Uh huh. Do you always take advertising slogans at face value? Does the New York Times really have all the news that’s fit to print?
If by that you mean that “fair and balanced” is a tongue-in-cheek joke, then maybe I can get behind that.
What’s the First Amendment got to do with it? I’m not suggesting Fox should be censored. I’m merely pointing out (in case I wasn’t clear in my point) that the American “free” press and media, being corporate-owned, have very little place, any more, for any views that run counter to corporate interests. And that’s not how it should be. And, no, I can’t think of any good solutions.
So you admit the “Fair and Balanced” slogan is a lie?
And the NYT is pretty neutral in its actual news coverage. It’s editorially liberal but it doesn’t go around saying it isn’t. There really is no liberal equivalent to Fox News on television. The fabled “liberal media” is a fabrication of the screaming heads on right wing talk radio and Fox News.
BG very plainly said “I wouldn’t find the existence of Fox News quite so objectionable if there were a left-wing equivalent to balance it…”
He finds it objectionable because it runs counter to his beliefs. Understandable personal bias. We all have it. But he wouldn’t find it as objectionable if there were a straight, left-biased “news” broadcast news outlet.
Are you trying to say that personal bias should not exist, or that you don’t have it?
'Course not. It’s a slogan. I don’t take them literally as a general rule. And I don’t like all of the shows on Fox. O’Reilly is too shrill and doesn’t listen. Hannity does listen, actually, and he treats a lot of his guests pretty OK for that format, but the Colmes position should be beefed up. The news coverage tends less toward the biased, as folks here complain, and far more toward the sensational.
Still, as I said, Chris Wallace and Brit Hume run good shows. They are explicitly opinion shows, so they can be expected to take opinions one way or the other, and to let guests have their say. But they seem as a whole to be run well.
As for the rest of Fox News, I confess that I don’t watch it enough to have much of an opinion. But frankly, I just wonder what the “threat” is. That seems to overstate things considerably.
Even in the thread I started about the New York Times, I said off the bat that I felt the Times’ had a right to do what it wanted, and this was a question of perceptions.
One hopes the President of the United States doesn’t need to watch NBC, ABC, etc. because he has top-secret access to FBI, CIA, etc. I don’t want Britney and OJ competing with Iraq for access to Bush’s one brain cell. So I’m with you on this one.
Not to speak for BrainGlutton, but if there were a left-wing Fox News, at least the right-wing Fox News would have some moral justification for being like it is. “We’re a bunch of big fat liars because they are too”. That would be much less sickening than FOX claiming that they are merely single-handedly balancing the entire mainstream media, who are of course all a bunch of terrorist-loving commies.
The GOP already borrowed the Wilsonian notion of spreading democracy by killing figleaf. What would a “left wing” Fox look like then? “We can rule the world better than the GOP. Look at how incompetent they are. We could make nations obey much more effectively.”
…his staff already sent the memos. And the checks, in some cases.
Mr. Moto:
Fox is just the worst of the worst. It’s not different in kind than CNN or MSNBC; they’re all in it together, to fool the American people on any given issue. It’s just that Fox is blatant, and its logic is so in your face stupid. It’s just insulting. It makes it too easy, almost. I’d rather watch CNN because they’re usually more coy about it and it can take some work to peel back the bullshit.
Or, to quote IOZ,
Okay, this thread has gotten a lot more attention than I thought it would, and it appears I should’ve taken a different thread title (I’m more invested in the personal side of the rant, obviously). I’m going to try and take it in parts, broken up over more than one post. Each will start with the name of the poster I’m replying to.
Quartz, I generally make it a point to try and understand both sides of any political discussion I read or listen to, and when reading a news source about an issue I’m interested in, I’ll try to look up another source on the subject that isn’t automatically going to be on the same side. However, I think it’s something of a fallacy to believe opposing viewpoints always need to be given equal time, but I do try to get more than one perspective on an issue if it’s one I might want to be involved in (or if it might influence how I vote).
Weirddave, in case you missed it, I already made that dig at myself in the OP. I’d like to stress again that this is out-of-character for me. Aside from a couple aborted attempts to persuade my mom that maybe she should try getting her news from other sources, or stop watching shows that upset her so much (about things she couldn’t do anything about), I generally make it a point not to do anything like that. To my knowledge none of my siblings (nor my dad) do either. She seems to always automatically assume that’s the case though.
