That would be absolutely true, if you could make a case that public interest is driving the liberal bias. But it would be a stretch even for a liberal - to believe that the average American watching the nightly news is watching it in order to get the liberal perspective on things, for example. (Also it makes no sense, considering the comparison of the media to the public, as previous). It makes a lot more sense to assume that the liberal bias is just not egregious enough so as to make that people can’t take it (combined with a dearth of alternatives). Although the widespread perception of liberal bias (this concept has had a lot of traction over the years) and the success of the Fox network does suggest that people would prefer a bit less bias if possible.
I’m not sure what this means in the context of our discussion. But in any event, I will note that there is also a lot more coverage of the goings on with cultural celebrities than there is of factory conditions. To just randomly compare things makes no sense. For your specific comparison I would point out that the state of corporate earnings has a far more direct and immediate impact on the vast majority of Americans than Third World factory conditions. To expect parity in coverage - and to use the lack of parity as proof of any sort of “bias” - is simply rediculous.
You could. In fact, that is remarkably similar to what you are actually doing.
My point is that you have to deal with what you know people mean, rather than get bogged down in hypertechnical discussions of the “true” meaning of words. People talk about liberal media and everyone knows what they mean. You should be able to debate this meaning in a straightforward manner. What you (& others) are doing is seizing on the use of the word “liberal” and trying to obscure the issue by debating the true meaning of the word liberal and debating whether this is appropriate for the media. A nice game, for some people.
This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Conservatives find little drips and drops in the news like this, and get all hyper about “liberal bias” and expect us to ignore Fox and Clear Channel spewing conservative bullshit 24/7 like fire hoses.
:rolleyes:
Agreed. Bush’s stance isn’t up for debate. But, he isn’t making it a priority, or even pushing this issue at all.
Somewhat, but Bush could have been much more aggressive. He is simply cutting them as much as he can without causing to much of a stir.
Agreed.
I agree with your thoughts that Bush and Clinton are both basically centrists. I would add that Clinton is more liberal and Bush is more conservative then they let on. It was/is for strategy reasons that they move more towards the center, IMO.
I don’t think that picking Pelosi was a tactical move the way you describe, however. It’s symptomatic of how out of touch with most Americans the Democrat party is right now that they would choose her as the leader. It also fairly represents the fact that the democrats have gotten more liberal overall while the republicans have moved towards the center. This explains why the dems have been loosing elections.
It’s funny that someone mentions time magazine. I don’t usually read this, but I picked up the issue in the gym last night and read it for 30 minutes.
Holy liberal bias, Batman!
I don’t know if it was the latest issue or not, the cover story was about Saddam’s sons. That article was balanced. It basically just talked about the bad things they had done and how much of this is just coming out now that the people aren’t afraid to come forward with stories about them.
However, the first half dozen artilcles were hugely anti-Bush, extremely biased pieces. All were little one or two page deals. There was no attempt to even hide the fact that Bush was evil in their opinion. Bush’s tax cuts will destroy the economy and hurt working families, etc. Anyone who just reads quickly through the first paragraph of every article in that magazine would not be able to deny the obvious liberal bias of it.
Actually, this is exactly what I have been talking about.
You simply dismiss all the evidence out of hand. Not refute, not discuss - just delete it without addressing it, even in passing.
But you supply no evidence at all of what you claim is happening “24/7” - that Fox News is “spewing conservative bullshit”.
So far, there has been only one cite from Fox News, which was a relatively balanced piece, reporting Gore’s desire to set up a news network, and balancing it off with roughly equal coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s desire to expand his own news organizations. Notice also that there was a quote from an opponent of Murdoch, but none at all from any opponent of Gore.
So if you would have us believe that Fox is such a cesspool of bias, you will have to supply something at least slightly on topic if you expect to be taken seriously.
Repeated, dogmatic assertions prove nothing. You’re spouting off, with nothing to back you up. Stop doing that; it makes you look stupid.
You will also need to show that one TV network being somewhat right of center is conclusive proof that practically all the others - CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. - are not left of center. It is silly to pretend that one network to the right offsets a half-dozen to the left.
For heaven’s sake, I provided you with side-by-side quotes showing that the mainstream media used the announcement of a Vice-Presidental candidate as an occasion to get in a plug for the Democrats, and a dig for the Republicans. Address that, instead of just deleting it and complaining about something you can’t prove.
I never listened to Clear Channel. If your point is that AM talk radio opinion shows which are conservative are more successful than those that are liberal, I doubt anyone will disagree. This is largely due to the success of Rush Limbaugh, who chose AM radio because it was cheap. He has been a huge, overwhelming success, because he identified a target market that has not been served - radio that is not skewed exclusively to the Left. NPR seems to have that market pretty well sewed up, and they have been around much longer than Rush.
On the other hand, NPR needs government subsidies and pledge drives to keep it going. Rush, on the other hand, is popular enough to make it on his own. See if you can figure out what that tells you about whose ideas have a wider appeal, and who is more out of touch with the American center.
