Is it ok to dismiss someone for watching FOX?

Great Debates
141

Your confirming my point. You haven’t told me anything about the accuracy of Fox News, but you’ve told me what you think of Ted Nugent.

CNN has had PETA and Al Sharpton on. I don’t like them, but I recognize my bias. I don’t let the fact that I’m being exposed to viewpoints I find ludicrous and stupid color my perceptions negatively against CNN. CNN is valuable because it shows those to me, just as Fox News should be valuable by showing you Ted Nugent.
What’s wrong with Ted Nugent?

He has been wildly successful in a number of varied venues. A rock singer, gun advocate, conservation advocate, hunting advocate, political advocate, his own brand of food, etc etc.

I’m sure he has been more successful and effective than you have been. I’m sure he’s accomplished more (no offense intended. Al Sharpton has me beat, too.)

Why would you be dismissive of Ted Nugent? Why would you be dismissive of a show that aired his viewpoints?

Is it not the role of the news to inform you of things that you do not know? It’s not particularly valuable for me, because I know and understand Ted Nugent’s viewpoints. For you, it should be pretty cool.

I’m always seeing Bono, or George Clooney, or Oprah, or any one of 10,000 other celebrities showing up on the mainstream media espousing liberal viewpoints, and it doesn’t bother me. Probably you see that too, and it doesn’t even register.

But God forbid they put up Ted Nugent… on Fox News.

I mean, there are live five conservative celebrities that aren’t afraid to admit it, and 10,000 liberals (I hyperbolize,) and you get pissed off at Ted Nugent?

C’mon man. You need more Ted Nugent. You need to expose yourself to dissenting contrarian viewpoints. Challenge your worldview.

It’s symptomatic of dogmatism when you view a a dissenting viewpoint, a challenge to your worldview as an insult rather than an opportunity.

Don’t hate the playah, hate the game.

I read that as “I am dismissive and intolerant of those who do not share my views.”

142

Of course, because you are unwilling to think critically about this.

Look, I appreciate the effort you throw into rambling posts that have a lot of words but no content. You wanna actually make insightful contributions to this thread or do you want to repeat your thesis over and over again?

FOX News reports lies. They aren’t journalists. This is a fact and you are blindly ignoring it because it does not fit your silly world view.

143

That is right, view points, unfortunately Fox news claims on many occasions that they are facts.

That works only if one assumes FOX news was born yesterday :slight_smile:

Unfortunately there are many examples on record (Besides their mendacity on the CRU Climategate “scandal”) why in most cases one should dismiss FOX.

This very recent example show how even the news part of FOX is becoming like the opinion part.

http://www.newshounds.us/2010/07/13/megyn_kelly_advances_fox_franken_illegal_victory_meme_uses_it_to_further_smear_doj.php

Once again, you are talking about view points, if only FOX news would clarify that.

http://www.newshounds.us/2010/07/13/megyn_kelly_advances_fox_franken_illegal_victory_meme_uses_it_to_further_smear_doj.php

144

Gigobuster:

Newshounds is antagonistic to Foxnews. Normally, that would make it valuable as a dissenting view, just as Foxnews is valuable because it is antagonistic to mainstream media. However, I find it less so.

Fox news is valuable in that presents an alternate dissenting viewpoint. Newshounds really presents no new viewpoint at all. It’s stated purpose is not to bring something new to the table, but to dismiss a dissenting viewpoint from the corpus of mainstream news. “we watch Fox New so you don’t have to.” My argument is that a categorically dismissive viewpoint is unworthy is hardly discredited by a cite to categorically dismissive viewpoint.

If they were presenting something new or different that would be interesting or useful, but as simple naked bias without content I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of it that I’m not already seeing from the mainstream media.

145

Gigobuster:

Similarly, I don’t see a lot of value in this cite:
http://cnnlies.blogspot.com/

It doesn’t offer anything but a dismissal. This is quite a bit more egregious than your cite, but nonetheless similar.

If I don’t like CNN that will tell me what I want to hear. If I do, or am undecided and rational about it, than I would realize that all it does is provide confirmation bias.

146

Fox News goes beyond presenting “viewpoints,” and actually falsifies the news. It intentionally reports falshoods, falsifies video and weaves crackpot (and more and more frequently outright racist) conspiracy narratives out of nothing, and it does those things in what is ostensibly supposed to be it’s hard news segments.

