You’re the leftest sock, o’ course! And I was saying there weren’t very many leftists in America these days…
Jackmanii:
Told ya, Jack. I’m not even bothering with you anymore. You’re palpably absurd, and as you still haven’t bothered to address the substance of my last long post to you, I won’t be wasting my time any further.
That other posters have spoken up to defend me (and my arguments) in my stead might indicate to a more reasonable man that your constant claims of rhetorical victory are ill-founded and far-fetched.
Here’s one hint for you, though. I’m extremely careful, when I write, to be as precise as possible. I try to frame my argument in fairly meticulous fashion. In short, I say what I mean.
That being said, I’d advise you to go back and look at my posts. Then read your responses to those posts. I think you’ll find, in most cases, that you’re responding to something which wasn’t present in my argument to begin with, and entirely overlooking the points that are actually being made. Until you demonstrate that you can address my posts in a way more consonant with the reading comprehension of an intelligent adult, I’m more than satisfied to leave the defense of your weak verbal salvos to my fellow musk oxen.
Jackmannii: *And incidentally Kimstu, let me know just what Clinton policy mandating taxpayer-funded abortions Dubya is all set to overturn. I didn’t see it mentioned in the article. *
Gee Jack, that’s pretty disingenuous of you. I didn’t say that Clinton’s policies “mandated taxpayer-funded abortions”. I said that it seems quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will work, and is working, to reverse Clinton’s policies on abortion. Example: Clinton encouraged research and development of RU-486, while Bush is now attempting to delay its approval. Example: Clinton in 1993 overturned the rule that prohibited workers at federally funded US clinics from counseling, advising or providing information about abortion, whereas Bush has explicitly stated that he is against using federal funds for such advising. And then there’s their difference of opinion on the Mexico City policy or “global gag rule”, which is what this whole argument started about. Yes, Jack, Bush wants to reverse Clinton’s abortion policies, and you don’t need to be a liberal to realize it!
As for Gadarene, sorry, but I (and presumably xenophon as well) reserve the right to criticize any of your comments that we think are wrong or misleading, even if we run the risk of having you compare us to overprotective musk oxen. Sheesh, Jack, your real last name wouldn’t by any chance happen to be “Dean Tyler”, would it? As that late unlamented poster found out, most of us here on this board welcome honest opposition, but we really do not care for irrelevant taunts and malicious misrepresentation. Sooner or later, that sort of thing will just get you on everybody’s “ignore” list, as xenophon pointed out.
re your last post: What I said about the term liberal is only my own perception. I may be wrong.
Regarding your other point, (if I have it correctly, that the ultra left has less influence and is less likely to be referenced than the ultra right) this might just be true by definition. By creating an expansive definition of the extremist right you can lump a relatively influential group into the extremist right, while limiting the claimed influence of the extremist left by limiting that term for a relatively small far left group. So I think the only way to approach it would be to compare the politicians’ or pundits’ views with reliable unbiased survey results or election results, and define the extreme 10% (or so) as the ultras.
Another comment about the FAIR quote study: it does not appear that they’ve weighted their cites by circulation or influence (the latter, a difficult if not impossible task). I think in the last thread the topic of newspaper endorsements came up – these historically tend to favor Republicans. But (as I mentioned then) this is due to the small town press being mostly Republican - the combined circulation of these papers is less than that of the combined Democrat-endorsing press. The FAIR article mentions “major newspapers and radio and TV transcripts”, but within “major newspapers” there is a difference between the NY Times, Washington Post and WSJ, and lesser “major newspapers”. So beyond the issue of think tank labeling, about which there is apparently some ambiguity, I think the methodology of this study might be open to further question.
All this points once again to the difficulty in establishing or disproving media bias through truly objective means. So I’m left where I started – I believe that the biases of journalists are likely to affect their work (more than the counterbalancing bias of the publishers, if there is any). But I haven’t seen anything that I think can conclusively prove or disprove it. And I think it is a mistake to make too much of that fact.
By the way, of these three major newspapers that you mention, I was sort of wondering which one is the one that looks at things from an anti-corporate perspective? Given that there is a supposed left wing bias in the media, one would expect that at least one of these could reasonably be said to have such a perspective. (Surely, the WSJ is so unapologetically pro-corporate on its editorial and op-ed pages that it would take quite a tilt the other way to counteract it!!!)