(and boo to Fox news where i first saw this story for eliminating their in-site search engine) Shodan
Yeah there was, i even quoted it in my post! This just goes down as more evidence that you are seeing “liberal” bias as anything that you disagree with, while someone in a news article insulting Gore is “fair and balanced.”
[quote] Originally posted by IzzyR
That would be absolutely true, if you could make a case that public interest is driving the liberal bias. But it would be a stretch even for a liberal - to believe that the average American watching the nightly news is watching it in order to get the liberal perspective on things, for example. (Also it makes no sense, considering the comparison of the media to the public, as previous). It makes a lot more sense to assume that the liberal bias is just not egregious enough so as to make that people can’t take it (combined with a dearth of alternatives). Although the widespread perception of liberal bias (this concept has had a lot of traction over the years) and the success of the Fox network does suggest that people would prefer a bit less bias if possible.
[quote]
I think had the bias been so rampant an alternative would have shown up much earlier and been very successful. If everyone knows the media is liberal, then why would conservatives just sit around and do nothing about it? Since most of them have money, they would have started dozens of media to counter the threat. No one did anything for the longest time because they knew the argument was just a lie used to drum up the faithful and a good excuse to blame others for failure.
factory conditions including wages are a major component of many companies earnings statements. the whole issue is glossed over and ignored in favor of showing the bottom line so Joe Sixpack can feel good about his 2 shares of stock. I will argue this is not the liberal stance, therefore there is a huge chunk of the media where the liberal label does not apply.
it seems you are just dismissing it with a wave of your hand as unimportant, while i am trying to argue that the lack of liberal bias there can be extended to other areas and goes against the foundation of the media bias label. Or am i misinterpeting your argument?
Where those just the Op-ed pieces? if so, i could point our a few newpapers that would make you say “Holy Conservative bias, Batman!” I don’t read Time much since i don’t care for much of their coverage so i can’t recall if they mix Op-ed pieces throughout the magazine or not.
At the risk of not letting sleeping threads lie, I did really want to respond to a few things here.
Yes, but I think you miss the bigger picture here. The point is that you guys got to choose the words and this was supposed to be some big piece of evidence of liberal bias. Well, what we have seen is that to the extent that “ultraliberal” appears in reporting on U.S. politics less often than “ultraconservative”, that just seems to mirror use in the popular lexicon. More than likely, words other than “ultraliberal” are used to describe the far left. And, in fact, the use in the popular lexicon seems to swamp the use in terms of U.S. politics (at least in reporting), so it is not a big player anyway. It’s like making a big deal about the fact that more people are killed by being hit in the head by golf balls than by Frisbees…This might be the case but neither is an important player in our public safety.
So consistent that I already provided two links to an analysis made that found the reverse. Here they are again:
As for the stuff you grab from Media Research Center, this is just a lot of selective data mining where they take quotes out of context and say, “See, doesn’t this look biased.” I’ll admit that to a certain degree, that is what FAIR does on the other side. But, to FAIR’s credit, at least they do more sometimes—such as presenting some fairly hard data (percent of guest on network shows the were pro- vs. anti-war, for example) and actually demonstrating cases where things are said that are not just biased presentations in their view but are at actual variance with the facts (such as how the networks reported the inspectors getting “kicked out of Iraq” in 1998…Or reporting the allegations of spies on the UNSCOM team as if they were just the claims by a nutty dictator when they were in fact well-documented as being true, sometimes in stories that appeared back in '99 in the very same media outlet).
Here’s a couple of more specific comments on a few of your examples:
And this quote from Stephenopoulos is worse than the idea of a network run by Republican hack Roger Ailes considering itself to be “fair and balanced”?? At least Stephanopoulos has only one show and not a whole freakin’ network in his control.
Wow, I am shocked to find that the guy who is perhaps the single most left-wing person who has a show on any major TV or radio media outlet (can you think of anyone else?) has actually said something in what even MRC admits was a “commentary” that seems to have somewhat of a left-of-center bias! Why, one would never find such a thing in the other direction on something like O’Reilly’s show…something like this for example:
Note that in contrast to being clearly a commentary, this was Bill O’Reilly in “fair and balanced” mode, kindly discussing how his show is going to present “both sides”.
Yes, but this leaves me a bit confused. I mean, what are you proposing they do? Simply censor the news and not cover the story of the election in Iraq at all? Or, do they have to use the word “sham” in every single sentence in which they mention the election in order for it to be “unbiased” in the mind of you and MRC?
You provided no evidence, by the way, that the actual segment did not basically say the election was a sham, as I imagine it did. And, I imagine that “teaser” line on the website might have been written a bit tongue in cheek. And, my guess is that if you surveyed the American public on the question of whether Saddam ran free and fair elections in Iraq, you would get the factually correct answer to that question much more often than you would get a factually correct answer to a question like “Is there any well-established connection between Saddam and the September 1th hijackings?” or “Is there strong independent evidence backing Saddam’s claim in 1998 that the inspection team contained U.S. spies?” So, I don’t really see how the media is misleading the public in the direction that you seem to think they are being mislead. Quite the opposite.
After reading the MRC’s take on climate change science here, I can start to better understand their tendency to see bias in reporting. If you are completely out-to-lunch on where the science actually is, I suppose you can get really confused on what constitutes bias in reporting on such an issue.
