Of course, sometimes the fugitive will have an inaccurate “(D)” next to his name. 
Comedy Central. 
Real news?
The Associated Press stories are about as unslanted as I can usually find. I typically get my news from NPR and, if I want to know more, I research it.
That’s just me, though. I know a guy who watches FOX. Staunch conservative. He also makes the occasionally deliberately provocative statement to liberals like “You know, there COULD be reasonable, logical arguments against same-sex marriage.” When excoriated for homophobia, he counters with “Did I say I agreed with any of the theoretically possible arguments? No. But you assume that because reasonable people differ, I hate you and all you stand for. I don’t. But I know you’re a hypocrite and a bigot.”
He’s also a bright, educated, thoughtful guy. He’s way more conservative than I am: he thinks Obama is either a very slick talker or a truly, honestly moral fellow – and either way, he doesn’t have the experience to lead the free world. He does not, to my knowledge, believe UHC is a good idea. To be honest, since we mostly don’t talk politics beyond “both parties are filled with dirty lying hypocrites, which knows no side of an aisle”, most of his stances are something of a mystery to me. He’s not an idiot, he’s not a theocrat, and he’s definitely not a liberal.
And he’s assuredly not a homophobe. If he was, he’d lose one of his best drinking buddies.
This makes no sense. How is something that only presents your view balanced? You could think it was the best or most honest for agreeing with you, but not balanced. Balanced would, by definition, also present counter-views.
And Fox News is not balanced. Not even close. I’ve mostly given up hoping that my parents will think critically about things that Beck and O’Rielly spout off about, but despite being a republican myself, I have little use for anyone on FOX. (but on the flipside, I have no use for CNN either.)
So I guess my answer is no, it’s not bigoted, because I’m fairly conservative and think there’s a lot of foolishness on FOX News too.
There used to be a channel with news. HLN. You could watch it and find out what is going on.
Now it has the worst news programs, Nancy Grace and Jane Velez. Last two nights were devoted to one topic_ Mel Gibson. Entire hours devoted to discussing his rants. Must be there are no missing white girls.
A person who thinks they’re getting “objective” news from any outlet whatsoever is living in a dream world and at the least should be pitied.
“Fair and balanced” is only slightly less ludicrous.
Still it’s dangerous to dismiss someone based on their favorite news/opinion sources. For instance, I’ll read both the American Spectator and Mother Jones, sometimes simultaneously while twitching and gesticulating wildly.
No one has dismissed me, at least to my face.
Depends. If they are otherwise intelligent, logical, and not batshit insane, my follow-up question would be, “Are you talking about the news or the commentary? You do realize the commentary shows on Fox News aren’t news, right?”
If they are moonbats, then yes, I would dismiss them out of hand. To moonbats, there’s no difference between the news and the talk segments on Fox.
It’s funny, at one time we judged things objectively by looking at the facts. If someone repeatedly says things that are not factual then we can characterize them as biased or ignorant. These days it seems that everything is just an opinion. Evolution? There are two sides. Death panels? Just an opinion. Obama not born in the US? Maybe yes, maybe no.
I wish news programs would just say "in other news, a bunch of morons continue to maintain position x despite incontrovertible evidence that it is not true.
The majority of channels other than Fox News. The channels that are accepted internationally as being serious news channels, the way Fox News is not. The ones that don’t make a point of lying; that aren’t just an extension of a political party.
Fox is NOT just another news channel.
He’s either a homophobe or a troll. There ARE no “reasonable, logical arguments against same-sex marriage”; which is no doubt why he didn’t provide any of those “theoretically possible” arguments. Opposition to same sex marriage is about bigotry, and only bigotry. “Reasonable people” do not oppose SSM, ever; only the evil and irrational do.
Oh please. So many of these arguments boil down to “nothing is perfect, therefore everything is equally valid” and we all know that’s bullshit. Fox News is ridiculous. This is equivelant to saying “both Pravda and the New York Times have their own biases, so you can’t judge people for thinking either of them are good sources of news”.