There is no liberal counterpart to Fox (no, MSNBC is not equivalent. It leans left editorially, but not 100%. It still offers strong conservative dissenters and it doesn’t falsify the news or oresent faked video like Fox routinely does, and does on purpose), There is absolutely nothing close to it on the networks.

It is not possible to maintain intellectual credibility while trying to deny that Fox News is uniquely pernicious and dishonest among major news outlets.

147

Wait a second, was that a whoosh?

So Foxnews is good because it is a dissenting voice.
Newshounds is bad because it is a dissenting voice.

Foxnews can say and do what ever they want, because they are antagonistic to the mainstream media.

But Newshounds can’t, because by criticizing an organization that is criticizing the mainstream media, they become the main stream media.

The enemy of my friend is my enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

At what point does Foxnews become mainstream media?

148

That would be valid if they claimed that fox should be dismissed just because they say so, in this case they also point at good reasons why FOX should be dismissed.

Well, I thought that you would follow your standards and accept a dissenting viewpoint, so never-mind that. :slight_smile:

You are missing where I’m coming from though, opinions are OK, however when a news channel attempts to pass opinion as facts… That is where me an many others notice that your points here are not on the money.

149

That is not accurate as the quote (coming from the same link) shows that they did bother to check with other sources in Minnesota if the news bit did hold.

150

Actually, the real problem here is not Fox, but it’s followers.

FNC is candy for gullible conservatives.

A smart conservative recognizes this and calls bullshit, it’s fine that they watch it, but they know they are being spoon fed pure, uncut Republican crack. A gullible one plays the sad conservative victim, reinforced nightly on FNC. No no, it’s not that FNC is blatantly biased, it’s that the MSM is out to get them, and that all the other news agencies are biased.

That is an ignorant viewpoint that should be dismissed.

btw the link to cnnlies.blog didn’t have any lies, it was just one guys rant against cnn.

151

The Franken story is based on some highly suspect conclusions by a right wing group which has some very flawed methodology and some provable mistakes in it. For one thing, many of the names they say are felons were not, in fact, felons. They tried to match names with years of birth, but not with the exact birth date. This resulted in a number of “false positive” hits and hundreds of simply unconfirmed hits, but all were counted as positive, regardless. They also have no way to verify whether the voting rights status of any of these alleged felons remains restricted or whether they have changed. They just assume that all of them had no right to vote in the '08 election.

Another gaping hole in the their methodology is that they automatically assume that any felon who voted fraudulently (and let’s be clear, they can’t actually prove that any did. They are working from a number of tendentious extropolations) must have voted for Franken. The reality, obviously, is that they have no idea who any of these people voted for, and no basis whatsoever for asserting that they were more likely to vote for Franken. They (and fucking Fox News) just expect that everyone will agree that of COURSE all felons vote Democrat.

The story is garbage, and the slimeball attempts to tie it in with their grand, racist, Protocols of ACORN narrative just make it all that more repugnant. There is no liberal analog to this kind of thing among major news media organizations. None.

152

Indeed, but that doesn’t answer the OP’s question. Is it OK to dismiss someone for watching FOX?

People I love, watch FOX. I still love them.

153

That’s an arguable proposition. Their argument is that Fox News has a bias that distorts, that they are sometimes innacurate, and sometimes misrepresentative and sometimes deliberately so.

If that were not true of all other news sources than I suppose they might have something worth considering.

If, as I’ve already discussed bias and distortion were not the defining hallmark or human thought than they might be telling me something that I didn’t already know. That they seem to think it is especially unique to Foxnews tells me a lot about them, but not much about Fox.

I am. They are not offering a viewpoint. They are trying to dismiss one.

If passing opinions as facts were unique to Fox news than I suppose you’d have a point.

As has already been pointed out by Bricker in this thread and others, studies or attempts to prove that such things are unique or special to Foxnews fail to demonstrate this thesis.

154

I kind of like Wango Tango. Now I’ve told you more of what I think of Ted Nugent.