No, quite the contrary. I’m saying there is no liberal bias, and there never was.
The news is the news: US Coalition Invades Iraq, Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Abortion Case, Osama Bin Laden Tapes Released To Media, whatever – an awful lot of the content of our news media is ideologically neutral, as it should be. The notion that there has been this overwhelming ideological bias to the way news is reported is conservative nonsense. I am sure SOME news has been spun in a conservative way, and SOME news has been spun in a liberal way all along, but overall I don’t think “working the refs” has worked too well for anybody until the Fairness in Media Act (IIRC) was dumped.
That along with the FCC decision allowing more media concentration is going to change the landscape of news reporting – and not for the better. Let’s just say that reporters have long felt themselves superior to PR flacks. Five to ten years down the road, I don’t see that there’s gonna be a lot of difference between the two professions.
Shodan writes: “On the other hand, NPR needs government subsidies and pledge drives to keep it going. Rush, on the other hand, is popular enough to make it on his own.”
And the Times, the Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN are also popular enough to be profitable without subsidies. So there must be people reading these papers and watching these networks who are satisifed with the way they report the news. That is, people other than flaming liberals.
What I mean to say is that it’s a competive, capitalist system. We choose which paper to buy. If an auto maker chose to make only two-seat roadsters, would you say they have a bias? No, you would say they found a market for two-seat roadsters, they found enough people to buy them. And Dan Rather has found people who want to watch his newscast. So maybe he is in touch with middle America.
I’d also like to ask, as much out of curiosity as anything else, when this supposed liberal bias developed. Did the media always suffer from a liberal bias?
I don’t know if those two words are the most representative either.
But, at any rate, all we have again is some undocumented claim that did a search for the words without looking at whether they appeared in a reporting context or elsewhere.
So, if it were shown to you that as a general matter, conservative American organizations were referred to as “far left” more frequently than liberal organizations were referred to as “far right,” you would not concede that this is evidence of liberal media bias?
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It seems to me that out of context occurrences would tend to balance eachother out.
Well, it would depend on the organizations in question. It is conceivable that it could be one weak example of liberal bias in a much larger sea of conservative bias. [And, as I noted, the degree of bias that exists probably depends on the issue. The media probably has something closer to a “libertarian bias” … i.e. , left of center on social issues and right of center on economic ones. Although, coupled in with this, espcially since Sept 11th seems to be a bias in favor of naively believing whatever government officials…especially Administration officials…tell us.]
I still think it is much more important what things the American public is hearing about and what they aren’t hearing about at all, how often think tanks on the left and right are quoted, and whether Americans are systematically misinformed about things in a liberal or a conservative direction. As I pointed out, in the case of Iraq, it seems quite obvious to me that people are misinformed in ways that favor the Administration’s point-of-view. Now, this may have to do with the success of propaganda from the Administration but I think it is the media’s job to help keep us grounded in the facts and not off in some la-la land of unreality due to barrages of propaganda.
This is an extremely simple-minded argument. “Since most of them have money”? Oh, so most conservatives are a bunch of fat-cat rich guys, sitting around looking for ways to spend their money in favor of conservative causes. Right.
Actually, most wealthy people are primarily devoted to their own wealth - the extent to which most people are willing to gamble large amounts of money on ideological causes is limited. And although the media has a liberal bias, at the top levels it is very entrenched, and any new entry seeking to take on the three networks is going to have a high likelihood of failure. (Murdoch succeeded against the odds, with Fox). Similarly, the NYT and WP have reputations that go back a long long time - it would not be easy to displace them.
Further, I would also note that the very reasons for the liberal bias at major media outlets - the overwhelming liberal sentiment of the vast majority of people in the reporting business - is a severe obstacle to anyone trying to establish an unbiased or even neutral outfit. Whereas the liberal bias will flow naturally from the inclinations of a random cast of employees, establishing a neutral or conservative bias would require heavy-handed interference in hiring or editorial control. Not an easy task.
The fact that Fox News has been as successful as it has been suggests that there is indeed a market for an outlet that is not liberal, but it is not reasonable to imply that the existence of liberal bias should cause many conservative competitors.
I am not trying to argue that business reporting reflects a liberal bias - I would say it is pretty much neutral. Factory conditions including wages are not covered because they are not of interest to the readership.
I am not dismissing anything with a wave of my hand. In fact, I tend to regard your focus on business reporting as being something of a hand-waving job in it’s own right, as you have not really established any conservative bias, and seem to be relying on a general attitude that “business = conservative” to get you through. You’ve made two actual points here; that corporate villains are lionized and that factory conditions are downplayed. I’ve responded directly to both points.
I was considering asking you what evidence it would take to demonstrate liberal media bias, but you seem to agree that there is in fact liberal media bias, at least on social issues. I have no idea whether the media is conservatively biased on economic issues. Certainly, in my experience, the media does not seem to support tax increases in the way that it supports gun control.
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Ok, but this is a different criticism of the media separate from this issue of liberal (or conservative) bias. And it may have merit.