The remaining articles are left as an exercise for the student, grasshopper.
Sofa: Actually, I did mix up the March and May articles in your list. My bad. Doesn’t change the conclusion, though.
This is what’s known in the biz as “burying the lead.” The only real information in the story is that officials have not found weapons. This detail is obscured, however, by the breathless announcement that officials had discovered “the strongest evidence yet” that Hussein had biological weapons.
This is the headline that was screamed at the top of every half-hour and run on the crawl. The fact that this so-called “best evidence” was actually no evidence at all was whispered as an afterthought at the end of the uodate. Most Fox News fans do not have the attention span or the critical listening abilities to pick up on that most important detail.
When it was determined that the trailers were not labs at all, Fox News did not announce it with sirens and flags like they did when they broke their discovery. It was reported only in passing and was buried under the usual Faux News tonnage of Bush pimping, liberal bashing and jingoistic misdirection.
CNN also reported the administration line (albeit without the cheerleading) and I am on record as saying that CNN and the networks all laid right down for the Bush line of bullshit on this war. They’re starting to wake up now, though and they , unlike Fox, have made some regular effort to dispell popular ignorance when they can. Fox makes it’s money off the ignorant. It can’t survive without them. It has a vested interset in keeping them that way.
This is one of the reasons I went online to debate and discuss the Iraq Invasion: To make sure that more people were aware that outside the USA the War was extremely unpopular and by no means considered a act of humanity or heroism.
Its sad that so many know so little…
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it. - Samuel Johnson English author, critic, & lexicographer
John Mace… instead of debating CNN credibillity why dont you explain to us why people with more misconceptions about the Iraq war tend to watch Fox News more than people who know the truth ?
How about because that’s your misconception as hase been pointed out.
I think a good part of the problem here is that people are confusing News Analysis with News. Just like you don’t read the editorial page of the newspaper to get your news, you don’t watch Bill O’Reilly on FOX to get your TV news. FOX’s News Analysis is conservative in tone because it’s mostly staffed by conservatives. Here’s my take:
O’Reilly (FOX): Conservative, but not a partisan hack. Has somewhat of a libertarian element. Claims to be independent, but one wonders why he has Cal Thomas sit in for him when he’s on vacation. His biggest fault is that he’s turned into a blow-hard who is way too full of himself.
Hannity (FOX): A Republican partisan hack, but at least he admits it.
Colms (FOX): Is this guy a real liberal or does he just play one on TV? Not too convicing. They need to get a stronger liberal to balance Hannity.
Chris Matthews (MSNBC): Probably not as much of a Democrat as he used to be, but not a partisan hack. Asks some good, hard questions. Does a pretty good job of balancing whatever bias he might have. Doesn’t spit when he speaks as much as he used to.
Scarborough (MSNBC): A Republican partisan hack. Why don’t they just bite the bullet, hire Ann Coulter and get it over with?
Donohue (late of MSNBC): Not a complete Democractic hack, but pretty close to it. Look up bleeding heart liberal in the dictionary, and you’ll find his picture.
I don’t watch much CNN, so I can’t really say much about their guys. I lost interest in the Lacy Peterson case a long time ago, so I don’t tune into Larry King. When I get interested in that case again, I give him a listen. If I want CNN’s take, I usually tune into CNN Headline News.
I don’t see much difference between the actual news that is reported by the 3 cable news stations. Whatever “bias” they may have is pretty easy to spot and discount. Just like my local paper, the SJ Merc. It’s a liberal leaning paper (from the Op Ed pages), and it creeps into their reporting sometimes, but is easy to spot and sift through.
Its "pretty easy to spot and discount" or to "sift through" for you and me and most Dopers... its obviously not for "regular" folks. That is the KEY issue. I was trained in high school to critically analyze news... most people go thru life without much critical thinking. Maybe they arent required to do so ? So when FOX overplays certain facts its playing on this lack of critical thinking/analysis.
