Also incorrect. The assertion on the liberal side is that Fox is biased, but the rest of the MSM is not. This is false -as mentioned, the same measures that show that Fox is biased show that the MSM is biased, just in the other direction. So, as I also said, if you feel the need to dismiss someone who believes what he is told by a source biased in one direction, you need to dismiss those who don’t listen to Fox and get their news only from those slanted the other way.
That doesn’t seem to be the message that I’m getting (in this thread at least). The assertion is that most media is biased to some degree (say 2 out of 10, for instance), whereas Fox is biased to an extremely high degree (say 8 out of 10).
And this is not to suggest the converse is true, that a person who doesn’t watch FNC IS able to converse.
And this is what is significant. To hear that a person watches FNC and thinks it’s fair and balanced gives a pretty good indicator of what they believe and how they converse. I know what topics to avoid.
I also do the same thing with people that listen to a lot of NPR. There is a pretty good chance I can guess where their views sit.
As a way out example, if I went to Denver and sit down for dinner with a guy that is wearing a Broncos jersey (ignoring for the moment why someone would wear a jersey to dinner). That says a lot about his views concerning football. Statistically speaking, it is possible he is a Patriots fan that lost a bet. It is also possible that he’s very objective in how he watches football, and happens to just like the jersey.
But if my money is on the line, I’m not going to bring up how I think the Steelers are the best.
I think the message in this thread is that people watching FNC should know that’s how they’re viewed.
There is no such thing as the “MSM.” The notion of a “liberal media” is a paranoid, right wing phantasm and always has been. There was no “liberal bias” in the major news media outlets prior to Fox News. MSNBC has now become somewhat of a left counterpart to Fox (though not to the same extreme, and without the blatant dishonesty and falsification of facts), but it’s complete bullshit that the networks ever had a liberal bias. Basically, that’s just something that Rush Limbaugh made up to give conservatives an excuse to dismiss inconvenient reality.
I was dismayed when I recently discovered that my favorite aunt, my mother’s sister who was almost a second mother to me when I was growing up, has been watching Fox News a lot recently.
I was truly heartbroken.
Oh well, I still love her. In fact, I’ll be going to visit her next week.
I will admit that Shepard Smith, is as far as I’ve seen, a reasonable journalist. However, the other 23 hours a day, FOX news is nothing but a transparent polemic with the message, “Republican Good, Democrat Evil.”
It is a fact that FOX News viewers believe things that aren’t true. It is a fact that FOX News supports lies and misinformation. It is a fact that FOX News hyped death panels, the made-up ACORN controversy and presents global warming as farcical (against a general consensus), presents the stimulus as an abject failure (against a general consensus). It is a fact that FOX News regularly reports on its own reporting to create media interest that isn’t there.
MSNBC, for its commentary shows, rarely goes into the realm of non-facts (that I’ve seen). And they have Republicans and Democrats as issue commentators on all the shows (except Olberman).
Again, FOX News makes up things and sells lies and misinformation. That isn’t bias, it’s outright lying.
If you honestly don’t think that FOX News is garbage for small minds, you either aren’t watching it or you are in its target demographic.
The reasonable ones, sure. The extremists are denying that liberal media bias exists, and labelling anyone who dissents as evil bigots and the usual mixture of foam and bullshit.
One advantage on the SDMB at least of Bricker’s thread as cited is that the extremists don’t bother trying to prove what they say any more - just scream and repeat. This makes it easy to dismiss their opinions.
Not that I don’t anyway - I consume all sorts of media, and I can always count on some of the more vehemently silly posters on the SDMB to let me know what the news is saying in La-La Land.
With extra coverage to the flat side to compensate for what the main stream media isn’t reporting on.
Last night Hannity had a wacko on bitching about something news media wasn’t covering. Which leads to one of two problems: If the news part of Fox News wasn’t covering it, than they’re liberal-bias MSM too. And if they are covering it, why is this guy complaining that it isn’t being covered?
