothing whatsoever in this thread to the effect that Fox News is biased in its reporting.

What little of Fox News I have seen does not lead me to believe that its news reporting is particularly partisan, though its commentators certainly are more conservative than not and do, IMHO, tend to mix up news reporting and commentary. I also detest that stupid “we report, you decide” tag line, in that it implies as fact a political bias elsewhere that purportedly does not exist at Fox. (Sorry guys, you can’t have it both ways.) On the whole, however, I have not watched near enough of Fox News to come to any reasonable conclusion regarding the presence or absence of a bias to its reporting.

Oh, and very astute post there, erislover.