I used to have a TV in my bedroom that would alternate between the various news channels in the background all day. I watched a decent amount of Fox News in the late 90s up through roughly the time of their blatant cheerleading for Iraq - in the late 90s it might’ve had a claim of being remotely legitimate, but it descended into nonsense pretty quickly.
And almost every time I happen to run across FNC now I almost happen to catch them in the moment of some sort of absurd hysterics or another.
This isn’t subtle. This isn’t “Hmm, well Fox News is a 9.2/10 on the fairness scale and CNN is a 9.4/10 so it’s close”, this is fucking “Fox News is the propoganda arm of batshit crazies”. Let’s not pretend that Pravda has just as much a claim as being a legitimate news source as the NYT, and let’s not kid ourselves in treating Fox News like it’s in the same ballpark as pretty much any other news channel.
You can’t judge a person completely by one single issue like this - and you couldn’t reliably tell where they stood on every issue - but it’s certainly a mark against them. If they truly think Fox News is fair and it’s every other fucking news source in the world that’s all librul propoganda, it tells you that they’re a person who likes to seek out information that confirms what they want and attacks what they dislike. It tells you about their general political stances. It tells you about their inability to detect bullshit.
I mean, FFS, you can still detect bullshit even if someone is on your side. When people make arguments I agree with, but they do it poorly or dishonestly, I’m not comfortable with it even if they’re on my side. So even if I were a republican, I would be uncomfortable with the bullshit propoganda job Fox does, even if I happened to agree with the premises sometimes.
Bricker has already demonstrated that the idea that ‘FoxNews is biased but ABC/NBC/PBS/NPR/MSNBC/CNN etc. are not biased’ is false. Any measurement useful enough to establish right-wing bias at Fox can be used to establish left-wing bias on the part of the rest of the MSM. So if you want to be consistent, go ahead and dismiss anyone who watches FOX. Then dismiss anyone else who watches any other news outlet in the US.
Personally, I tend more to dismiss the opinions of those who make ridiculous statements like this -
Especially when they make the same kind of hateful and moronically bigoted remarks about those who disagree with their opinions on anything.
There’s somebody who watches FOX, and the part I quoted above is right on the money.
So if he came to the conclusion “many liberals assume that disagreement = bigotry” and “many liberals are as consumed by hatred as the worst of the right”, then Fox taught him something quite true and useful.
Regards,
Shodan
This is false balance. The assumption that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and therefore since Fox sticks out from the pack, fox must be on one side of the divide and the rest of the media is equally far out on the other side. This essentially is just part of the modern republican strategy of assuming all sides are equally bad as a premise.
I wonder if someday you’ll realize the irony of your MO and your head will explode.
And those are?
Could be a perfectly appropriate advertising slogan to the non-liberal crowd
I tire of the false equivalence cast between MSNBC and FOX. Maybe on their “straight” news shows, FOX does a good job. That’s plausible. It’s on the opinion shows that most of us have issues with FOX.
MSNBC leans left, no doubt about it. But Olbermann and Maddow do what FOX doesn’t: they play fair. They have research staffs and editors that ensure that while the facts may be presented in a particular way, they are still facts. I don’t recall anything remotely equivalent to the “death panels” being presented regarding Bush on MSNBC. What’s more, MSNBC actually gives air time to opposing viewpoints. Pat Buchanan is a regular guest on Hardball, for example. Joe Scarborough has his own show on MSNBC, where is the equivalent on FOX?
So if someone tells me they get most of their news from FOX, I dismiss them as being uninformed, and I believe with justification.
That was an awesome thread.
But I would add, for the record, that of the news sources you list above, I regard NPR as being the best of breed. They lean slightly left, but their news reporting seems to strive to report facts as opposed to analysis. Some bias is unavoidable simply by what you choose to cover, and how much time you allot to various stories, but as a general rule, I have found NPR to exhibit the kind of objectivity that makes me imagine their newsroom and editorial policies both say, and believe, in a reporting of the facts and abhor the injection of opinion.
PBS is the runner-up in this category, as much for the civility of discussion shows as for objectivity in news reporting – again in my opinion. What bias seems to permeate PBS comes more from the sense they seem to have that their financial well-being is aligned more with Democrats in power than with Republicans in power.
