The point of the thread was media bias, and i am attempting to argue that the same people that are crying the loudest about unfair labeling of people in the media as conservative are unfairly labeling the media itself as liberal, both of the arguments are based on their interpetation of liberal and conservative.
Mostly to cause trouble, but i despise being set in a label. I considered myself a moderate Democrat for many years, before i was bombarded with the Liberal label by conservatives based solely on a single issue i was debating. Whenever i was arguing pro-gun or pro-death penalty, i was never called a “dirty conservative” unlike the “dirty liberal” label i now wear with pride out of spite. from that experience alone i feel safe to make the claim that ultra-liberal is used less paritally because many conservatives feel liberal itself is enough of an insult (despite how ineffective it is as an isult ont he intended target)
Libertarians, Federalists, Greens, and the ilk have many people who agree with their views but would never vote for a third party candidate for a variety of reasons. To conform to a simple conservative/liberal scale they would have to modify their beliefs to fit in with the views on the scale. (as many do anyway when deciding candidates from the major parties to vote for).
I think liberal would be more of a broad term. As i said in eariler posts, he could be socially liberal but be fiscally conservative, but with a standard liberal label, he bores you with votes for abortion and national parks creation, but surprises you with suddenly being for a huge tax cut and ease of tarrifs. Such a postion could be a candidate in either party, but would be called conservative in one and liberal in another. A better approach would be to ID terms to describe such a person (and the opposite) that was neither liberal or conservative which would more readily describe the belief structure.
The media does seem to treat some people who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal as liberals, and big spenders yet socially conservative as conservative. The whole money issue is not considered part of the label at all, which it should in my opinion.
ISTM that Democrats in government and in the media generally use the term “ultra-conservative” to mean “very opposed to the Democratic position.” Racists and sexists are called “ultra-conservative,” since Democrats strongly oppose racism and sexism. But, they would also use that term for someone who strongly supports school vouchers, even though a majority of blacks support vouchers. I think they would use the same term for a too-passionate supporter of tort reform.
By “the same people” do you mean people in this thread? It sounds rather like you mean Rush Limbaugh, who has not posted here to my knowledge. The argument made by people in this thread - or at least by me, anyway - is that the way to measure media bias is where the media fits on the spectrum of the US public. Whatever Rush Limbaugh says in not relevant to my argument.
I may not be “crying the loudest”, but I happen to be the person you are interacting with here.
OK, but the discussion here is not about you personally. It is about the general tenor of the media, and as such must use generalities, which may not be valid in individual instances.
But as a practical matter, these are the people who are electing the various Republicans and Democrats to office. If there were enough of these people to have significant impact, the Republican and Democratic parties would look more like the Green or Libertarian parties than they do. Of course, there are many such people, as you say, but not nearly enough to render the broad use of terms like liberal and conservative meaningless.
Words mean what the people who use (or hear) them think they mean. It makes no difference what they should mean, what they used to mean, or any other measure. If people use liberal and conservative to indicate rough adherence to some set of political positions, we should be able to accept this meaning for purposes of discussions about such matters.
well, right above you is december complaining about democrats defining conservative as whatever the flavor of the month is! Also, if you really want to run the 10% numbers, then you have to edge out the top 10% of the media as liberal, and then attack below that number. In certain media groups, you’d be hard pressed to find enough positions to fill the 10% slot (in fact, with talk radio, you’d have to include Bill O’Reilly as one of the top 10% of liberals!). But i would find it difficult to label the media at 10%, 10% and 80% just from the arguments over how liberal certain outlets are. and since the major media is compacted into just a few companies, you’d have to broadly define one whole corperation as liberal, one whole corperation as conservative, and say the rest should all be moderate. And i can easily argue that the media in its failure to report to us what US companies are doing overseas (i.e. child labor and slave wages), coupled with the CEO lovin’ that is grossly displayed in major papers (Ken Lay was treated as a prince until the scandel.), the media loves rich conservatives and rich conservative business practices. This is an issue that affects the real world much more than how someone is labeled. (especially since, once again, links have shown labeling is not nearly as widespread as reported here)
Fair enough, but as december above points out, they aren’t using the terms for rough adherences, they are using them for anyone who disagrees with them on a particular issue (much as i pointed out earlier with the opposite side). this is why i think the linear model of liberal/conservative is flawed and currupts the whole argument of a “liberal media”
I just plugged these into google “news” tab and did the same thing and got the same numbers. However, then I actually went and looked at the top 10 links that came up for “ultraconservative”. Here is the breakdown:
1 article used it in discussing a community in the country of Jordan, and more in a social sense than a political one.
