You know I like you and respect you overall, John, but sometimes…your “Devil’s Advocate” position just seems as so much habitual apologizing as it is genuine. As if there’s something to be truly gained by not taking sides in your current and clearly broken bipartisan system.
Not the first time I urge you – with no credentials to be sure – to get off the fence, but as usual you seem to inhabit there as you would in a 5 star hotel.
It’s not a devil’s advocate position. I said he usually has a decent show, and I think he does. I like it as a conservative leaning analysis show, not a news show-- which it isn’t. For the straight up news, I watch PBS’s News Hour with Jim Leher. From your cite:
I don’t watch his show to get news-- I watch it to get a conservative viewpoint on things.
A comedian, Lee Camp, was being interviewed on Fox News. Only, he starts in with a diatribe, calling Fox News a “parade of ignorance” and urging all viewers to go outside. There’s a host who is stunned, and some chick who tries to get in words to the effect of “I love Fox News and what really matters is that Hillary Clinton is running…” Finally, the host cuts him off, then segues to another reporter, who is surrounded by 8 or so cheerleaders/supposed “women of Star Trek” and he begins to talk about a “brand new” book that was written by a guy (Deforest Kelley) who has been dead for 9 years.
How odd then that the Times endorsed Clinton for the Democratic nomination. They certainly can’t keep their act straight.
I get the Times, and I’ve never noticed any particularly awful pictures of her, above what you’d expect from someone in the middle of a long campaign without enough sleep.
He said the Times ran flattering pictures of Clinton and bad ones of everybody else. If that was true, they did keep their act straight. Personally I thought the Times had a reputation for running bad pictures of everybody.
Do you have a cite for this? I’m aware of cases where media outlets have done things like darkened an image or upped the contrast, supposedly to make a picture more threatening or more appealing. But even if we accept that that’s the case, I’ve never heard of a case where a non-tabloid news source blatantly changed a persons actual facial features?
I can’t stand Fox but I’d agree that we shouldn’t mistake opinion for the news.
The problem is their intent to present themselves as news when they’re not. Fair and balanced when they’re not. Aside from the opinion shows there’s also what they decide to report on as news. Which stories are presented and which ones are left out. Who gets brought in as a guest expert commentator? How is the story presented. I don’t watch enough to make a fair critical judgment but based on the few times I give them a chance just to see what they’re doing and how, they are consistently a bunch of agenda swinging dishonest jackasses who shouldn’t claim to be either the news, or fair and balanced.
This is a degree beyond the OJ stuff, though. Changing the lighting of an image for better appearance in a publication is a standard practice in journalism (though Time went way too far, obviously, and stupidly). Fox was distorting the shape and size of physical features of people that were critical of it. That’s not something you accidentally end up doing.
You might want to read this: A Measure of Media Bias. This is a paper written up at UCLA which attempts to measure media bias. Their methodology was to compare how often the media cites various think tanks from the right and left, against how many times those same think tanks are cited by Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Now, it stands to reason that since this board leans pretty far to the left, the average poster here would think that Brit Hume is way over on the right and CNN is somewhere in the middle. But that doesn’t make it so.
My memory is hazy, but they just changed the lighting/contrast there didn’t they? Not that that’s a good thing, but I think altering an image so that the person actually has different features is a whole different degree of dishonest
Then again, Time was trying to overdramatize a piece of news and Fox was childishly attacking or poking fun at “critics.” I can’t think of another case offhand where a news outlet altered pictures that way, but I know of some where photographers have done the same to their own images and ended up losing their jobs when they got caught.
Let’s keep in mind that we have a significant number of non-American posters, mainly from countries whose center is considerably to the left of the US’s center. That skews us leftwards even more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There are enough posters on the right here so as to get various points of view out there. We don’t have many (any?) foaming at the mouth religious right zealots here, but I don’t think we’re missing anything because of that.
At any rate, I’m sure this board doesn’t seem particular left-ish to non-American posters, but it certainly does to American posters.
I watched the clip at Mediamatters. Looks like the pics were photoshopped so they would fit on the photo of the end where the faces were superimposed on a poodle and the guy walking the poodle.
This is not a "news " piece, but a commentary piece.
If you’re going to get offended by this you may as well get offended over the caricatures of public figures in political cartoons.
Yes, and this board is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge over nonsense, which of course is going to mean the people here are more informed politically. Ditto for why the states with the highest education levels vote Democratic far more often than Republican.
If the media is perceived as being biased toward the liberals sometimes (despite endorsing Republican candidates far more often than the public votes for them) it’s probably just because a business devoted to finding and publishing objective information about the world (even if they drop the ball all too often) is always going to be better informed than the mass of people who prefer to remain ignorant… and vote that way too.
I just did that to save Dio the C the trouble. 