There you go again. Calling it a ridiculous assertion does not make it a ridiculous assertion. Several posts ago I cited examples of left wing bias at CNN and all I got back was some dumb ad hominem stuff, some expletives and some distraction. So where’s the evidence that CNN is not biased? Or where’s the evidence that my cites, or anything in South Park Conservatives, is false?
BTW Neill Boortz has a standing $10,000 offer to anyone who can show that a Fox news item is deliberately slanted. Does Soros or Michael Moore or any of the lefty millionaires have an equivalent offer related to CNN or the NY Times?
Agreed. The last thing this country needs is another network of howler monkeys screeching at the top of their lungs. It adds nothing to the debate and only serves to confuse. Propaganda is propaganda no matter which side of the aisle it belongs to.
Shodan, do you have any cite on NPR or PBS being biased left? I listen to All Things Considered all the time and have yet to hear any sort of bias. It’s, IMHO, the most unbiased news available.
Don’t forget the possibility of (3) “Fair and Balanced!” I mean, IWT would have a more legitimate claim to that title than Fox has . . . still not a perfectly legitimate claim, but leftists have just as much right as righties to lie!
Gore’s Current TV – http://www.current.tv/ – apparently is envisioned as a commercial network. According to the FAQ, it’s not a exactly a “news” network:
In other words, they’re not trying to compete head-to-head with Fox, nor with CNN, they’re trying to do something entirely different. Maybe they’ll attract a market base that, at present, is not satisfied with any existing cable “news” outlet. We’ll just have to wait and see if it works.
IWT is trying to do something even more differenter, but it has some serious professional/executive types who seem to think they can pull it off. It’s going to be organized as a non-profit corporation. The amount they’re trying to raise to launch it is $7 million, all of it from donations. They will refuse all commercial and government contributions, to maintain their independence; needless to say, they will sell no advertising. They’ll have a worldwide fundraising drive next year and hope to go on the air in 2007. Their Development Plan (pdf file at http://iwt.tv/bizplan.pdf) says:
Far-right pundit Hugh Hewitt has lauded the Internet as creating an “Information Reformation” that cuts institutional gatekeepers out of the information-dissemination process. He envisions this as a way of doing an end-run around the “liberal media”; he seems to have forgetten that everybody can use it, not just the Freepers!
That’s a fair description of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. But that’s not a fair description of Pacifica Radio (listen and you’ll see), and I doubt it will be a fair description of IWT.
No, you got me asking specific questions and raising specific objections to your examples. I also said that I don’t think lobbing examples at one another proves anything, which you seem to think was hypocritical, as if I were the one who asked you for examples. (We’re not one big monolith, you know.)
They probably are true. I just didn’t think they were very good examples. Even if they were, we have a saying in my field–“the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’”.
Here we have an example of the mainstream media dutifully letting the right-wing establishment dictate the terms of the debate, which in this case are built on a total falsehood: http://mediamatters.org/items/200504260001
This is an example of the media giving a pass to the right-wingers, but it doesn’t prove any overall bias any more than your examples did (or would, if they made sense).
Kent Hovind has a much larger amount pledged to someone who can “prove evolution”. Does the fact that it remains unclaimed give any merit to his arguments?
Don’t mind if I do. Though I doubt it’ll make any difference at all in the minds of the ignorant bots that have currently taken America hostage to their ideology.
Can’t say that I’m not enjoying this particular New Imperialist version of America go down the drain – because, make no mistake about it, no amount of kicking and screaming (or outright killing) is going to stop its current and rather precipitous economic and military downfall. OTOH, unlike xtime, I I have no interest in popping corn for the occassion for beyond the fact that I wish ill on any society there’s also the very pragmatic fact that the US’s undoing at current pace will have a very negative impact on us all.
As a side note, reading some of the rightwingers posts on this thread only reinforces my belief that they are totally and completely out of touch with the majority of the world at large. I just wish and hope that the ensuing bloodshed needed to bring them back to reality can be kept to a bare minimun – unlike what’s happened in Iraq.
Sadly, I highly doubt it. For how do you fight greed and a complete lack of empathy without facing them head on? Particularly when they keep building on the biggest/largest arsenal the world’s ever seen.
For obvious selfish reasons, I’m glad I’m close to fifty with most of my life behind me. For obvious paternal reasons, it saddens me that this is the world I’m leaving behind for my soon-to-be fifteen year old.
There are lots of them. I assume you are not disputing the commentaries and opinion shows like Fresh Air. And Garrison Keillor is known locally for the foam-flecked vehemence of his anti-Republican hatred.
For NPR news, one measure used was to determine how often liberal think-tanks and their studies were cited. By this measure, NPR is about as left-of-center as CBS news or the Washington Post. Link.
I would like to see a classical liberal (or libertarian) news network, seriously challenging both threats to our civil liberties and reckless economic strategies from all political parties.
Nope. Just going by the news programs. For what it’s worth, the “foam flecked vehemence” that Garrison Keillor has seems to be a measure of disappointment at what the republican party has become.
OK, as long as we are consistent. If bias at NPR only counts in their news programming, then none of the editorials at Fox and practically none of AM talk radio, can be taken as evidence of right-wing bias, either.