2 links were from media in Europe (and in one it appeared that “ultraconservative” was actually the name of a political party there).
1 was an editorial [in the Atlanta Constitution].
1 was a paraphrase of a claim made by Senator Schumer that was very clearly expressing his views and not those of the writer.
1 was an article on the shuttle disaster, talking about “ultraconservative” in the sense of a “conservative estimate” (thus a positive and completely apolitical sense and it was a quote at any rate).
1 is from an editorial/analysis piece at the libertarian Tech Central Station website quoting / paraphrasing / ridiculing those on the Left.
1 is a quote that regards being very careful not to violate NCAA rules.
1 is a quote from a legislator who is complaining that he was characterized as “ultraconservative” by the local newspaper in which this article appears. [It is not clear if that original characterization was in an editorial piece or an article although I’d bet on the former personally.]
1 is an actual real use of the term “ultraconservative” in a news analysis article in the Boston Globe (characterizing the editor of the Lowell Sun Nespaper) profiling the political history of John Kerry.
So, there you have it, out of the first 10 citings that came up, only 1 is a genuine use of the term by a reporter in the U.S. media characterizing someone’s political positions.
It wasn’t clear. I didn’t understand it. Neither did others. Rather than getting testy, you should have just clearly re-stated what you meant.
Sure you can. The fringe elements of republicans can be labelled conservative according to you. However, the fringe elements of the dems cannot?
Yes, Libertarian != conservative. But, libertarians are to conservatives as greens are to liberals. Because libertarians and conservatives have a lot in common it was a fair comparison to your Nader example of an “extreme liberal”.
Here is a brief rundown of the next 20 “google news” hits for “ultraconservative”:
11 were hits from an AP wire story picked up by various U.S., Canadian, and U.K. outlets in which concerned the vote in Poland on entrance to the E.U. and in which this sentence appeared:
(By the way, this quote also reminds us that the word “radical” is often used as a characterization of those on the Left, although I have noticed a recent tendency for those on the Left to use it against those on the Right too.)
Another 5 were hits to a story about Pakistan which used the term to describe the Islamic religious folks in a province there:
The other 4 used it in a similar sense to describe religious groups in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and apparently some Catholic group somewhere (I can’t get to that last week because it has expired).
By the way, if we look up “ultra-liberal” and “ultra-conservative” on the google news thing, we get 25 and 593, respectively. I suppose that we can conclude from this, the previous results, and the some of the logic in this thread that the majority trying to stuff a liberal agenda down our throats are almost equally likely to hyphenate or not hyphenate whereas those few who are trying to stuff a conservative agenda down our throats are 5 times as likely to hyphenate as not.
Oh, and if you look up “radical” and “reactionary” then you get 5460 and 353 hits, respectively. Is this a sign that media is biased in the conservative direction. [Hint: The correct answer is NO; it is probably not an indication of much of anything beyond the fact that “radical” has a wider range of meaning and uses than “reactionary”.]
since someone’s most common reply is “i don’t know what you mean” (in this thread he denied doing so, so i pointed out 8 examples from just 2 pages of a previous confrontation. 3rd post down) it is harder to discover when something is actually not as clear as it should be. But i did repeat several times that the question was answered.