Were they speaking as constitutional scholars as per Dr. Nuge? What is a supposed news channel doing presenting Nugent as someone who’s qualifed to discuss the constitutionality of anything? I didn’t think much of Charlton Heston, but I recognized his position of president of the NRA and his qualifications to speak on behalf of it. But who the hell’s Ted Nugent? Next I’ll be expected to listen to Chuck Norris wail about health care reform.

I didn’t want to bring up the fact that Fox News went to court to fight for the right to lie in their news stories if it benefitted their sponsors (Monsanto, if memory serves) because picking on Ted Nugent and his keen legal mind is more fun. But now you’ve forced me.

I don’t care what Ted Nugent thinks. I don’t care what Victoria Jackson has to say about string theory, I don’t care what Charlie Daniels has to say about quantum teleportation, and I don’t care what Ted Nugent thinks about constitutional law. And I won’t let you disingenuously turn this into a conversation about how important his opinion is when I used it as but one example of Fox News’ blatant Republican bias. If picking on Ted Nugent upsets you, think back to O’Reilly’s whining about extreeeeeeme leftists, or the constant nattering about flag pins, or Hannity’s insistence that the US’s torture techiques aren’t really torture, or the support Fox gives those Tea Baggie lunatics, or Rupert Murdoch admitting in Davos that he supported Bush policy with his papers and television and on, and on.

I can’t believe you tried to convince me that Fox News is doing people a service by having Ted Nugent come on and whine about Obama. They poison the public discourse with right-wing lies because they are a right-wing propaganda outlet. This has nothing to do with me, they’d be doing the same thing regardless of my opinion.

155

Uh no, they are reporting also that "Initial reviews by state and local officials, however, indicate that the problem may be far smaller than the group found in a recent study being championed by the Minnesota Republican Party.”

The point of view is clear. That you do not like it is also clear.

And I already pointed out that he really failed to demonstrate that. It was really weak evidence. And for this thread we are focusing on people that ignore what you are mentioning here.

When someone says that he or she are relying on one source for their information, be that FOX or MSNBC or bartcop and on top of that they tell you that that source has no bias, that person deserves to be dismissed.

156

Loving them is one thing, taking seriously their opinions on public affairs is quite another.

157

For the record, the OP didn’t ask whether someone who claims that Fox is not biased should be completely dismissed in all aspects of their humanity, but said he will “give little or no credence to whatever they say on certain issues,” and he’s asking whether that’s bigoted. The answer for everyone should be of course not. If someone claims to be a Young Earth Creationist, would it be bigoted to conclude they are unlikely to have any opinion on evolution worth listening to?

158

If you don’t care what Ted Nugent thinks, you can change the channel you know. Why does it piss you off that somebody else does?

Not really. It’s more that you found it offensive that he was on.

I don’t like extreme leftists. They are the most intolerant, and dismissive group I know of.

Missed that. I have nothing really for or against flag pins.

I think what constitutes torture is a valid topic of debate.

I think the left and the mainstream media is incredibly dismissive and intolerant of the Tea Party.

I think the left attacks and attempts to dismiss its antagonists rather than engage them, as they do with Fox News, the Tea party, Rush Limbaugh and what have you. Why is eveybody that is not mainstream lockstep liberal a bad guy, or a racist?

Why is that a problem?

Ok. Try this. If you are a knee-jerk liberal than liberal politicians tell the truth, liberal news sources report the news, and George Soros provides a public service and is an example of a wealthy man standing up for what’s right and putting his money where his mouth is. Chances are you also believe that Conservative politicians lie, conservative news sources and pundits spew propaganda and Rupert Murdoch is a rich rotten sonovabitch using his money to further the cause of his own evil self interest.

If you are a knee-jerk conservative you believe the exact opposite. Right?
All these things are debatable propositions, matters of degree, opinions and viewpoints.

Tell me something about your viewpoint that makes it superior to mine. I think it’s inherently flawed in that it cannot accomodate dissent.

159

I disagree that there is a criteria whereby you can dismiss someone without considering the merits of their content.

I’ll go further and say the merits of the argument are really the only criteria that should be considered.

160

But this is not happening in a vacuum, you are really insisting that this is the case.

Besides their mendacity regarding the CRU Climategate “scandal” there are many other examples of FOX’s malpractice in reporting. They are the reason why someone can be dismissed when he or she still insist that all those examples of chicanery do not exist.