I’m in agreement here.
Just a slight nit to pick.
It should actually be the “civil service” rather than the “government”.
Elected reps should say - “news must be of a certain level of impartiality” then it is up to the civil service to measure and regulate that.
I’m pretty sure that Fox News is actually generated by former writers of The Simpsons who decided to try their collective hand at a dryly sardonic publicity stunt gone badly wrong (or very, very right, depending on your point of view). If you listen to Glenn Beck and Chief Wiggum side by side they are suspiciously similar not only in content but linguistic styling as well. Ditto for Bill O’Reilly and Principle Skinner.
It is left as an exercise to the reader to equate other Simpsons’ characters to various Fox News personalities. Sadly, I don’t believe they actually have a Lisa Simpson equivalent.
Stranger
Cite? I know you say IIRC but I’m trying to find it and I can’t.
I have no problem with Fox having a right-wing bias, nor with MSNBC having a left-wing bias. My problem with Fox is that they lie. Knowingly and deliberately. MSNBC doesn’t do that.
Just watched Colbert online and he brought up a segment where Cooper put Hannity on his Ridiculist. Of course, Colbert was doing a funny bit where he was defending Hannity.
Anyway, it peaked my curiosity so I searched for the bit on YouTube an found this.
It seems Anderson Cooper exposed Hannity or his editors in an outright lie.
It was so blatant. I’m curious if Hannity will respond to this. Cooper did say he didn’t want to start a tit for tat ratings stunt, but surely an apology from Hannity is in order.
Oh, I’m sure someone will find something that can be spun as a falsehood by MSNBC, and then you’ll be sorry!
Here’s the thing: Fox News (on television; their website is pretty much straighforward news) is decidedly biased toward the right, much moreso than any other station is toward the left. But the thing is, it’s virtually the ONLY rightwardly-biased news organization in the country. So, yes, it’s aggressively right-wing, but it has to try to counter the overwhelmingly large number of news organizations in this country that have a left-wing bias, albeit less agressively so.
In this country you have Fox News vs. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Time and Newsweek magazines. Then in the entertainment media, you have the Fox Network which carries Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, plus radio personality Rush Limbaugh vs. MSNBC’s commentary, Vanity Fair magazine, Playboy magazine (or hell, just throw in the whole lot of entertainment magazines), most Hollywood movies and television programs, including the nutjobs on The View (and Joy Behar on HLN), plus Oprah Winfrey, 60 Minutes, and all the major network morning programs like The Today Show.
So in other words, as strident and aggressively pro-right as Fox News and Fox political programming may be, the pro-left side in aggregate far outweighs it. So, looking at it objectively and from a distance, Fox and Limbaugh are but two lonely voices crying out into the hurricane winds of left-wing news and entertainment media, trying and succeeding in their own little way to have at least some influence on the way people in this country get their information.
In Soviet Europe we don’t make Freudian slips. Freudian slips make us.
As has already been said, the problem most people have with Fox is not that they have a right-wing editorial line. It’s that they’re blatantly and dishonestly distorting the truth and facts. It’s the outright lying and making shit up that get the goat of people like Jon Stewart.
I’ve got no problem with a pundit analyzing facts with a decidedly RW slant. Divergent opinions strengthen a debate. A pundit generating his own facts out of thin air to support his RW slant is something else entirely.
To the degree that Fox lies, I would join in condemning it. To the degree that they are distorting it, I would say that offense largely depends on whose ox is getting gored. I feel that the MSM distorts the news in favor of the left constantly. Who’s to be the arbiter of what’s fair and accurate and what isn’t? Just because certain left-wing viewers find their reportage distorted, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is, just like you most likely wouldn’t characterize the MSM’s reportage as being distorted in favor of the left. I haven’t watched Fox News in years, so maybe they really have gone over the top like posters here claim, but I know that I have a hard enough time dealing with misinterpretations and mischaracterizations of my own posts around here to know that plenty of the lefties who are seeing distortions on Fox News are quite likely seeing mirages.
Obviously, you’re new to TV.
They have, Starving. If you haven’t viewed FOX News in a number of years, I’d say you should do so, if for no other reason than to gain a fresher perspective. Choose a few programs to watch over a number of days and draw your conclusions.
I don’t care for some of the name-calling you’ve been subjected to, and I don’t think you’re stupid. If anything, you are, perhaps, a little too invested in an ideology that’s clouding your objectivity. That said, I think even you will be appalled at what goes on there and what passes for news.
He’s never seen it, which makes him an expert, no doubt.
Rune claims the government controls the content of the BBC. puddleglum claims the BBC was biased against the Thatcher government. See a problem?
Fox News now admits that its “opinion” shows in the evening are slanted, but claims that the news shows during the day are fair and balanced. The Daily Show has done multiple segments on how the news shows reflect exactly the same bias.