Republicans are more tolerant of excepting the fringe elements into the main rank (as long as they continue to get re-elected)
i still think their differences are much more gaping than the differences between Greens and Dems. So much so, that Libs should be in an entirely different category. Religious Fascists would be a better example of a Green comparison if you want to go outside party, but there is not really one operating in the US (besides a few idiot Klansmen). And i’d hesitate to include them with conservatives (which is partially why i didn’t refer to them earlier)
If jshore wants to filter out the non-American references in his fervent googling over the term “ultraconservative”, I suggest trying “ultraconservative judge”. That one draws 1,720 hits to 323 for “ultraliberal judge” (and most references seem to be about American judges).
“ultraconservative senator” yields 1,610 hits (339 for “ultraliberal senator”).
There are similar striking margins in favor of references to “archconservative” (senator, congressman, judge, politician etc.) over “archliberal”.
Oh, of course all this is totally (ssh!) meaningless. But it’s sort of fun.
Please quit trying to make this personal. The reality is that you chose to make a point in a cryptic fashion. You could have said “I consider Jesse Helms an ultraconservative.” Or, you could have said “I consider Jesse Helms an ultraconservative because he supports confederate organizations.” But you didn’t – for reasons only known to you.
People here can read your posts, but not your mind. When you post stuff that’s unclear, vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant, you run the risk that people will reply that they don’t understand your point. You might ask yourself whether the problem might really lie in the way you have chosen to express yourself.
**
So what? Instead of clarifying yourself, you chose to simply insist that you had already answered the question. You could have said something like “I already answered the question, although I concede my answer could have been clearer. What I meant was that I consider Jesse Helms a conservative.” But you chose not to – for reasons only known to you.
And by the way, it appears that you still haven’t answered my earlier question:
Why won’t you concede that you were attacking a strawman?
The 10% number was an example, for illustrative purposes. I was trying to illustrate that - whatever the particular number is - you have to have a balanced and objective scale. The media itself is a spectrum much as the US population is. The question is how the media spectrum compares to the overall population. I and others would say it is skewed further to the left. One indication of this is the comparison of “extreme” or “far” references. The imbalance here is an indication that on the media spectrum politicians are more apt to be on the extreme right end of the spectrum than they are on the public opinion spectrum (as indicated by the success of the “extremists” in winning elections.
Again, all I was saying is that if you want to compare when the use of the term extremist is appropriate, you have to use the same percentage of the distribution from both ends of the scale (in contrast to what you were doing). I am not saying that 10% is a hard and fast number. (Nor have I made any claims about the media having a 10/80/10 breakdown - not sure where you picked that up from).
Well you could argue that but you would be engaging in more of the same - fighting a debate by redefining the terms. It is true that the conservative philosophy is more business friendly than the liberal one. But this does not imply that on an individual level conservatives are more apt to support corruption by CEOs than liberals (much as liberals would prefer to think otherwise). Ken Lay himself is evidence of this.
It is not at all clear that the media have failed to report on what US corporations have done overseas - I seem to recall various reports about such issues. I think what you really mean is that the media have not harangued on it as much as certain liberals might prefer. But here again, you have to compare it to the public at large. Is there enough public interest to sustain a campaign about these issues? I think not. So the media might be more “conservative” in reporting about these types of corporate sins than you would prefer, but you can’t really make a case that they are more conservative than the public about these issues.
No contradiction here. The term implies rough adherence. It can sometimes be used to for “anyone who disagrees” etc. The meaning of the term is unchanged.
Again, the basic premise is that the media is, in sum, skewed to the left as compared to the overall population. Arguing over the precise meaning of the terms “liberal” and such is obscuring the point.
I would argue that in fact the exact opposite is true.
To be successful with the masses, the Republicans have abandoned the more fringe elements of what they stand for. Bush keeps away from the abortion issue. His tax cuts have been small. He hasn’t cut the budget as much as I expected him to.
