Unless they come from Bernard Goldberg, I guess.
That’s probably a sounder argument than the one I made. The guy is so full of crap it’s coming out his ears. If your view is that liberals are wealthy effete hypocrites (or else they’re nuts) and that premise is central to your career, I’m not much interested about what you have to say about bias.
But he’s an insider, unlike Dan Rather.
You alleged that Goldberg is more biased than Rather (and the other reporters at CBS). Prove it.
Please provide a cite that proves that everyone from Texas is conservative, or that Rather is conservative.
Regards,
Shodan
i don’t agree his generalization was crass. But at least there you’re on firm rhetorical ground. It’s perfectly reasonable for you to take the position that his generalization was crass. I don’t agree, but i don’t call your argument pathetically weak, or even particularly weak. I don’t agree, but I recognize it as valid.
But I sense you trying to steer away from the argument that was pathetically weak, and doing so hoping to avoid an admission on that front. It amazes me how resistant people can be to simply saying, “Yeah, OK, that was a garbage argument. Here’s a better one.”
In the thirteen-plus years I’ve been here, I have made some really poor arguments – mostly based on inaccurate information. And while I obviously start out defending my position, because I wouldn’t have posted it if I didn’t believe it, eventually I am shown good evidence that I screwed the pooch. And then I say, “Yep, I was wrong. Completely wrong.”
Why, Marley, is this a fate worse than death for you? You were clearly and completely wrong. it doesn’t destroy your larger point. It was just a stupid thing to hang your hat on. But now you appear to believe that any admission of error on that point will invalidate the entire progressive movement, and it’s up to you to save it by changing the subject and avoiding the admission.
Why?
I’m gonna guess “liberal hypocrisy”. Yeah, I’d bet on that one.
Plus, its not quite fair to bring up how often you admit being wrong, seeing as you have so many more opportunities.
No, it’s not. Whether Goldberg would listen or not is not the issue. It’s whether a fair-minded and reasonable rhetor would be remiss in failing to disclose that Dan Rather was raised in Texas (but hadn’t lived there in over 25 years) in the context of asking his readers to imagine the effect on broadcast journalism if most broadcast journalists lived in Omaha.
The answer is: no. There’s just no way that’s a significant omission. This is true regardless of whether Goldberg (or the hypothetical fair-minded rhetor) would listen to your critique.
Because his entire premise (that liberal media bias in the US does not exist) is entirely faith-based and has no real evidence to back it up. When once he starts to argue that premise based on facts and evidence, he will lose. Better to avoid the danger altogether by simply making assertions and stone-walling.
Aided by ad hominems, attempts to change the subject, etc., from the Usual Suspects.
Regards,
Shodan
Why isn’t it fair?
Let’s assume I have ten times – no, a hundred times the opportunity. Let’s assume I’m wrong once a day, and Marley’s first error ever is this one.
Now explain why, even under those circumstances, it’s not fair to ask him to admit it.
And again: this is a thread that asks about “It’s OK if a Democrat Does It,” and we’re discussing bias, and the blatant error made by a liberal in this very thread, and that fact that not a single other liberal even has the balls to step up and suggest that the error exists.
So, yeah, explain why it’s not fair, please.
And how about you? I saw your gleeful message asking why I didn’t condemn the attacks on Kerry. I replied. I posted a link to the message in which I did just that.
And zip – you’re off on another tangent. No acknowledgment, no post that says, “Ah, so you did – my apologies.” Why?
Yes, how remarkable it is that people don’t respond well to self-pity and sanctimony. But I’ll try to step back here: you’re right, the Omaha thing doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The Fox News version makes more sense. That said, you brought up Goldberg as a reasonable citation in the first place and then demanded a reason I don’t take him seriously. Perhaps you should examine your own biases on the subject (or look at some more of his reading material).
That’s actually tangential to the entire discussion. The thread is about whether or not the media takes it easy on Democrats, to which a couple of posters offered a series of examples that didn’t pan out and some goalpost moving that failed pretty miserably. Which dovetails nicely with this comment:
Because several posters argued that the media is biased toward Democrats, and they couldn’t do any better than arguing “they cover scandals involving Democrats, but you can tell they don’t really wanna.” That’s a pretty good example of faith based reasoning right there: it’s easy to see the liberal bias if you believe it first; if not, it’s hard to demonstrate based on actual events. Certainly nobody in this thread got anywhere with it.
You alleged that Goldberg is more biased than Rather (and the other reporters at CBS). Prove it.
Please provide a cite that proves that everyone from Texas is conservative, or that Rather is conservative.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, I’m from Texas, and am pretty conservative for a radical lefty.
Thank you. Of course I was asking you to respond to logic, not self-pity or sanctimony. Does the presence of self-pity somehow erase the logic?