Rune, were you aware of Roger Ailes, the head of Fox, close ties to the Republican party?
You may well be right. I know from visits to Rush Limbaugh’s page from time to time (I used to listen to him regularly in the very early '90s), he has deviated quite a bit from when I used to listen to him and he sometimes employs tactics which are at the very least ‘intellectually dishonest’).
And I probably am a tad too invested in my ideology. It’s just that I’ve seem so many harmful and to me utterly nonsensical things come out of the left over the last forty years that I’ve come to feel liberalism is a deeply flawed ideology at its very base. Even when it’s correct, as in countering things such as racism or censorship or in promoting a healthier attitude toward sex, it goes way overboard and seems to know no limits, not matter how bad things get as a result. Thus I’ve come to feel that liberalism is just plain bad and in a big picture sense it causes far more harm than good. Therefore I seem to have adopted the default position that liberal=bad and conservative=good. This attitude is strengthened even further by the behavior of many of this board’s political posters, where almost everything I say is reflected back in dishonest ways. So I’m sure you’re right in that occasionally wrongful conservative misbehavior gets a pass from me either because I don’t believe the messenger or because I’ve come to regard the offensive behavior as fighting fire with fire - and a fire started by the other guy, at that.
Still, there can be no legitimate excuse for supporting outright lies - especially in the news media - or for ignoring the dissemination of information that I know is wrong, whether by honest or deceitful intent. I get emails from time to time from family and friends that contain pro-right or anti-left scenarios that just don’t pass the smell test, and which further investigation often reveals to be based on fictitious emails that have been going around for years. I usually write back and debunk them, demonstrating how I know and listing the facts that debunk them. Sometimes this has the result of causing people to start investigating on their own, and other times it has the effect that they simply stop forwarding their political emails to me. 
Anyway, long story short, if Fox or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else is stooping to lies and deceit to advance their cause, it’s wrong and unequivocally so. I don’t know that I’ll take the time to watch Fox trying to catch them in a lie because I would imagine the noise-to-lie ratio would require lots of watching in order to spot what I presume is only the occasional lie. And even if I did, it wouldn’t accomplish much because I’ve already condemned the practice. Still, Fox and Rush Limbaugh provide a valuable service in countering the overwhelmingly liberal bias of the mainstream news and entertainment media, and to the degree that they present the issues honestly but with a conservative spin, I have no problem with that.
[QUOTE]
Anyway, long story short, if Fox or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else is stooping to lies and deceit to advance their cause, it’s wrong and unequivocally so. I don’t know that I’ll take the time to watch Fox trying to catch them in a lie because I would imagine the noise-to-lie ratio would require lots of watching in order to spot what I presume is only the occasional lie.
[QUOTE]
You don’t have to. (Not that the lies are “only occasional”). Go to Youtube, write “Fox News Lies” on the search line, and you can see hundreds of examples.
You really think you’re innocent of this?
Thousands. But then “Fox News Lies” gives approximately the same number of Tube hits as “CNN Lies” and “BBC Lies”. CNBC & Sky News lies gives less.
Logical next step is to evaluate the quality of those searches. Of the hits you get for “Fox lies”, analyze the top twenty unique stories (i.e. ignoring duplicates) and decide if the claim has merit. Do the same for other news sources.
I expect a number of the complainers will have biases so obvious that their claims are suspect on that basis alone. Amusingly, I checked the first hit for “CNN lies” and got Michael Moore ripping into Wolf Blitzer about CNN’s analysis of Moore’s then-current documentary Sicko.
Nope, they are not honest.
Well, they didn’t change the regulation, and Sun TV went on the air this year. What evidence is there that Sun TV is deliberately spreading falsehoods? I mean, it’s on now, so are there any examples? Got one? I don’t watch it so I haven’t see any myself, but surely there are examples, if it’s just a given that their intent was to spread false news?
I find this angle curious; now the story is that the applications were rejected because Fox and Sun INTENDED to spread false news? How would the CRTC know this? Did Fox and Sun actually put on the application, “We’re gonna spread lies and misinformation and pass it off as news”? (Of course, there’s no truth to this, so it’s a hypothetical question.)
I don’t know what the other side of the debate is, and I’m not on it. My point is simply this; Mr. Kennedy’s article is a load of absurd horseshit and is full of exaggerrations, significant omissions, and falsehoods, He is either a liar or is so disdainful of Canada that he could not be bothered to get his facts straight. His article is almost complete fiction. I will give him credit for spelling “Canada” correctly. I could list all the lies in order but it’d more than double the length of this post.
Um… can you provide some examples of stations that have been stopped from starting up because of this? You do know the 2011 example is, in fact, on the air, with the regulations unchanged? And you know Fox’s application for a channel was not rejected for alleged violations of a truth-in-news regulation, yes? (How could they run afoul of a regulation without broadcasting any phony news?) You don’t seem to be fully appraised of the facts.