Izzy: Good points, but it does seem to me as if the papers with greater influence and greater circulation would almost perforce be the ones writing the stories which quote most of the think tanks, you know? I mean, it’s not like my local Medford Mail Tribune or even Portland’s Oregonian are going to be doing many stories where they’ll be calling up the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation or the Economic Policy Institute and asking for quotes. Right? Generally, if they have stories which cite think tanks, those stories will have come from wire reports or taken from other, more major papers anyway.
And actually, re-reading the Think Tank article, I see that they cull their citations from a LEXIS/NEXIS search of “references…in major papers and broadcast transcripts.” So the above paragraph is largely moot, except insofar as we–and they–might differ in our definition of “major.” I suspect that even that isn’t an issue, however, because I’m fairly certain that FAIR just uses the NEXIS database in its entirety–NEXIS itself, then, sets the boundaries of what media outlets are considered “major,” probably by whether or not they subscribe to the NEXIS service and allow their archives to be available in the database. Unfortunately, I’m at home right now–tomorrow I’ve actually got access to LEXIS/NEXIS and, if you like, I can tell you what papers meet their criteria.
To sum, I don’t believe that FAIR is being selective in their examination. It may be the case, however, that they’re improperly interpreting the data, and that while overall conservative and center-right institutions are more quoted, the distribution is skewed the other way within the papers of the most influence. I honestly doubt it, though, because I’d wager that the Wall Street Journal is one paper of influence which uses predominantly conservative think tank sources, and the fact that five of the top eight most-cited think tanks are undeniably conservative (and none are liberal, unless you’re counting Brookings’s centrism) means that the Times and the Post would really have to be citing left and center-left sources almost non-stop for your theory to hold true.
I guess we could test it by doing a think tank survey of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal exclusively. Anyone got the time?
Other than that, Izzy, I do back Joel’s objections to your last post as well.
Jackmanii:
You make fun of me for not responding to you, and then you make fun of me for responding to you? Classy move. Shoo, tiny.
You do have my point correctly, and what you say in its regard may certainly be the case. It’s a valid objection to my interpretation. I’d think, though, that we (and people in general) share definitions of ideological extremism to a greater degree than you might suppose.
Not to be flip, but do you have very many examples of influential people to the extreme left whose ideology you feel I may be overlooking? I’ll certainly grant you Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy as candidates for the hypothetical label of “ultra-liberal,” though I think I have more respect for those two men than most (and I wouldn’t be surprised if both of them are already sometimes appended with extremist labels in the media–or, at the very least, ideological identification as being “liberal”). But what cohort of the Democratic Party is both extreme enough and influential enough to mirror the impact that, say, the Christian Coalition and Rush Limbaugh Republicanism (two separate things, in my opinion) have had over on the right? Where’s the newsworthy Democratic or liberal leadership that matches Trent Lott or Tom DeLay in ideological fervor?
Who gets mentioned more in the papers, Lott or Paul Wellstone? DeLay or Barney Frank?
(Obviously, the inclusion of people like Lott and DeLay in any kind of extremist category is a value judgment on my part–but it’s one which I believe I can back up with manifold examples.)
Wouldn’t a fairer comparison be between Lott and DeLay and their counterparts?
Senate Leader Daschle and House Whip Bonior are on my TV and in the papers all the time when Congress is in session. They all seem to have their fair share of ideological fervor.
No, I’ve made fun of you for repeatedly saying you weren’t going to post any more in response to me, then going ahead and posting to generate new exchanges. Not to mention griping about how I wasn’t answering the questions it took you hours to dream up, and then ignoring the answers when they don’t please you. But so it goes.
Can someone explain how working to please corporate interests is an exclusively right-wing proposition? Money-grubbing doesn’t come with any automatic ideological tags.
My local rag just reported that the GOPs raised about 211 million dollars last year and the Dems 199 million. Neither party will come close to backing solid limits on soft money and countering other fundraising abuses.
I don’t intend on getting into nitty gritty details on examples of bias, in which direction your post seems to be heading. I was making a specific point regarding the methodology of the FAIR study.