Check out those commercial breaks in Discovery Channel... they keep repeating the "good" points on and on... several times. The price and the real usefullness of the rubbish they sell is kept low key or not at all. The same goes for heavily biased news. Emphasis on what is "good" for your political viewpoint.That’s one thing so many ideologues from across the political spectrum have in common - an overriding contempt for the general public, who just don’t have the smarts to detect the truth the way the Chosen Ones can. I see this view is endemic in Brazil as well.
Before we forget - let’s add CBS News to the Axis of Right-Wing Reporting Evil! (And of course, there were no prominent retractions of this story by Dan Rather and his fellow Blackshirts).
And the things we could say about NBC, ABC, the Associated Press etc. and their war stories that didn’t pan out.
But that would spoil our Fox fun.
Well do you think the general public is good at spotting bias and have well developed political awareness ? Do you think the general public read enough news and have sofisticated opinions on politics ?
Not only should one endevour to seek the truth… but to know that the truth can be pretty relative. I do have contempt for the general public… they put in office clowns like Bush and the governor overhere (Roriz). Still democracy allows them to vote… and I have to accept that. It doesn’t change the fact that they cant read a newspaper does it ?
Jackmannii, by all means, we (or at least, I for one) don’t mean to imply that Fox is alone in their pathetic coverage of these issues! Fox is just the most pathetic of them. Here are some articles by FAIR, the liberal media watchdog group documenting some of the ways in which the media screwed up the WMD stories:
http://www.fair.org/extra/0307/wmdhunt.html
http://www.fair.org/extra/0305/kamel.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/abc-iraq-weapons.html
We’re not talking about the relative popularity of conservative thinking. We are talking about the popularity of patently-false “facts” that favor conservative views. Surely, you see the distinction here?
Well, they clearly weren’t doing a very good job presenting hard facts, unless by hard facts you mean presenting what someone else said. And, I admit that the media isn’t completely to blame. I think Bush and Co. waged a very effective propaganda war of lies and deception. But, I still think the media could have done a lot more not to be completely taken in by it. One way is to give more airtime to those who were setting facts straight…Even if many of the Dem leaders were falling down on the job, not all were and surely there were other people who were not.
Also, newspapers often have “news analysis” stories which are somewhere in between a very straight just the-facts-of-the-day story and an editorial. The point of these is not to editorialize for a certain point of view but to examine facts in more detail rather than just reporting who said what and put facts in the context of other facts.
Yeah, count me among the deceived too. I didn’t pretend to know what Iraq had…But, my wild ass guess was that they did have some chemical and biological weapons stocks but probably not as much as the Administration claimed.
John Mace, I was originally humoring you for an obvious mistake. Now, however, I question your statement:
Which conclusions? Your errant, desperately Freeped talking points from the likes of Neal Boortz, or mine, which is that the Fox News network regularly and independently reported horseshit during and after the war which did not in pan out in May of 2003 and which continues to not visibly appear to be true?
And while I’m at it, who the hell says FAIR is liberal? They’re a bunch of splitters, if you ask me, the liberal on the left hand of my friend elucidator. Or is it his right hand?
Guards, cut one of elucidators’ hands off that I might never to have to make a distinction again. Report to me, and I shall decide… if your actions are worthy of a man of his calibre and distinction.
I put the wrong title on the article. Put the correct one on, as you originally indicated, and nothing else in my post changes:
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The “mobile weapons lab” story was reported by all the news agencies.
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The FOX news article clearly states in the very first paragraph that no WMDs had been found.
Why don’t you tell us what in that artilce is false? They reported, just as all the other news outlets did, that the government had released info that “mobile weapons labs” had been found. Did the gov’t not release that info? Did FOX make it up? No.
Mike Malloy (who seems to be the liberal Rush) was talking about this tonight, and I agree with him that this isn’t evidence that Fox News makes people stupid - stupid people tune into FNC to hear what they want to hear. It’s fine to blame the channel for spinning the news, but changing or even eliminating Fox News won’t cure people of being stupid.