Mr. Moto we’ll have to agree to disagree then. I’m not saying news sources should be perfectly objective, because I think that’s impossible. I prefer organizations that hold themselves to a standard of not knowingly misrepresenting facts, and openly acknowledging a generalized bias in the editorial voice. I am fully aware that muck-raking has a proud history going all the way back to our esteemed founding fathers and beyond, but I’d like to think the news could have the editorial vision to try and filter that stuff out of politicians’ talking points and campaigning, rather than playing it up. My beef is that so much filler content gets reported that just isn’t news. That in this day and age, even the big-gun organizations who try to posit themselves as “real news” commonly use scare-tactics and inflammatory issue framing to drive up ratings.
If Access Hollywood is entirely schlocky celebrity gossip is fine to me, that the supermarket newspapers or tabloid papers are garbage doesn’t upset me. That Rupert Murdock’s media organization, along with many others, are actively trying to market themselves as authoritative, reliable news sources when the actual content they make available is often only one or two steps above the aforementioned (and where celebrity gossip is concerned, dead even) is what upsets me.
As to your other question, I don’t have a problem with documentaries of religious subjects, and if the nature of the program is primarily to relate it to a current event than it does have a place in news programming. I think for me it was the amount and consistency of the content all in one night that got to me. Plus, the program about the apocalyptic revelations was very much done in the “do you know what your kids are doing after school?” or “Your milk may contain deadly bacteria, learn how to protect your family at 11” style of news show, not the pseudo-A&E religious history documentary style I’d imagine a Stone Phillips or Peter Jennings would use.
Stolichnaya, I basically agree with that. What I would point out is that it seems to me like the right-side culture seems more and more to be one of willful anti-intellectualism, that watching shows like Bill O’Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, and some others, I come away with a feeling that they almost glorify that mindset. They always seem to portray the academic community, the democratic party leaders, and liberals in general as one unified block of snobs who primarily interested in whatever opposes the current conservative stance because then they can act superior for disagreeing.
Having finished reading the thread up to this point, I’m somewhat relieved that those were the only things directly adressed to me.
If I think of something else in particular I want to say, or just a better (and more concise) way to express my overall frustrations, I’ll be back. I’ll just lurk and keep an eye on the thread in the meanwhile.
I sort of have to apologize. Ordinarily I don’t make pit threads expressly because I don’t want to be the person who rants, and then complains if anyone disagrees because they thought they could just dump and run. But I was totally not expecting any real response to this thread one way or the other. :o
PS. And since I caught most of them too late, I’d like to apologize for more bad grammar in the post before this. I really need to stop writing stream-of-consciousness posts. I’m starting to understand why I only got 76th percentile on writing while the other sections were all 92nd-96th (I was looking through some old records and found my GED papers last night).
The less you plan to do about something, the more you must talk about it.
E-I-E-I-O
Eh-heh, I was just checking back over my posts, and realized I’d missed responding to you, Captain. Sorry about that.
I don’t believe there’s any particular problem like that; she just turned 60, and she’s not anymore forgetful than she always has been (a trait I inherited), so I don’t think it’s alzheimers.
I think that somewhere in my family is a history of predisposition to (clinical) depression, because I and each of my siblings have dealt with it at different times in our life. Actually, the sister closest to me in age was prescribed medicine for manic-depression highschool, and I took zoloft for depression from around the time I dropped out of higschool until a while after I’d started attending College. So there might be something to that.
Of course, all of this is setting aside the fact that although all of her kids have attended counseling at some point, and my therapist not only advised that she, my dad and I see a family counselor (back when I was in highschool), but has actually spent the better part of whole sessions just talking to her about things (on weeks where there wasn’t really anything for us to talk about, or if mom was obviously upset about something), she still gets offended if anyone implies she might need it.
It’s probably a mindset thing. She’s older, and grew up in a fairly traditional working-class background where most of the community were either Catholic Italian or Polish families. I think that, along with her generation, probably predispose her to think of counseling as having a stigma attached to it; ie, there’s something wrong with you if you’re getting it. I can vaguely remember actually having a discussion with her and my sisters when they were home for the holidays while I was first starting therapy, in which she said that she thought therapy was good for people, and that she could probably benefit from it, but it wasn’t “for” her, that just wasn’t how people her age dealt with things.