Again, the distinction needs to be made that Fox and Friends, Cavuto, Beck, Hannity, Greta, and O’Reilly are NOT journalists. They are not reporting on news. There is nothing fair and balanced about their shows. They are providing candy for simple minded conservatives.
The news reporting on the Fox News Channel is at least reasonably straight forward (assuming they get the [D]/[R] correct). But their message is tainted enough that if something they report sounds too good to be true, I double check it.
But then, don’t we do that with all news? Headline reads, “Obama born in Kenya.” Do we believe it, or do we follow up with a quick websearch to find that the next sentence is, “…says local wingnut.”
During the Israel/Lebanon war, I really enjoyed going back and forth between jpost.com and English aljazeera, and then try to figure out what actually happened. Neither side could accurately report a situation, the truth was somewhere in between.
And I do think it’s okay to dismiss someone that regularly watches Beck and Hannity. As I said, no self-respecting conservative would put up with that. Everyone on this message board had been through the abortion debate in its entirety. We all know both sides, and we also know the shit that gets trooped out on both sides. It’s been done so often that now when a well meaning but stupid noob starts a pro-life debate, conservatives are the first to set him straight. Like I said, no self-respecting conservative could sit still and listen to someone spew lies, even if it’s on a topic they agree with.
Hannity and Beck say so many things that are just so far off, no one that is “in the know” could tolerate it. If you are an intelligent conservative you know they are full of shit. You have to be a complete moron to gulp it all down without vomiting a bit.
Is their hard news even good? I mean, they still do interviews and pick their subject matter and how they present it. A few months ago I was channel surfing when I saw Don McLeroy being interviewed on FNC during what appeared to be a regular news show. He gave the most nonsensical interview - he was promoting his conservative Texas curriculum bullshit by making completely oddball arguments like… “The constitution gives us 3 branches of government because the founders knew that man was falliable… and the bible tells us man is imperfect… therefore the constitution was based on the bible and we’re a Christian nation” - as silly as what I just said sounds, I’m actually sort of being generous. What he was saying made even less sense, I’m just sort of summarizing what he was trying to get at.
In any case, the interviewer was extremely sympathetic, supporting him at every step during his babbling, never asking any questions about the contradictory and confusing nonsense he was spewing. I wish I could find this clip on youtube. If this was their idea of real journalism, it’s the most sorry ass journalism I’ve seen in quite a while.
Edit: Ha, I went to google again to see if I could find a video or transcript of this interview, and entering various keywords like “don mcleroy fox news interview christian nation” one of the first results was this very thread - the post I made 2 minutes ago. Google works fast…
I always view it this way…
Fox = American Idol
CNN = Grammys
Fox knows it’s not serious, presents itself as serious, and yet, everyone once in awhile puts out a decent artist. CNN takes itself very seriously and believes it is honestly awarding the best in music. From time to time they get it right.
Neither really puts out good music on a whole, though. Not to me anyways. So to answer the OP, if you got your news solely from Fox or CNN, I would dismiss you just the same (or just from television in general). But only in my head, I wouldn’t actually dismiss their views outright, but would have to be patient with them in a way that can be trying.
No, that just shows how shitty journalism has become.
If anything, CNN tries too hard to be “balanced.” They can’t have a marine biologist talk about what oil does to an ecosystem without giving equal time to some wingnut that thinks oil is natural and that the oil spill is a good thing.
I think we’re going in cricles due to the disconnect between the Thread Title and the OP. Dismissing someone for watching Fox would be a mistake. I myself am a strong believer in hearing what both sides have to say, and I admit to checking in regularly in the hopes of identifying some useful, intellectual debate.
Dismissing someone who thinks that Fox is unbiased and fair is entirely justified. This is not someone with whom I will be able to have a meaningful conversation. If they don’t know enough to understand the meaning of bias, or the record of Fox, then they are not going to be able to converse on a level that I would find engaging.
This doesn’t mean that might not happen on another topic, but I’d stay away from this one, and probably politics in general, when around that person.