But it was so fat, and juicy, and waiting to be said…
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you denying that the tendency to paint conservative politicians as more extreme is evidence of liberal media bias?
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Well, I’m reasonably comfortable with my own critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, I’m not as comfortable with the critical thinking skills of many of my countrymen. Anyway, if a reporter writes a biased piece when he or she is supposed to be neutral, I find it inherently annoying.
I’m a little skeptical but I’ll give it some thought. In any event, it doesn’t seem to address my point, which is that conservatives are more likely to be described in extreme terms.
:eek:
:rolleyes:
From what I have seen, what conservatives are complaining about is that liberal ideas and opinions sometimes are expressed in news stories – wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened WRT to conservative ideas and opinions now and then.
Their other complaint is that liberal ideas and opinions exist at all on opinion pages, along with conservative ideas and opinions.
Whereas liberals are complaining that conservatives have whole NETWORKS which are clearly dominated by conservative owners and operators and are openly dedicated to promoting conservative ideas and viewpoints (i.e., Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, esp. Faux News, and the Clear Channel radio network).
Anybody else see a certain IMBALANCE here?
While I think there is truth to the fact that the debate in the U.S. is very skewed to the right relative to the rest of the world (and, in fact, this may be in part a result of our corporate media!), I noted specifically how FAIR found that reporters were often to the right of the general public on economic issues, so if they are injecting any bias into their reporting on these issues it would likely be in that direction (even before we factor in the effect of their superiors and owners in the corporate media world who are undoubtably further to the right than the general public on economic issues).
Speaking of issues with reading comprehension! Was there something about the phrase “probably tend to correlate strongly” that threw you off. Or did you just want to make a characature of my claim?
Well, if there is a report on a bill to mandate the teaching of creationism alongside of evolution, should the reporter quote a PhD biologist who believes in creationism? There are several out there.
Like I said, I don’t know if the link between cancer and abortion is at that level or not. But, I don’t see a priori why a reporter has to provide both sides of a scientific debate if there is really no real debate in the scientific community. (And, by “no real debate”, I don’t mean complete unanimity…as there certainly isn’t this on evolution.)
But, I don’t see a priori why a reporter has to provide both sides of a scientific debate if there is really no real debate in the scientific community.
Good point. In fact, there’s a journalistic technique that I call “bogus balance” that would call for exactly what you object to – you simply present “both” sides of an issue and ignore whether or not one side of the issue is totally uncredible, just plain wrong or lying their asses off, or as often the case, all three.
If the vast majority of medical researchers believe the link between abortion and breast cancer is so remote as to be totally bogus, then it’s important to make that point. Anything short of that is essentially lying.
I agree with you in general, and I think I agree that the alleged link between cancer and abortion isn’t accepted knowledge. However, the editor may have been pointing out that the reporter ought to have a found a more direct way of convey that information, rather than use rhetorical tricks.
OK, fine. Let me revise my remark: "Right, because if you’re anti-abortion you are most likely a provincial rube. :rolleyes: "
Better?**
Show me a biologist with a PhD from a reputable educational institution who believes that. (I’m assuming that by “creationism” you mean a literal seven-day creation, and not simply divine authorship via evolutionary processes).
And that’s hardly the case here. While a great many researchers don’t believe such a link exists, some credible researchers do. A reporter can indicate that the great weight of scientific authorities agree with one position without totally minimizing the other. Here is a Web MD article that does exactly that.
How does that WebMD article do any different? The last paragraph describes a dissenter:
It seems to me that Brind is portrayed as agenda driven here as well. Maybe both articles do that because the “pro-counselling” side is agenda driven.
(sorry thats the 2nd last para from D C U’s link)
Probably because the extreme conservatives are usually on TV making a fuss, while the extreme liberals are out protesting the IMF or World Bank. your earlier definition of ultra-liberal seems to support my eariler point that conservatives see anyone who disagrees with them as liberal.
The Media is Money biased, plain and simple. Currently the big money makers are idiot scary conservatives like Mike Savage because their shock value is ratings gold. Luckily there isn’t a Democrat in power or every network would have these guys 24/7. Individual reporters may have their say in small scale, but any big stories can get vetoed by their bosses, especially when it will hurt a sponser. If the media was truely liberally biased, there would be plenty of anti-World Bank stories, plenty of third world workers making $0.03 a day stories, and Bush would have devil horns and a tail added by CGI.
On a completely different note, would anyone here support a thread where we went over the various US senators and broke down their political beliefs? I think it would help many people get a sense of who is in power now and why certain legislation will pass and why others will fail. Or at least it would increase familiarity with the powers that be, which is never a bad thing.
Not very compelling evidence. What “economic” issues are we talking about anyway - unions and labor strife, corporate malfeasance (pollution, hostile takeovers, defective products), tax cuts…??? I think the problem here is that excuse-finders and enablers of the current system for injecting opinion into news reporting have seized on the idea that Corporations own major news media, and Corporations are Inherently Right-Wing, so therefore reporting must be Right-Wing, at least as it deals with an economy that involves Corporations. No actual evidence is required.
