reviews when it first came out, then in What Liberal Media, then also in a quick Google search while making sure he had little to no cites before i posted.
Shodan
So give some examples.
No, Your MRC site is from a page dedicated to eliminating the “liberal media” and their definition was not forthcoming, and all i got from their site was that liberal referrs to anyone they disagree with. Moderate is not in their vocabluary. But i’ll excuse you for not checking your cites.
Then buy hooked on phonics. It can’t be clearer what i meant.
no, you are mistaken:
Democrat or liberal <-----------------------
Republican or conservative
Lean to Democrat/liberal <--------------------------
Lean to Republican/conservative
Independent
Notice Democrat/liberal is one choice. Notice Republican/conservative is one choice. if i was a liberal Republican i wouldn’t know what to pick. The survey is meaningless. Reading. try it.
Yes, the spelling arguement. excuse me while i yawn at your intellectual superiority, oh, ye of little reading comprehension.
You are making the Liberal claim. So back it up or shut up. End of story.
here is a cite that disproves one of Goldberg’s claims: http://whatliberalmedia.com/apndx_2.htm
I have checked up on some of Alterman’s claims, and they have all checked out so far, but he has like 40 pages of cites and there is no way i have time to check them all to see if he is lying. He does make a strong case despite being a liberal himself.
I did link to the article, but if you are registered and you click on the link, it will redirect you to the page asking you to register.
I agree that they have an agenda. As I noted in my first post, FAIR “criitiques the media from a liberal perspective”. [This is a more direct disclosure than Shodan made when he cited lots of stuff from the Media Research Center without noting their right-wing perspective.] But, as far as I know, they don’t just make things up. So, the point holds that those looking from a left-of-center perspective can see lots of cases of right-wing bias in the media.
Can yuo give me some real-life examples of politicians you would consider liberal Republicans, within the meaning you mention above – that is, faced with a survey that said: “I am a Democrat/liberal or a Republican/conservative,” can you name some people that you believe would be stymied in their choice?
While I grant that the parties do not divide themselves neatly into two areas, for the purposes of this discussion, which is about supposed media bias, I can’t imagine that the bias divides neatly either. So what qualities does a Democrat have, and what qualities does a liberal have? What are the defining characteristics of each?
The answers to this question would certainly go a good ways towards making clearer for me your objection to the cite’s authority.
I suppose that it is handy to assume that all opposition to the administration is “liberal,” but in a country in which the Right is dominant, I keep seeing the center called “liberal” and “Left” and it certainly does not align with my perceptions of political positions.)
This is an important point which probably deserves its own thread. Conservatives have been trying to shift public opinion rightward by consistently identifying middle-of-the-road opinion as liberal or leftist. Frex, the idea that we should get our allies and the U.N. with us before invading Iraq isn’t really a leftist idea, it’s a MOR idea, but anything short of mindless support for the war has been so relentlessly castigated as liberal that it’s been identified as such in the minds of many.
It would be interesting to look at a lot of centrist positions and see how they are identified by the Admin. My bet is that the Pubbies are using their media clout to quietly tilt the playing field in their favor.
FAIR doesn’t exactly make things up, but some of their arguments are wildly stretched. Several years ago, they blasted Rush Limbaugh for a report he gave about an alleged trip to Cuba made by Chelsea Clinton’s class. Limbaugh responded that the story was well sourced. He had gotten it from CBS News.
Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR, then published a letter in the Wall Street Journal. Rather than apologize for his incorrect criticism, Cohen’s letter quibbled that Limbaugh’s source was a CBS news service, rather the CBS News evening show. Unmentioned in Cohen’s letter was the fact that Limbaugh had a sound source and Chelsea’s class trip had indeed occurred.
december, it might help us see where exactly you draw the Liberal/Conservative line if you could tell us which major media sources you consider to be, not left or right, but moderate. Or do you label all media that is not conservative to a fault to be liberal?
[Edited to fix coding. And yes, I e-mailed myself to ask me to do it:) -Czarcasm]
tomndebb, you’re correct that Pew in its conclusions stressed the negatives in examining world views of the U.S. (which is a subject for questions of another kind), but there is no excuse for a major news outlet like the Times skimming the surface in order to have the best possible ammo to hurl at the Administration.