Oh, I’m sure he thinks his reasons are good. But that is something that occurs all the time in discussions of this sort. To right-wingers, Fox appears “fair and balanced”. To left-wingers, it is obviously too biased to be valid. To liberals, left-wing bias in the mainstream media isn’t bias at all - liberal ideas are objectively true, so pushing those ideas is just presenting the truth.
The difficulty comes when this automatic assumption leads to error. Andy Rooney mentioned (in an address at Tulane University) that 60 Minutes would not have done the faked National Guard documents story if it weren’t a negative story about Bush. They assumed that it was almost self-evident that Bush was lying about his record, ergo any documents that seemed to show it must be valid.
Woohoo, linky worky. And now, for your enjoyment, a quote from linky.
This seems a rather odd rating system. For starters, how does one cite a think tank favorably? “Those saintly fellows at liberal think tank…” It would also seem to be based on the raters perceptions of a think tank as liberal or conservative. Doesn’t seem to have much to do with the actual content of the broadcast.
[PIRATE VOICE]These figures be dubious, says I.[/PIRATE VOICE]
Yeah, and those people are wrong. Granted, I think there’s a world of difference between Randi’s challenge and Hovind’s, namely that Randi’s conditions are fair representations for what his subjects ought to be able to do and Hovind’s are manipulated to guarantee he’ll never pay off. (Please, for the love of God, let’s not go any further down this road.) But neither challenge is really proof of anything.
I don’t know what Boortz expects to meet his conditions, but given that a cottage industry has sprung up documenting the atrocities on Fox News, my guess is that it’s pretty exacting.
As someone who worked in the TV news industry for ten years, I can answer that one. Listen carefully the next time a study is cited as the basis for a story.
If the news organization is biased in the same direction as the source of the information, the intro will go something like this:
“The sky is falling. (raise personalized example of falling sky, quote statistics, etc)”. Somewhere in the middle of the piece they will say something like “The study was commissioned by the Income Redistribution society” and then continue on with no further reference to the originator of the information.
If the news organization is biased against the originators of the information, the story may not appear at all. If it does, the reference will be at the very beginning and will go something like “A right wing think tank says the sky is falling. Is there any truth the claims?”
If you don’t believe me, just pay close attention. You’ll see it the next time someone puts out a study that magically confirms their point of advocacy.
Arrr, arrr, shiver me timbers, 'tis the black spot.
Thanks, Evil One.
But if you need a further example, think of how often I (for example) would cite Accuracy in Media as opposed to Dailykos or the like. I expect you could draw reasonable inferences on my political positions and therefore my biases from that kind of examination. And I would also expect that reasonably fair-minded people would agree on which of my cites were “favorable”.
It is not all that different from the media, or Congress. If you make studies from the Brookings Institute the basis of a lot of your speeches, it is unlikely that you are a member of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy.
It is obviously not a perfect measure, but there are few of those. And after a while, a whole bunch of indications start to add up to probability, ISTM.
Liberal media bias is not a myth, and the efforts by people like FAIR to redefine terms or change the subject are not helpful. Even when it starts to look like their strenous denials are getting some traction, a scandal like the Halperin memo or the “Favored Son” fiasco blows up and reclarifies the issue. Disputing a point is one thing; living in denial is another.
Not that this is what you are doing. But some are.
Evil One, the study you mentioned would likely be flawed anyway. What on earth would the Income redistribution society know about the falling sky?
And your post leaves an odd taste in my mouth that only strong rum shall be able to alleviate.
This caught me because it reads something into nothing. I’m just fuzzy on how not reporting something indicates any sort of bias as news shows have a set time limit. Far more reasonable to assume that there simply was not enough time to cover the story than to read bias into it.
Apologies for the hack job, but I wanted to address the middle part first. For what it’s worth, I also eat the cream filling out of oreos first. Pattern of behavior I guess.
This sort of reporting, to me, would indicate what the story was about rather than bias. The first example, with the study in the middle, tells me that the story is the news and the study is a cite. The second example, study first, tells me that the study is the news, which happens often when studies are freshly released.
To use the board as an example, somebody opens a thread about the sky falling. As a cite, he presents a study or report on bits of blue sky landing on trailer parks. The subject of the thread is falling skies.
The other side would be is somebody started a thread on whether or not the study that shows that bits of blue sky are falling at an increased rate. In that thread, the subject would be the study.
I should also say that I dislike the assigning of any political views to studies. If a study is properly done, there should be no bias in any direction.
Sure, but length is not always the reason for leaving something out. And if it seems to be consistently the case that data relevant to one side of the political questions get left out more often than that relevant to the other, other reasons might become more obvious.
F’rinstance, there have been lots of studies in which news stories go out of their way to identify certain people as identifying with one side or the other. IIRC, the study I remember was how often conservative women were explicitly labelled as “conservative” while liberal women were simply identified as members of “women’s groups” - like NOW.
It gives a certain insight into what the labeller considers so unusual as to require classification. Liberal women, thus, are simply women - conservative women are such odd ducks that the viewer needs to be warned to question what they say.