I love it when PBS is called lefty. Every show has a balance. Both right and left are given chances to voice their views. When commentary is done, it is David Brooks vs Mark Shields. They are both columnists and Brooks probably is bigger than Shields. Yet they get equal time. Any story they give has both sides presented.
Yet some are so used to a slanted right wing press, that fair and balanced seems strange and tilted to them now.
I suppose “Democracy Now” is the closest to a Fox balance, but they don’t have their own stations and are on 1 hour a day. That is surely unbalanced in favor of Fox who broadcasts all day long.
None of the points you made were relevant to the OP.
You obviously thought the point of the thread was, “Is [network Z] biased?” And you might be forgiven for that, since those words do appear in the OP.
But the OP, when read in its entirety, is not about that, but about what arguments are permissible to prove bias. This is why it linked to the other thread: the same arguments being offered to prove liberal bias for Network Z were not acceptable, apparently, to prove bias at Network N.
In order to illustrate that, I created the thread that Shodan linked to. Every argument used there against Fox was simply ported back to the first thread, and every argument used in the first thread to prove the lack of bias at the other networks was ported back to the Fox network. It was the rhetorical equivalent of playing two chess masters by taking white in one game and black in the other, and simply duplicating white’s move against my black pieces in the game where I was playing white, then carrying black’s response against me back to the first game. Done against two grandmasters in chess, it forces them to essentially play each other; done here, it exposed the puerile and ridiculous arguments in the first thread, a fact not lost on many of the thread participants:
The entire thrust of that thread was, in other words, not to take a position on the bias itself, but simply to show that evidence-wise, what was good for the goose was not so hot for the gander.
Those who think Fox is ‘more’ biased than the other MSM channels are either delusional or trying to push an agenda. I’m sure that Fox considers themselves the lone island of reasonableness in a sea of liberal media. But that’s not to say that Fox News, in pursuit of fair and balanced reporting, actually neglects to hammer the GOP or Republican policies from time to time.
Just for instance, from this morning’s WaPo editorial, it talked about how Chris Wallace was hammering Kyl on the tax cut extensions on the rich. Chris evidently didn’t go for his lines and prepared remarks.
The echo chamber of the SDMB probably won’t give Fox News credit for this, I’m guessing. A moderate, and an open minded person, should though.
I was under the impression that studies had suggested that while the media had a (mild) liberal bias in the US on social issues, it had a conservative bias on economic ones. Does that make me an extremist for suggesting that?
Chris Wallace, like Shep Smith, is one of the ones who will occasionally go off script, but that’s hardly an arguement that Fox isn’t purely a right wing propaganda outlet.
it’s also completely delusional to assert that network news is anything equivalent to it.
Once again, you are just avoiding dealing with them, it is then easy to claim that that thread is something to be proud rather than the embarrassment that it really was to you.
As other doper mentioned those chess moves (thread) were redone to death, claiming even a rhetorical victory was silly.
The points I brought were relevant to showing a more complete picture of the bias present, you only refused to deal with them as it showed in the end the weakness to your points.
It is not a delusion, on many discussions like this, I make the exception to bring a clearly biased source. Because it is when we are dealing with opinions that we should check what are the actual opinions the left has no?
So on occasions like I go to sources like Democratic Underground.
What you are doing in your post is implying that left leaning people do not even have the capacity to notice when mainstream media is not reporting items that they consider important.
As on previous occasions, there is a consensus there that the mainstream media is mostly ignoring or not reporting properly items that the left considers important, the most glaring difference now is a sympathy for MSNBC.
What I’m saying here is that the left has many reasons to say that mainstream media is not following what they believe is important. The right has no such problem with FOX.
Not necessarily. It’s possible that they choose to willingly ignore MSM gaffes since they’d be criticizing their own, so to speak. At least, that’s what so much of the right believes: they think that it takes a Fox or a Drudge to talk about RatherGate, or more recently, the Black Panther voter intimidation. Hell, didn’t it take one of those groups to take down ACORN? To expose MonicaGate and Clinton?