If favorable views of America improve from 34% to 60% in Italy, or 48% to 70% in Britain, with the only interim event of note being the invasion of Iraq, that’s news. Even if you don’t headline it, you mention it. Even the marginal improvement in Russia (not exactly our “traditional friend”) might be worthy of discussion.
jshore, you need to clarify who it is you are quoting when you quote multiple people in the same post. Whoever made that statement about FAIR and its agenda, it wasn’t me.
My impression of some of the media that are moderate would include:
– Christian Science Monitor
– Wall Street Journal news (although their opinion page is very conservative)
– USA Today news.
– USA Today opinion columns. (Their editorials veer a bit left, but their op-eds are well balanced.)
– MSNBC
No doubt there are many others. I’m not an expert on all media.
No, it isn’t news, if it is a temporary backswing from a much stronger movement in the opposite direction. 48% to 70% is not a real improvement when the original position was much more favorable. As was pointed out already, Britain started out at 83%, and even 75% last summer. That still makes 70% a significant decrease in support. The fact that it was much worse when the conduct of the US administration on the international stage was at its worst doesn’t change that fact a bit. It merely shows the difference between short-term and long-term developments. Citing Italy, by the way, is awfully misleading. Given the influence the government exerts over large parts of the media there, polls have to be analysed extremely carefully.
If people like Tars Tarkas are going to dismiss my cites without (apparently) reading them, let me request that any claims from the other side of the aisle come with better references than FAIR.
These are the people who claim that their surveys are balanced and accurate. Why? Because they have been told this by unimpeachable sources - like Greenpeace, Ralph Nader, the Fund for a Feminist Majority, and UC-Berkeley. :rolleyes: Cite.
Color me underwhelmed.
I think this is a large part of the problem. Media types often genuinely do not think they are biased; they believe that their opinions are obviously true. Since so few of their colleagues fail to share their opinions, they are rarely or never challenged to defend or to think thru those opinions, and feel that they must be centrist - everyone else they know agrees with them. And, since the media thrives on conflict, they tend to have contact only with the more extreme types with which they disagree, it becomes that much easier to dismiss everyone who does not vote Democratic as a fringe thinker.
They consider what they say to be self-evidently true. Therefore, in order to make it clear to the rest of us, they will resort to distortions or outright lies and fakery to get their point across.
FWIW, I ran a quick Yahoo news search and found several other stories on that Pew report, including several from the AP and one from USA Today. None of them included the particular nugget that Jackmannii insists demonstrates the NYT’s liberal bias. Instead, they all went with the summary provided by the report itself: World opinion of the U.S. has dramatically declined since before the war (i.e., a year ago), and the fall is most dramatic in predominantly Muslim countries.
What we have here appears to be nothing more than lazy reporting, regurgitating Pew’s summary without scouring the report itself for any other interesting nuggets. That’s hardly unusual–reproters uncritically report on research studies, by partisan and nonpartisan groups alike, all the time. It says much more about their laziness than it does about their supposed liberal reporting bias.
My brother used to be a reporter, and he claims to have discovered “Scylla’s brother’s law of repertorial integrity.”
Briefly stated this law suggests that a reporter’s willingness to accept at face value a press release is in direct relation to the number of goodies and food that reporter is given at the press conference.
One of the most ingenious recent examples was the deck of “Iraq’s Most Wanted” playing cards.
Apparently everybody at the conference got a deck of these.
Free goodies like this evaporate skeptical instincts and make jaded reporters go “oooooooo, playing cards!”
They then accept and report everything they are told at face value.
The Bush administration could make the current controversy completely disapear by handing out “weapons of mass desruction erector sets” at the next press conference.
The point of this spluttery little disjointed response escapes me.
If you want to ignore the newsworthiness of the poll data I mentioned because it doesn’t serve the cause of dumping Bush, feel free.
I worked as a reporter for a number of years, and after awhile it’s not at all difficult to recognize the line between fairness with a recognizable point of view, as opposed to indoctrination. (I wish I could say that disgust with bias was what caused me to quit the news business, but it was the atrocious hours and low pay).
And noticing that several other major outlets ignored the recent rebound in poll numbers is, um, a little embarassing for the position that no anti-Bush bias is involved. That’s an awful lot of convenient “sloppiness”.
From OliverH: **
Hats off gentlemen, we are in the presence of a psychic.**
I see. Italians don’t think for themselves, unless they’re coming out with opinions of which you approve. :rolleyes:
If the media was EVER liberally biased then they were quite incompetent in pushing their agenda.
How many liberal presidents have they managed to get into the White House?