On the breast cancer-abortion “link”. There certainly is no obligation to give equal time to a view that has not been demonstrated to have scientific basis and for which the medical community is firmly on the side of no link. Derision or other bias against the anti-abortion rights side however frequently pervades reporting on this issue, and which ticks me off even though I am firmly pro-abortion rights. It’s a device which is again unprofessional and corrosive to debate.
The issue isn’t the suggestion that either side has a political agenda (indeed, the snippet you quoted from the WebMD article suggests that both sides may be politically driven). The issue is that the Times article quoted a pro-link scientist and yet failed to give any indication as to the purported scientific basis for that scientist’s opinion.
The WebMD article does not do that. It clearly points out Brinds credential and the basis for Brind’s opinion, while simultaneously noting both that the risk asserted by Brind is relatively minimal and that the efficacy of his study is debatable:
It also notes that many reputable medical sources do not think there is a link at all, or at least a link significant enough to worry about:
And early in the article, it notes that other reputable sources are undecided:
In short, the WebMD article plays fair with all sides. It gives the scentific rationale for both the pro and anti link sides, notes the potential political biases at play, and lets the reader decide.
The Times article evidently did not. It suggests by omission that there is no reasonable scientific case for a link between abortion and cancer, and that thus those claiming such a link must be solely motivated by politics. That’s bias, any way you slice it.
And please spare me the creationist-evolutionist garbage. Brind is a real professor at a real university (Baruch College, part of CUNY) teaching and researching in real subjects and publishing in real peer-reviewed journals. His degrees are from real universities (Yale BS; NYU PhD). Here’s a bio. He is not a whackjob citing to Jack Chick tracts. His conclusions may ultimately be wrong and they certainly don’t represent the majority view, but his arguments and research ought to be taken seriously. A fair article would at least note the existence of studies by credible scholars contradicting conventional scientific wisdom, even as it points out the weight of scholarly opinion is contrarian.
Except there are credible studies that show just such a link. Those studies may be flawed, and their conclusions may be incorrect, but that’s true of much early research into a particular area. At the very least, the article should note the existence of those studies (along with the existence of the criticisms of those studies). Otherwise you make it look like the legislators in favor of counseling just came up with the idea of a breast cancer-abortion link over coffee at the country club one morning.
I don’t know if what you say was ever true - it is possible that you are just out of date as the Journal and Constitution merged into one newspaper in 2001, so you cannot have been reading it recently. The AJC does feature a mixture of views in its guest columnists. Ivins is a regular, by the way. And on the right they have O’Reilly. However, the editor, Cynthia Tucker, is clearly liberal and the paper’s own Opinion section (as opposed to the columnists) is almost always liberal.
I think most of the legislators who want counseling written into law are against abortion based on their idea of morality, and will seize on virtually anything to throw a roadblock in the way of women seeking an abortion. The debate over abortion and its supposed link to breast cancer has been around for decades, and there is still, as your WebMD link shows, nothing to convince the medical community that the link exists. “The jury is still out”, in scientific terms, means “There’s no case.” I know of a couple credible studies suggesting there’s a minor protective effect against breast cancer in women who’ve had an abortion. There’s no way I’d expect a newspaper article to give equal time to someone pushing this point.
If that Times story did what the memo said, it was wrong. But not because of the “equal time” argument.
Until quite recently (December 2002) when the editorial pages were merged, Jim Wooten, now Deputy Editorial Page Editor, was the Editorial Page Editor, period, and Tucker was a columnist. In those days, the paper was a solidly right wing rag, wiith Wooten and a lot of national conservatives dominating and Ivins checking in occasionally as noted.
Now there’s a certain balance, with Tucker and Wooten the ideologues and the rest kinda MOR for the most part, though Jay Bookman tends to be leftish on the whole. Wouldn’t call it a LIBERAL rag by any means, it’s balanced. Or is “balanced” what conservatives mean when they say “liberal.”
Here’s a cite about the paper’s recent reorganization:
It’s a Google cache site, if it doesn’t work for any reason you can find it by typing in “Atlanta Journal staff”.
True for some, not true for others. At least some legislators are actually concerned about informing women about health risks. Their position ought not be caricatured. The breast cancer link is not something a bunch of legislators came up with over cocktails on the 19th green. Fairness dictates alerting the reader to the scientific basis alleged for the proposed law. Of course, it also dictates alerting the reader to the fact that this is a minority position in the scientific community and that the studies which found a link have been criticized.
The bottom line is that omitting information about pro-link studies does a disservice to the reader. The reader is left sitting there wondering “why the hell are they talking about breast cancer?” and is forced to draw the conclusion that the legislators have just made the whole damn thing up. The reader is ill-informed as a result. The newspaper has failed in its job as an effective conduit of information.
Please note, protestations to the contrary, I’m not talking about “equal time.” I’m talking about time, period. If the bulk of scientific opinion is against a link, or agnostic on the question, then the bulk of the article should reflect that (as the WebMD article does). But a fair article would at least mention, however briefly, that there is a scientific case to be made in favor of a link, albeit a disputed one, and that that case forms the basis for the legislation in question.