Not to mention why his voter registration says Republican.
Clearly, I made some mistakes with the OP. Clearly as well, most of you didnt bother to read the link.
Remember? It has to do with three declared fallacies. And the sources of news.
If you accept that the stated falllacies are, in fact, fallacies…
It leads you inexorably to the conclusion that such persons who derive most of thier news from Fox are more likely to believe flaming horseshit than persons who derive thier news from CBS. But not by much.
The utterly boring, sincere, calm, reasonable, Unitarian, cottage cheese and hotdish NPR…
Was right all along.
Which proves that Gwen Ifil is hot.
Is she hotter than Condoleeza Rice?
(Ah…Connie…that summer in Berkeley…you with your Black Panther beret…and your Trotskyist rhetoric… a couple hits of window pane acid, some cheap wine…then the TV showed that picture of Ronald Reagan…
And I lost you forever…)
Call me.
No, John Mace, I think it would be more interesting for you to tell me what part of the Fox article entitled, Iraq Arming Troops With Chemical Weapons is true. And then you might continue to work your way through the others.
After you corked up my original citations–indeed, almost desperately cherry picked them in search of a single, erroneous, contradiction–I’m really interested to know what you think happened to that “confirmed” intelligence report that the Iraqis outside of Bagdhad were armed with chemical weapons?
I think you’re just afraid of getting shit on your hands. Our government was full of shit; our President is full of shit; his propaganda arm is full of shit. There is so much full shit extruding itself from the near-bursting bags of this administration and its preferred news network that it looks like a Play-Doh factory, only it’s shit instead of Play-Doh, which is still not acceptable in place of evidence.
And let me tell you a secret, John Mace: you’re soaking in it.
OK, Sofa, I’ll play this silly game one more time. From your article:
There. I bolded and the sections and underlined the key words for you so that you can see how tenuous this story is. It’s called live war news reporting. You get a lot of preliminary stuff. The cable news outlets are all racing each other to get a scoop and fill their 24 hr news programs. Do they get news reports too early and report them anyway? Yes, I’m afraid they do. But you seem to be implying that FOX made the story up. What part of the story is true? I suspect all of it is true, as reported: That Defense Dept officials released the info in the article.
BTW, how much searching around did you do on CNN and MSNBC web sites to look for similar, preliminary stories that never really panned out? I’m afraid that anyone can dig up this kind of stuff on pretty much any of the cable news web sites, as I showed you with the “mobile chem labs” story.
Funny, that’s the impression I got when you said this:**
A major “point” of the OP was that Fox News should be blamed for the acceptance of untruths about Iraq by many Americans. Since it’s been shown that only a small fraction of those people report having Fox as a primary news source, and that other major media outlets (who are difficult to brand as “conservative”) also jumped to report government handouts that didn’t pan out, the “indoctrination” cannot logically be tied to Fox.
Revelation: I am not saying that Fox News is wonderful. I get maybe .00000002 percent of my news from Fox, and only slightly more than that from other network news outlets (probably 90% is from newspapers, the rest from a variety of Internet sources and magazines).
Jeepers, I want the last 20 minutes of my life back. Two pages of this blather to come to the conclusion: Fox News appears willing to spin news items to support the Bush administration, and that people who are predisposed to believe the spin are more likely to, er, believe it. Good God, what a stunning revelation. I’ll never see Bill O’Rielly the same way again. Well, actually, I change the channel as soon as I see the Fox News logo, so it’s not like I see him all that much anyway.
Any of you pixies wailing about big bad Fox want to actually propose something useful, or is this just a bitch session? At least give us your action plan, folks, 'cause it sure doesn’t look like much of a debate here.
[Cite of Fox’s attitude](www.indexonline.org/indexindex/ 20030918_unitedstates.shtml )
Never mind that there are a whole lot of other choices available in between. Fox has made its choice. It chooses to be “foot soldiers for Bush.” Most of us have known that for quite some time, but didn’t expect an actual admission.