I concur. Fucking jackass jerk-off puppet wanker.
Well, the national news just started in the East. On ABC and CBS Iran is the first story; on NBC it’s the second. FTR.
Thanks Capacitor. Yes, I’m aware of NPR, and indeed I get to listen to it down here on a daily basis and I must say I rather like it actually.
In the interests of fairness, I have to admit that it’s been about 16 years since I was last in the USA. Prior to that, I had lived on and off within the US because of my father’s work and my sporting persuits since 1976 - so I was pretty aware of the lay of the land as it was back then - but obviously times have changed.
If you would be so kind, how successfully has NPR managed to implement itself these days across the US landscape? Is it starting to rival the BBC in terms of national presence? If so, I’m happy to stand corrected regarding my earlier post. (smile)
There was a huge candlelight vigil in Tehran on September 18, 2001 in memory of the World Trade Center victims. SeekingTruth needs a new username. How about Fuckwad?
Works fer me.
Boo Boo Foo, Americans can’t really use the constitution to mandate a publicly funded broadcaster. I know you hedged a little with pseudo and the quote marks, and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment but it’s not the way to go. The constitution doesn’t really give Americans anything. The best hope would be to claim (and it would be very shaky ground here) that it would promote the general welfare although fundies and other assorted loons would mumble (and scream when they need to) about it being socialist and un-American.
The aim of the constitution is to limit the power of the government and sets out what it can’t do. Taking away yer gerns, prescribing your form of worship or even whether you do, limiting what you can say or forcing you to incriminate yourself. That kind of thing. Nothing else in there unambiguously states that the tax payer needs to shell out for any particular institution or service.
When the constitution strays beyond limiting the state it can be disastrous. I suspect America’s experiment with prohibition has made Americans dubious about the constitution’s ability to be a panacea for all ills.
I hate to criticise an idea, a great one on the face of it, without offering an alternative but this one is an absolute non-starter. Our* best hope is NPR and PBS. Look at it this way, as the political and cultural situation in the US becomes more and more miserable, there’ll be more and more people like the the late M[sup]c[/sup]Ds heiress who’s just bequeathed $200m to NPR. Maybe politics is a self-adjusting system after all.
*Make no mistake though. The rest of us might get a laugh out of the number of Americans with weird ideas about Iraqi WMDs, Islam, the supernatural and healthy eating but they also elect the president. In a sense, it is more in our interests than theirs that they start getting in yer face, quality information and news. Without it, they can be blissful in their ignorance but we have to see them wallow in it on the Beeb… And then they vote.
Oh yes Gest I hear what you’re saying there. Perhaps my use of the word “constitution” was ill-advised in hindsight insofar as it implies a form of governmental interferance, and that was far from my original intent. With hindsight, I think the words “mission statement” are probably better.
I think what I was trying to get across is that the BBC and Australia’s ABC seem to have a “mission statement” written into their charter for existence which exerts a desire to be factual, and worldly (for want of a better description). And yet, concurrently, because they are funded out of federal revenues, they exist on a national stage and provide a healthy alternative to the commercial broadcasters which also exist in those countries. But they are free to say what they want. They’re definitely NOT mere vehicles for toeing the party line as it were.
If it turns out that NPR and PBS are filling such a role, and are increasingly seen to be doing so, well that’s a great thing near as I can tell.
Thanks for your cool reply.
Sounds about right to me. Fuckwad it is. Definitely.
Fuckwad indeed.
Ignorant little one at that.
You’re a fucking asshole.
Um, am I watching the same Fox News?
They’ve been all over the Iranian earthquake story. Check the website. I linked it on the other “Ramsey” Fox thread I thought you were doing a parody of.
This is the most dangerous attitude anyone claiming to seek knowledge can have.
Actually, put simply, you don’t know everything. I guess some people have not lived long enough yet to have been lied to by professionals. Sometimes it takes decades to figure out who was lying. This WMD stuff is a perfect example.
Beagle, I’m confused as to what you are getting at. Perhaps it’s evidence that contrary to my claims of omniscience, I actually know nothing or very little. Throw a little of that intellectual foreign aid my way and help me out. 
Do you have an issue with the accuracy of my statement; that much of the outside world does not hold this view and it is only my own twisted little terrorist-loving concoction?
Or… are you suggesting I’m correct in my description of foreign perceptions of your country and that such smugness does little for the quality and effectiveness of the debate in our countries regarding US foreign (and domestic) policy and how we can best look out for our interests?
It seems to me, as I’ve parsed it, from your first paragraph you have an issue with the concept but your second has an issue with me.
I must say I find it strange that of the two sides involved, it’s the totalitarian Iraqi regime that you are characterising as professional liars. Surely you don’t believe they’ve had more practice or need for pro-level lying than even the most honest democratic Western governments?
I hate to be a buzzkill here, but NPR had the story as its THIRD, after the mudslide story and one other. To be fair, it did kill 6, not 2. But it really made me think a lot about all of American media. Are we really so egocentric?
Six vacationers killed. 20,000 Iranians killed as they slept in a massive earthquake. We could actually do something to help the Iranians.
Who knows?