Going waaayyy back, during one of the times my brother visited home (before he quit drinking, he tended to get in really nasty fights with my mom and my oldest sister back then) he was talking with her about something that had people upset. He asked her if she needed someone to talk to about her feelings, and help her deal with them. She said that she was afraid to, because she felt like she’d blow her top, or that she’d be overwhelmed by the feelings she’d bottled up. While I’m sure that some of that was hyperbole, it’s still something to think about.
Looking back on it, she’s always been an emotional person, but it was usually only about things that directly afected her and her family, and was pretty understandable. It also came less often that she’d be really upset about something. When she was, once she’d said her piece, things cooled down and got okay pretty quickly. I feel like she’s becoming more emotional, specifically more bitter and resentful over the less decade or so, and definitely more right-wing and prejudiced. The degree to which she invests herself in programs like I was complaining about may just be a way for her to channel how she feels about other things, but it definitely seems to be influencing her stance on things, and seems to provoke reaction out of her frequently.
It’s a difficult situation, and talking about the one issue (bad news) naturally lead into the other, which quickly became my main need to rant. I feel better for having put it out there, but I don’t really see any solution, nor would I expect to get one from an internet forum.
marshmellow:
They’re honest about being dishonest? That doesn’t make any sense.
Hmmm… you’d have to work awfully hard to convince me of that. The other networks are also bad, in the sense of being heavily tilted to the right, but it seems to me that Fox plays in a different division.
Mr. Moto:
I disagree. First off, have you ever heard of “yellow journalism”?
Secondly, I disagree with the way you frame this argument. The issue isn’t whether or not an editorial board here or there across the country leans left or right. Of course they do. But few news organizations – none, in my experience – allow their political beliefs to influence the way they report news like Fox. So, to your question regarding why one would single out Fox in particular, I would answer that they are far more egregious in their use of propaganda, and their abuse of the free press, than the Tribune-Democrat or the Press-Republican.
The thing is, a functioning democracy requires an informed and rational public. An uninformed, irrational public will make ignorant, irrational choices – like, for example, electing George Bush. Twice.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. In Sweden, a lot of the press is right-wing (by Swedish standards), but there are also left-wing papers. They may on occasion focus on different issues, but they are still able to 1) be up front about their political affiliation, and 2) maintain a certain level of objectivity in their reporting. That sort of objectivity is, at least as far as I can tell, totally absent on Fox.
Here I react as well to another trick that I often see perpetrated by defenders of the right.
As far as I know, nothing like Fox News – a right-wing news channel, pumping out conservative talking-points and White House propaganda 24/7 – has ever existed before in US history. You would have me believe that Fox’s politics and influence are as innocuous as that of Tribune-Democrat or the Press-Republican. It isn’t. Trying to pretend that Fox is just another manifestation of a robust tradition of free journalistic debate in America is to me, ludicrous. Fox has a far more widespread, insidious effect on the American mind than any minor political leanings one might find in some local paper somewhere.
The strikes me as preposterous, but I’m willing to be convinced I’m wrong, if you can flesh out your argument in a little more detail.
Ogre:
Good grief. This ain’t exactly rocket science, you know. He finds it objectionable because there’s no left-wing equivalent, as he states quite clearly. He might very well find a left-wing Fox objectionable if there was no right-wing equivalent. In other words, what he finds objectionable is lack of balance – equal time for opposing viewpoints.
I disagree with him myself – the last thing I’d want to see is a left-wing version of Fox – but at least I understand what he’s trying to say.
There *used to be *a very valid answer to your question here, which does raise an interesting point. However, with “deregulation of the airwaves,” I’m not sure how valid it may be any more. But it would simply be this: there is no limit to the number of publications that can be produced and distributed in a given area, excepting only the economic one: will they be sufficiently profitable to someone to justify their production? On the other hand, the airwaves were regarded as a public possession, to be licensed out, as there were only a limited number of frequencies or channels available in any given location. To warrant holding one of these, the commercial operation seeking to broadcast on that channel or frequency was expected to provide a certain amount of public service and a certain balance in its content (“the fairness doctrine”).
With deregulation, all this changed. But before that time, for a TV or radio station to be as partisan as a newspaper might well be was considered beyond the pale.
Frankly, I don’t see how this applies to the Fox News Channel, which has never been a broadcast band entity.
Seconded. IANAD but I don’t think exposure to a news channel can trigger a major change in personality