Do you want this bloody molar back?
Well, yes, it makes MORE sense. It’s an example of the fallacy of the converse, but that doesn’t make it factually wrong, and in fact it’s a fair question: if the environment of New York is so persuasive, how do Fox reporters remain conservative?
My only gripe is the objection that technically, Goldberg doesn’t say the New York environment is persuasive. He says the Omaha environment is persuasive.
That’s what I mean by the fallacy of the converse.
But in this case, of course, someone can ask, “Why should we assume Omaha is so seductive and New York is not?”
So I agree that’s a valid objection.
And now I wonder: did you only surrender on the Dan Rather question when you saw that another argument was available? Or did you independently realize that the Rather argument was weak and only coincidentally was the second argument brought to life at about the same time?
Because my own dignity is not that important to me, not as important as the subjects we engage upon. I flatter you that you feel the same, but am consistently wrong about that. More’s the pity. Besides, you’re married and a Dad, how is it you have any dignity left to support?
Secondly, you have an unfortunate tendency to be your own star witness, you loudly announce your lack of hypocrisy and bias, find it in others everywhere, and expect us to take that as evidence that you are right about something. Kinda like “Hey, when I’m wrong, I admit it, but I’m not admitting it, therefore I must be right.”
Shit, if I had ten bucks for every time you’ve got to rattling on about liberal hypocrisy, I’d stop buying lottery tickets, I’d buy the damn lottery and just issue the winners to myself!
Don’t you mean that your own dignity is much more important to you than the subjects we discuss?
If you didn’t care about your own dignity, it seems to me, you’d readily admit your own error.
Or do you feel that by admitting your own error you hurt the cause you support, and that cause (and not hurting it) is the most important thing to you?
Sure enough, there’s plenty of opportunity to discuss hypocrisy here, and largely for the same reason I mention: this deathly fear of admitting even the slightest error. This is why I can seldom buck people like Richard Parker or MaxtheVool (to pick two of many laudable counter-examples). If they happen to advance a claim that isn’t true, or an argument that doesn’t hold water, they have no hesitation in saying, “Yeah, OK, good point, that doesn’t fly. But what about THIS?” They don’t, in other words, regard the concession of any single point as fatal to their entire position. And I assume, if I’m ever lucky enough to go up against one of those guys and undermine all their points, they’d concede the entire argument.
But you, and Marley in this thread, and others of your ilk, can’t do that. I should be grateful: it lets me continue to highlight what an absurd position you’re defending and makes your entire argument seem weak by proximity.
But I’m not grateful. I don’t come here and hang out because I like being told what a heartless bastard I am. As you point out, I’m married and I have an almost-teenager, so I don’t lack for that. I come here to ensure that my ideas can withstand vigorous challenge by well-motivated and competent challengers. And when I talk with Richard Parker, that’s what I get. (And, often, my ass kicked).
When I talk with you, I get someone whose arguments and reactions valorize snark and misdirection over substance.
Again, apologies to many others – I mentioned Richard only because of my most recent encounters, and not as an exhaustive list of one.
You can keep it.
Stumbling onto a better argument made the flaws in the Omaha comparison more obvious.
It’s too subjective. There’s never any two circumstances which are 100% exactly alike such that you can prove things from the different reactions in the two cases, and even if you found one such match you would never find enough to prove that it wasn’t an outlier.
The only objective fact is that the vast majority of journalists are liberals, which provides some basis for the idea that the media would be biased left. But past that, you can’t get anywhere by arguing about examples. There’s nothing objective enough such that someone who wanted to believe otherwise could not easily brush it away. Which is what you have here.
One small test is how it appears to those who are not themselves either conservatives or liberals. The majority of such people perceive the media as being biased left. But OTOH, very few of such people have the inclination to debate such matters on MBs. So you’re left with partisans on either side, with their own subjective views.
So the point WRT your post is that you can’t prove anything by claiming that “no one can provide any examples …”. That assertion is itself only your own subjective opinion and is not true in any objective sense, and therefore has no bearing on the issue.
That’s rich coming from you. The only person in this thread I’ve seen moving any goalposts, using weasel words, and just ignoring the obvious is you. Your assumption is always that if a story isn’t reported on thoroughly then it must not yet be worthy of news reports. You fail to realize that the lack of thorough reporting on a particular story can have the effect of minimizing the story itself
Interesting that the excerpt from Goldberg’s book is based on hypothetical "imagine"s and "what if"s. I assume the book was full of more substantive material, right? Or was Goldberg bound by NDA-type constraints that prevented him from providing more detail?
Goldberg provides plenty of substantive examples. No real way to know if he’s cherry-picking when he does so, but he doesn’t stint on detail.