Gadarene
That was my point. I was not accusing them of deliberate hanky panky (though one never knows).
No. To do this rigorously would require an in depth comparison of their voting records, official positions etc. And I second the point made by Sapphire Bullet about comparing to parrallel positions.
I would suggest that Daschle and Bonior aren’t as far to the left as Lott and DeLay are to the right, so I picked two unremittingly left-wing Democrats instead. I may well be wrong about Daschle and Bonior’s liberalism (as opposed to their partisanship, remember); if you have examples of them being extremist liberals, I’ll gladly reconsider that portion of my statement.
Well, were I in the media and dependent on the president providing my material, I would certainly have voted for Clinton. [rimshot]
Something which I did not find addressed is the question of rectitude. Perhaps individual journalists lean to the left because they are intelligent and well-informed. In other words, right. They can’t help it; it comes if the job is done right. Personally, I have always wondered how a reasonably intelligent person could possibly be a conservative.
Possibly it hasn’t been adressed because this discussion is about a factual question of bias. But FWIW, Republicans are, on average, better educated than Democrats. (This is not due to the fact that their higher education helps them see the truth better, but due the correlation between education and income level).
I think this goes to the heart of the matter. If you’re a reporter/editor convinced of your righteousness and want to make a difference, you face a daily temptation to take short cuts. I would love to see more well-written commentaries (a 2-page op-ed section is not enough). But I want to take my news straight.
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Uh-uh. See Journalism 101.
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A not unreasonably query. But not one guaranteed to win you a commendation at the next Young Republicans meeting (do they still have these groups on campuses?)
The intelligence thing is debatable; what is known is that on autopsy studies, the conservatives’ pineal glands (seat of greed and cold indifference to the unfortunate) are invariably enlarged as compared to those of liberals. :eek:
“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear” - Gladstone.*
*if you like this one, check out this linkfor more good quotes with which to bait your conservative acquaintances.
Ah, but “bias” is such a loaded term, and has not been adequately defined. Therefore, it is no more “factual” than any other term describing a opinion.
Of course, being “right” is also loaded. Right according to whom? One’s religious or social training are the common bases for one’s worldview. My own upbringing has led me to be more sensitive to social injustice than most of my friends. As that sensitive person I was drawn to journalism as a career, feeling it was a way to implement change by exposing injustice and, yes, change people’s attitudes and opinions. Any social activist seeks a way to change the world. In the early '70s, with Woodward and Bernstein leading the way, liberal change looked like it could be made through journalism. In the '90s conservative change could be made through talk radio. <shrugging my shoulders> You use the means that seem most effective at the time.
And the education statistic just puts to the lie the classic conservative canon that colleges turn people into flaming liberals.
And generally, if you take ALL news from ALL sources into account you get it. The apparently biased stories are the exception.
And see my comment immediately above. Dan Rather has as much in common with a cub reporter covering the police beat as the Man in the Moon.
Hey! I was a TeenAged Republican! Does that count.
(Yeah, they threw me out.)
Perhaps my extremely low respect of the intelligence of conservatives versus that of liberals is because I know so many of them. Familiarity has bred contempt; most of my life I have lived and worked around conservatives of all levels of intelligence and education and they averaged out to “blithering idiot.” On the other hand, my exposure to liberals has been mostly to the best and brightest—I stay away from the Alec Baldwins of the world.
I’m not sure how much these quotation statistics really reveal about media bias when you can’t see the quotations in context. Just because I quote Brookings doesn’t mean I agree with them – in other words, I can imagine that at least in some instances a think tank is quoted and then rebutted. That has to skew the results somewhat.
This whole question is a lot more complicated than it appears to be at first glance. I’ve realized while reading this thread that for me, when I consider mainstream American media, what I really focus on is it’s coverage of foreign affairs. Here one can see a very strong bias towards US vested interests, IMO. Since these interests tend to coincide with corporate interests, it’s easy to perceive a strong slant to the right. But on domestic issues – I dunno. I’ve been abroad for 10 years, so I just assume that in any given left-right tug of war, the media tends to tug right (since the acceptable spectrum in the US is between “extreme far right” and “pretty far to the right”, even when they tug “left” they tug right). I imagine that one would probably have to go through the coverage of a number of major papers, issue by issue, to really get a good picture of media bias. And even then, bias depends on your point of view, as I pointed out earlier.