JFK was a CONSERVATIVE democrat who ooposed teh civil rights movement and SUPPORTED the Viet nam war/conflict.
Nixon?I think it is safe to say he was conservative.
Jimmy Carter was a CONSERVATIVE democrat and also ran on that platform.
Ronald Reagan?Again, I am going to go out on a limb and say he leaned to the right(/sarcasm)
Bush I?(See Reagan)
Clinton?Okay, I wouldn’t call him a liberal per se but since he is so hated by rich people and the brainwashed children of people who did not graduate from high school but know that "He’s bad ‘cuz that Rush feller’ say’s he bad ‘n’ that Rush feller is a whol;e heapa laughs!"that I will grant you this one.
Bush II (aka “Shrub”)?
It seems to me that the conservatives should be insisting on MORE liberal media bias if they believe that’s what has been happening!
Actually it is nothing more than propaganda.“If you tell a lie often enough, it will become truth”.ABC/NBC/CBS may have employed people who voted democrat but no honesdt person can actually look at the newscasts of people like Dan Rather adn the like and say they were being less than fair in their news reporting.I never heard Ted Koppel report that “Anti-choice nazis had bombed another clinic because they are inspired by evil fundemntalist values”.I never heard Rather report “Anti-gun control types oppose the legislation because they are incapable of rational thought” or anything like that.Groups like the MEdia Research Center assert that anyone NOT promoting the right wing spin MUST be promoting the left wing agenda.
I can tune into any of three dozen prominent conservative radio and TV personalities every day if I wanted and yet there is not a single liberal equivalent anywhere on the air(ok we used to have Tom Leykus but he decided he would rather get laid than talk politics anymore)!!
Watching Fox News was until recently was like watching a rousing game of The Seven Degrees of Bill Clinton, where the object is to name a promblem or crisis in the world(or make one up) and link it in seven degrees or less to Bill Clinton.During the Michael Newdow pledge thing I half expected the FNN weatherman to come out and forecast that it would rain frogs because of God’s wrath for the atheists taking his name out of the pledge!
They have since let up a slight bit on Clinton since they are so entrencehed by Shrub exploiting the 9/11 disaster to keep people’s attention off of the economy and various civil liberties violations his admin. is commiting.Still a quite Orwellian entity though.
Color me underwhelmed by your reading comprehension. The study was endorsed by the groups that you mentioned; in particular, the words used are
Nowhere does it say that these groups are the ones that were relied upon for the data in the study (which actually pretty much speaks for itself) or to determine whether it was balanced or not.
I’ll also note that your list of their endorsers was rather selective and left off, for example, the two people from journalism schools.
But, I’ll make you a deal, people can read the info from your cite from a conservative perspective and they can read the cites from FAIR with a liberal perspective and they can decide for themselves which evidence of media bias is more convincing.
The point is that all you’re doing is complaining that the media is biased unless the news is reported exactly the way you want it to be. You data mined that report until you found something that looks contrary to what was reported in the story, and you blew it up into purported evidence of left-wing media bias, even though the study itself said next to nothing about your data point and it doesn’t in any way contradict the broad conclusion, reported by both the study and the news article, that world opinion of the United States is in the toilet.
Once again, we’re back to “It’s biased because Jackmannii says so.” The flaw in that argument ought to be obvious, but perhaps not.
Nonsense. What it shows is that nobody thought your data-mined point was newsworthy. You choose to see that as evidence of the Great Liberal Media Hive Mind Conspiracy. I believe it is better explained by lazy reporting, comparative lack of newsworthiness as opposed to the big picture that we’re in the toilet with Muslim nations and much of the rest of the world, and (as tom~ pointed out) lack of data.
I took a look at the report because somebody linked to it in another thread about perceptions of Bush abroad, and it took maybe 30 seconds to spot the conflicting data, right where the meat of the report begins.
It doesn’t require any particular diligence to spot something that newsworthy, merely a willingness to report with a degree of fairness. The Times, in particular, prides itself on being a newspaper of record (slogan from their website: “Can You Afford To Be Uninformed?”). The producers of a Yahoo! news summary might be able to get away with saying that they’re merely regurgitating a press release; a major national newspaper cannot use that excuse.
And you can howl all you want about how I’ve suddenly morphed into a Bush partisan, all because I don’t want to see the news pages misused for political purposes. It’s this sort of dementedly partisan attitude that keeps the O’Reillys and Limbaughs in business, and contributes to the likelihood that we’ll have to endure another four years of GWB.