In the aggregate, I trust CNN, through long experience and not taking everything they say as gospel (i.e. doing fact-checking and outside reading of my own). I don’t expect them to get every fact right, just the vast majority of them. The profit motive affects what they cover much more than how they cover it.
They also go out of their way to present alternate viewpoints, to a degree that I find annoying at times. (Now there’s something you won’t see from Fox News.) Personally, I’d take all the Trump- and WH-parroting talking heads who never seem to answer the question at hand and kick them to the curb, but then there’d be almost no conservative talking heads left for CNN to use.
Where do you think they got that information? Do you think they simply decided to come up with the make and model of the gun all by themselves?
No, somebody gave that information to them. And who would CNN ask to get that information? The law enforcement agency in charge of the shooting, which, at that moment might have been the local law enforcement, the Capitol Police or the FBI.
One of the Congressmen who witnessed the shooting, Mike Conaway, said he thought the gun was an AR-15. That’s a 5.56 mm weapon, not even in the same class as a 7.62. Does that mean Conaway shouldn’t even be allowed to touch a water pistol?
Regardless of accuracy or bias, I don’t like them because they’ve gone a bit clickbaity for my tastes. Or I see what I think is an interesting article, and it turns out to be a goddamn slideshow.
Otherwise, I see nothing wrong with incorrectly reporting things sometimes, but corrections or retractions should be done and I don’t think they do that either.
IME, CNN news is usually accurate, but slanted. They may present only one side of the issue, or deliberately over-report one aspect to play it up, but the facts underneath will be true.
Say that David is an NFL quarterback who won 10 games and threw 30 touchdown passes, but also lost 4 games and threw twelve interceptions. In that case, CNN may deliberately play up the “David lost 4 games and threw twelve picks last season” while ignoring the wins and touchdowns, to make David look bad. Facts are correct - indisputably correct - but deliberately slanted and partial.
He probably prefers that marvelous self-described “news” network we’ve been discussing here, currently 1700 posts in 34 pages mostly itemizing clear evidence of blatant and intentional lies on actual matters of substance. CNN doesn’t do that and never has. It’s just a cable news channel that does on a 24x7 basis what the broadcast networks do only an hour or two a day.
The latest right-wing Orwellian language change in the interest of pushing their insane agendas is to redefine and ambiguate what a “fact” and what a “lie” is.
CNN doesn’t realise that they basically just need to show more leg under the table, with lots of crossing and uncrossing, which is why Fox is the Preferred News Source.
I thought it was more of a Colbertian “truthiness”?
(that’s pronounced with a “sh” sound as opposed to “tee-uhn”) (as in Mar-“tian”)
I started to, and got to the word “sociopath” and bailed. That dude is obviously overcome with emotion and not thinking clearly. I doubt anything he has to say right now is of much value, but that goes double for “a short quiz you can use to determine if you are a gun fetishist and a sociopath”.
As for the OP:
I certainly wouldn’t use the word “trust” to describe my feelings towards CNN. They slant their news coverage, hire liars and cheats, and make plenty of mistakes and errors, but because I consume news from a fairly broad array of sources, I still end up reading / watching occasionally.
Military weapons were used in the same sense that an old lady with a couple Chihuahuas has a wolf pack. If someone corrects the terminology, it’s because it’s wrong and the terminology matters. In that case, it does matter. If they get the country of origin wrong, it’s a stupid mistake, but it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
As far as media quality, one can criticize CNN and say that Fox is worse. Both of them have slants in different direction, with CNN’s not as extreme. It’s important to notice that gun control correlates with a leftward slant, but it’s not the same thing as those being inexorably linked (some far left sources are very pro gun). But I will be critical of both sources for joining in the “quick fix” form of media. There more newsworthy sources (if sometimes stodgier/less sexy) that are both on the left and the right that IMHO are better reading.
Maybe the way to determine if it has value is to actually read it. It’s just a few lines long. And then address the substance of what is being said, recognizing that perhaps the strong language and the distress that was its genesis represents a moment of acute clarity. To my reading, every single one of those points can be amply illustrated with actual examples, from the media and even from the posts right here on this board.
Refusing to acknowledge this because you don’t like one of the words is exactly like the OP dismissing an entire cable news channel because they may or may not have got an irrelevant technical piece of gun terminology wrong. You reap what you sow, and ignoring reality with sanctimonious bleating has never been a defense against its consequences.
I already read enough of it to make that determination, but I’ll make you a deal: if you’ll read and give some consideration to this article, I’ll read the rest of “a short quiz you can use to determine if you are a gun fetishist and a sociopath”. Do we have an accord?
I honestly don’t know. I don’t have cable, so I watch precious little of either one. Reading seems pretty close to even too, at least in my mind, but perhaps that’s just my biases speaking. Let’s say, between the two, maybe 55% Fox and 45% CNN, but that’s just a WAG.
I’m sorry but I disagree with this. Their first goal is to make money, their second goal is to make more money, their third goal is to continue making money, and their fourth goal is to keep as much of the money they have made as possible. “News” or what passes for it in any commercial “news” organization is only their product. My parallel is any other business. Auto makers’ goals are as above regarding money, making cars is a means to those ends, and effective transportation is only important to them insofar as it contributes to those ends. If they could make money by making cars that only lasted 10,000 miles I believe they would happily do that. If “news” organizations could make money by feeding the biases of their viewers and showing plenty of leg instead of giving reliable information, they would do that.
As for the OP and the mistakes made in identifying the firearm, it is only important when it comes to framing policy, which I believe was the point of the OP, and those who are currently in charge of framing policy are immune to these mistakes. They have knowledge derived absolutely from their loudest constituents and their richest backers. Which I believe brings us back to where we started.
Sure, but I want you to actually respond to those points. What strikes me about those points (FTR, written by a distraught parent of one of the Parkland students) is that although the introductory language is hyperbolic, the points are absolutely spot-on accurate.
The article you cite is just shallow and misleading by trying to make the point that most guns are not used in crimes – only a tiny percentage are. And it enthuses that mass shootings are incredibly rare, statistically speaking. Wonderful! But the US rate of gun fatalities is not ranked anywhere near that of other developed countries, but rather, squeezed between a couple of violent third-world shitholes in the rankings of highest gun fatalities. And mass shootings, depending on how you define them, occur almost daily, with the big news major ones every few months. No other civilized nation on earth has to endure these things, and all of them are due to the proliferation of guns and are entirely preventable.
The gun worship that goes on in the US is quite simply entirely against the law in civilized countries. It’s not that you can’t own a gun, it’s that if you go in to a donut shop with an AR-15 slung over your shoulder, in most US states you might be regarded as an oddity or a gun nut or you might be admired, but in civilized countries someone would call the police, and the police would send a SWAT team. This is how guns are regarded in other countries, including the ones that gun advocates are always citing for high rates of gun ownership like Switzerland, which has very tight gun regulation.
While I was reading it, which uses small numbers to make a point, PBS had a Duke professor of psychiatry state that there are 40 million people in the US with a diagnosible mental health problem, 10 million with a serious issue.
Even taking the 40 million number and the 107,000 crimes committed with a gun - and assuming all of those were mentally ill, the we are looking at .27% of the mentally ill who commit a gun crime…
Back to the original Facebook post that has the quiz - the full post included this :