IMHO, analyzing the content of news stories isn’t really the way to go about this sort of critique. Instead, I think one has to step back and try to analyze the framework (admittedly a more difficult proposition). The question then becomes, “How do editors decide what is really newsworthy, and what isn’t?” That’s where the real bias lies, and where one can perceive the outline of the media’s agenda (again, IMHO). What makes it to page one, what gets buried in the back? Why isn’t there more extensive coverage of the civilian damage done to Iraq during the Gulf War, for example? The fact that infant mortality rates in Iraq have risen by more than 350% since the imposition of US-backed sanctions doesn’t even merit mention in the news, let alone make it to the first page. I can see the headline now: US FOREIGN POLICIES KILL BABIES. Sure.
In response to Jackmannii:
I should thank you for responding, maybe?
I found this post kind of hard to figure out. Instead of meeting your opponent’s argument with counter-arguments, you inform him that you have a counter-argument to your own argument that’s even more compelling than his. It would be nice if you could just explain to us lefties more thoroughly why are wrong in the first place, and back it up with a few good examples. But at any rate, what you seem to be implying here is that there is a kind of pseudo-liberal bias in the American press.
I’ll buy that for a dollar. As you point out yourself:
Yeah, almost my point exactly, only converse. For me, it seems obvious that “working to please corporate interest” is an exclusively right-wing proposition. Hence, both Dems and GOPs are right-wing.
You know, Dropzone, I wasn’t going to say it, because of course, if STOID said it, it would be attacked as the most bigoted, hysterical, blah blah blah…so I’m SO glad you said it instead.
It is exaclty the argument I offered to my father the last time he ranted at me about “The Liberal Media” “Well, Dad, maybe it’s because journalists are, as a rule, highly educated and intelligent people, and, as a rule, highly educated and intelligent people are liberal.” He turned purple.
Stoid, 'zone, you’re not being fair. Seriously. As Izzy in part pointed out, education and income have a high degree of correlation in this country. The better educated a person, the more likely it is that they will be socially liberal. (Note: this does not mean that the more educated someone is, the more socially liberal they will be.) And the wealthier a person, the more likely it is that they will be economically (or at least fiscally) conservative.
(Obviously, there are wealthy economic liberals and well-educated social conservatives, as well; I’m just talking general trends.)
Thus, influential journalists, editors, and bureau chiefs–who are, to a man, better educated and wealthier than most Americans–are probably gonna, in general, lean a bit left of center on most social issues and a bit right of center on most economic issues. Which is exactly what surveys have shown.
So quit with the “you’ve gotta be stupid to be a conservative” schtick, okay? It’s self-defeating.
I wasn’t really saying that…I was actually saying that if you’re intelligent and educated, you gotta be liberal. Which many would claim is virtually the same, but I disagree.
To me, there is a high correlation between social conservatism and ignorance. The reason is simple: lay it at the feet of the fundies, who have so loudly taken over the social arm of the conservative movement… as has been discussed in other threads, fundies can look pretty ignorant in their beliefs, creation being most prominent. But then there is the hating homosexuals thing, also ignorant…you know, the whole business of using religion to formulate attitudes about sexuality, it is inherently ignorant because it demands that scientific evidence be * ignored *. This is the noise we hear, so I and many other liberals just jump to the next step.
In other words, the possible error some of may make goes like this:
Conservatives have among their number a fairly large and certainly loud contingent of religous fundamentalists.
Religious fundamentalists are, almost by definition, ignorant about many things. (By choice… to be otherwise would call their religion into question.)
Which leads many (myself included) to conclude: “Man, them conservative types shore are dumb.”
I promise, in future, to separate deliberately ignorant religious conservatives from all other conservatives. Then I will see what comes up.
(BTW: that quote about stupid people being conservatives…I still think that’s largely true, for the reasons I just gave. But subsitatute ignorant for stupid. They are different, as I believe most Dopers realize.)
I do wonder, though…why is it that fundamentalists embrace economic conservatism? Just for the consistency of it?
I should thank you for responding, maybe?