Meanwhile the Democrats choose Nancy Pelosi as thier leader. She is certainly in the 10% fringe that we are talking about. She is on the extreme liberal side of the party and she is now leading it.
My very superficial Google search was certainly not meant to be rigorous, and thanks for doing the analysis. Although I will point out that if your one-in-thirty of valid uses of the terms “ultraliberal” vs. “ultraconservative” holds true for all the references, use of “ultraconservative” outnumbers “ultraliberal” by about 18 to 1.
There have been more than one analysis done to compare labeling of conservatives vs. liberals, and the consistent result is that the media tends to label conservatives far more than liberals. I can try to dig up the cites if you like.
I did discover a few examples of the sort of thing I am talking about, along with lots of other interesting quotes. Such as -
And now for something completely different - some nice, objective reporting on the complex issues that we face.
But don’t worry, the media is quite sure their background and experience does not lead to bias -
Of course, we always have PBS there for balance -
I can’t find anywhere where Moyers referred to Democrats having “monopoly control” of the government after the elections of 1992.
Foreign policy is always an area where the media is scrupulously fair and accurate to Republicans -
This one isn’t really about political bias, but it is too deliciously
stupid to miss:
Bush quietly told to surpreme court to leave alone a case dealing with abortion, and is a supporter of banning stem cell research and partial birth abortions. He has not left the issue alone. He has not proposed an overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, that is true, but the administration’s stance on abortion is hardly up for debate.
Not by his work. Snowe, Voinavech, and the Dems deserve the credit for chopping down the huge tax cuts.
Once you get the pot it is hard to put the lid back on.
A better arguement for your side would be that Bush has actually expanded the federal government and it’s powers, the opposite of what his party stands for.
Tom Delay would make a good counter to her, since he is a crazy fool as well. he tells poor people they ain’t getting a tax break, tried to redistrict his home state so repbulicans would get more seats (then helped get the federal governemtn involved in hunting down the texas legislatures), called unions that demand basic labor rights “undermining national security”.
Bush is just what Clinton was, a moderate. and the Media, like it spun clinton as a Liberal, is spinning Bush as a conservative. But you don’t see Bush running from Bob Jones university, for example. They wait until someone becomes an embarassment to them (like Dachell did) before they do something about the looney fringe. democrats picking Pelosi is more of a reaction of trying new tactics because running the center wasn’t working. Plus when your party has as few good leaders as that party does, you pick them where you can. (granted, they still are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, but at least in a straight line now)
They hardly address it at all. Only when it affects a celebrity (Kathi Lee) or riots occur in said country do we here about it, and then usually not in an expose of conditions but as a throwaway line explaining why Argentina is burning.
Well, then if this arguement follows, then there must be a public interest for the media to be liberally biased, otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable! And you can make a case, it follows the same logic as the “ultraconservative” line of thought, if you look for “factory conditions” reports you find little in the mainstream while “corporate earnings” gets their own network (MSNBC)
if the point is the media is liberal, then isn’t it a good idea to define what liberal is? otherwise i could say the media is orangutaun because i’m using a different definition of orangutaun than you are using… Plus if you want to prove an overall media bias you have to look at the entire media, and can’t simply ignore the business section.
Good of Tars to remind us of this comment by Al Gore last year.
Merriam-Webster online defines “fifth column” as “a group of secret sympathizers or supporters of an enemy that engage in espionage or sabotage within defense lines or national borders.”
Al got off relatively lightly for making this profoundly stupid and inflammatory remark. Imagine the uproar if a failed Republican presidential candidate had referred to left-wing voices in the major media as traitors or spies for enemies of the United States.
Also, what were you intending to prove with the Fox News story about Al Gore wanting to start a news network? I thought you had posted earlier about how biased towards conservatives Fox was.
You did notice, did you not, that about half the article to which you linked was about Murdoch and his expansion of his news operation - and that an opponent of that expansion was quoted directly?