Boy, which rock have you been under?
I think that in this day and age, a nationalised new media would not be a good idea here in the States.
Who would set the agenda, who would get to choose the commisioners to run it. Would you want a Bush administration appointee deciding what gets covered and what doesn’t. I don’t. The realities of the current situation in this country is that neither side can trust the other side enough to let them set up a national news organization
With the current system, you can get all the news that you could possibly want. You may have to look for it in more than once place, but you can find it.
Relying on the News Channels for reliable coverage is at best a risky business. Even if they cover a story that you want to know about, the won’t be able to cover it in an in depth way before rushing off to cover something else that is salacious because they aren’t just competing against other news organizations, they are competing against all the other crap that is on TV.
And it sounds like you’re no better than those celebrating September 11. No better at all.
Sometimes, I’d like to divorce myself from HUMANITY. Can it be done?
Marketing. Seriously.
Although I see UncleBeer’s comment about the media being outlet’s for the owners’ particular viewpoints, those viewpoints aren’t being spread willy-nilly across the air waves - they are marketed toward specific audiences to bring in the advertising bucks (surprise!).
Back in the mid-80s I took a class about radio broadcasting, taught by the then-director of news for WCBS radio here in NYC. One day we were given a list of five stories that had come in on the AP wire and told to pick three, listing them in the order in which they should be presented. IIRC, the list included:
[ul]
[li] a house fire in Brooklyn that killed a family of five[/li][li] Ronald Reagan making a comment about pending federal legislation[/li][li] the release of Bruce Springsteen’s latest album[/li][li] an item about the city’s budget[/li][li] an item about Margaret Thatcher[/li][/ul]
The correct choices were 1) city budget story, 2) the Reagan story, and 3) Bruce’s latest album, the rationale being that listeners want to hear first about things that will impact them the most. A number of students expressed surprise that the house fire in Brooklyn didn’t make the cut, since it was such a tragic story. Our teacher’s comment: The fire took place in a less-than-affluent area, so the story would really only be of interest to the blue-collar crowd that tuned into WINS (another news radio station), not the more upscale listeners of WCBS.
Since then I have made a point to check the news from as many sources as I reasonably can, because I know that no one media outlet will ever carry the full story on any issue, if they carry it at all.
It depends on the level of lying you are talking about. If you mean mere lying at the bargaining table, that’s a diplomatic skill. Without digressing into a long WMD discussion, it remains to be seen who had what where.
If you want to consider a shell game with the UN for a decade lying, then that argument can be made. One thing that is not clear, to me, is the WMD situation in the ME.
Just because Iraq has not turned up deployable WMDs yet does not mean that Iraq did not have them. Given that there are Iraqi generals and former Mukhabarat leading the resistance, It’s possible that there are weapons out there, that they were moved, that they never existed, they were destroyed, or something else.
IMO, the best criticism of what Bush has done comes at the margins. Without digressing too far, I think Donald Rumsfeld’s minimal force strategy needs some work.
OTOH, the conventional Democratic wisdom that France was just waiting for the right president to sweet talk them into an alliance is a bizarre hallucination mostly shared by Democratic presidential candidates. That’s a great example of something that gets repeated ad nauseum on the various channels, “engage the allies.” Engagement is a two-way street. A quick perusal of what passes for the intelligentsia in France indicates France is very far from jumping on board, joining the team, coming in for the big win, playing ball, helping out, lending a hand, being proactive, or other annoying Americanisms.
If you want to judge people based on their nationalites, I’d conclude that many people in other nations don’t have a basic grasp of the nuances of our dual-sovereign federal system, constitution, social systems, or much else that matters. Yet, they know how to generalize about Americans and our political system. They mostly display a know-it-all demeanor about America based on single source news coverage, “Our news is better.” “I’m proud to ignore sources that disagree with my point of view.”
If there is some great WMD story out there I have not heard, other than a poll related to “Fox viewers,” whatever that means – share it. It’s amazing how one poll, scientific or not, based on questionable science, takes on a life of its own.
That’s how WMDs comes up related to Fox, over and over.
If you really want to look at the WMD situation in Iraq, there are serious articles considering what happened to what. Implying that Americans all were part of, or somehow impugned by, this one poll is just stupid.
My post was confusing?
I would politely contend that, all things being equal, most non-Americans would know substantially more about America (by several orders of magnitude) than most Americans would know about the rest of the world.
To wit, when I was in high school in the late 1970’s in San Jose, I would get asked all the time “Where do you come from?”, and I would proudly announce Australia! I lost count of the number of times I was then asked if I was familiar with where “The Sound of Music” was filmed? Now think about that…
All I’m saying here is that few things in life are more impressive than a scholarly, worldly American - and this here little messageboard seems to have an unusually high number of them. Which is simply wonderful - yourself included Beagle.
But Jesus Christ, in my travels over the years throughout the USA I’ve met shitloads of Americans who know absolutely zilch about anything other than NASCAR, and NFL, and professional hockey. It seems to me that THEY are precisely the audience that Fox News caters to.
The USA has a global reputation as being a very insular place. Don’t shoot me - I’m just the messenger on that one…