Sure (not sure if you had a point to make). All the more reason why it’s important to see that from the very beginning the major news outlets have been slanting news coverage to the left. Managers hire like minded folks. It’s been a self perpetuating machine.
The door swings both ways, too.
No one person, entity, organization, group, or other force “controls the media.” Individual media outlets may be controlled, but there is no large scale, cohesive plan by a group of people, however loose, to control the media.
An example. Fox News. They define themselves as “fair and balanced” because there is no other dedicated right-wing media network. This does not mean that the rest of the media is controlled by a vague group of liberals, Jews, or gnomes. It means they don’t like the spin they see put on stories, and utilize their freedom of speech to deliver their message.
In general, media plays to the market. If it won’t sell (usually in advertising space), then it won’t get published. Your local nightly news and your CNN and your MSNBC etc are not operating under some plan to establish a liberal point of view; their individual reporters and editors may occasionally editorialize, but for the most part they retain a certain level of neutrality.
Of course, there are left-leaning publications, just as there are right-leaning publications. Each is only listened to/read by people who are interested in hearing more of that branch of propaganda.
Further, news is relative. You may look at sources like AI and HRW and label them “leftist” … but why? Because they bring up things that you don’t want to hear? Anything you don’t agree with is automatically the “other side”.
Oh, I think you are. The media has changed drastically since he’s been gone. How he may or may not have treated the news in the seventies is irrelevant to today’s corporate media culture.
Oh, you mean a conservative think-tank devoted to “working the refs” as they call it when they forget who’s listening? Nice try.
I know. It consistently is nothing short of total amazement that far left posters like you have that anyone would dare have an opinion that is not in lockstep with your own.
sigh Lets look at your list:
This means nothing. A guest on a program on fox news named Mat Staver makes a claim. So what? He’s not employed by Fox News. Religion vs secularism around the Christmas time decorations is always a big news story on any network. It’s just silly for you to claim that this says anything about bias on the part of Fox.
Fox hired a democrat and this means they are biased to the right? You really are grasping at straws here.
This is really splitting hairs. Hannity claims there is 15,000 up armoured humvees. However, in reality there are actually 16,000 humvees which are either up armoured or add-on amoured. For you to call this minute detail of terms that are less than clear a “blatant lie” says more about your bias than it does of Fox’s.
Besides, this entire point is moot. You chose a stupid quote to give an example of for Hannity. He is a conservative. He freely admits this. He does a news analysis program on Fox (with Colmes to give a liberal perspective). They both get equal time. Hannity does not prevent straight news stories, or try to give an unbiased view.
So, a panel formed to talk about Social Security isn’t actually allowed to have any opinions on Social Security? Again, you really are grasping at straws with these examples. Weak, just really weak.
I can’t discuss this one too much because no source info is given. There are only very limited quotes to what the panelists said, and none of these examples give full transcripts. All your cites are from mediamatters.org which is a liberal page devoted to “correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media”. Hardly a place to go looking for information unless you are simply interested in bashing Fox. All that page is doing is digging up every phrase anyone on the network says and quoting it out of context to make them seem unfair. Keep in mind, this is a 24 hour news network, if you are only looking at one sentance or phrase at a time, then it’s possible to make the case for bias in any direction.
They hired a Democrat who hates Democrats and spoke at the Republican convention: a democrat who bizzarely basically called Kerry an evil man and unamerican for refferring to US troops as the occupation… when Bush had used the exact same term.
That’s their balance: hates Democrats + thinks Democrats might at least make good slaves when the revolution comes + maybe some quiet guy who actually sticks to the confines of journalism and gives analysis rather than partisan punditry even if they are a liberal. That’s a “balanced” Fox panel for you right there.
If you even knew anything about the show, this might be an interesting argument. But you don’t, so it’s pointless. It’s Hannity’s show. He designed it, he runs it, he picked Colmes to be his whipping boy. Colmes is not balance: like the “journalist” above he matches timid analysis against blowhard punditry, and the result is no contest.
Good grief. They formed a panel to stage a gladhanding of George Bush’s push to partial privatize Social Security (remember two months ago, when claiming that was what Bush was going to do was considered a liberal slander? Now it’s simply accepted as a matter of course, with apparently no mental conflict whatsoever). They cared so little about accuracy that they even spelled the name of the forum incorrectly.
Neither, though Ascenray has it dead on.
The hard fact is that $$$ controls the media. Ratings control the media, Self interest and sensationalism control the media. As far as politics go, the only thing controlling the media is their own desire not to piss anyone off and lose market share or demographics.
As soon as more people come to grips with this and stop waving their political flags around, maybe we can fix it and get good and independent journalism back.
Sorry, bit of a sore spot.
Bingo, well stated.
One phrase sums up the American media:
SUMMER OF THE SHARK
Stop worrying about whose face you see on TV and whose voice you hear on the radio. Who controls the media? The boards of Disney, GE, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom.
… right. And as stated, their goal is $$$.
I mean, if News Corp was truly a right wing propaganda firm, they wouldn’t be producing films like Kinsey (which I liked, BTW. I think the other 2 people in the audience did, too. Sigh.)
Ya think? That might be a fair assessment of the execs in charge of CBS, CNN, etc. But I’m fairly confident that if Fox News were to start showing a net financial loss, Rupert Murdoch would continue to run it the way it’s run now, even if that meant tapping the resources of other parts of his business empire to subsidize it.
What distinguishes a “traditionalist” from a “conservative”?
O’Reilly is viewed as liberal by the conservatives?
Let me make this simple.
In Winter of 2003 conservatives were trying to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction (a lie). Liberals were trying to convince the public that it was unclear whether Saddam held weapons of mass destruction (a truth). The vast majority of the public, at the start of the war, believed that Saddam did certainly hold weapons of mass destruction.
At the same time, conservatives were trying to convince us that Saddam had strong ties to Al Queda while liberals were tyring to tell us that according to the facts available to us, no he didn’t. The public, by a large majority, ended up believing that he did have ties to Al Queda, and in fact that the 9/11 hijackers were mostly Iraqi (a lie).
After the invasion, conservatives attempted to convince us that the Iraqi people were welcoming us with open arms, while liberals were attempting to tell us that they were not. Most people ended up believing that a jubilant crowd in Bagdad toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein (a lie), clearly a belief that propped up the conservative vantage point.
So here we have three clear cases where the public by large margins believed lies that benefited conservatives, as opposed to truths that would have benefited liberals. This could not have happened, unless the media was going to great lengths to cover up the truth and propagate lies that benefit only conservatives.
Or if they were merely incompetent fools rebroadcasting what they were told to by a misleading administration without proper independent fact checking, mostly responding to an upsurge in patriotism where questioning the Administration’s “truths” was to look very bad to the vast majority of the population.
If you think the media isn’t biased to the left, ask yourself this: If you could, would you switch places? We’ll replace Rush with Al Franken, hand FOX over to Ted Turner, you can have the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, and in return, conservatives get to control CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe…
You complain that there are only conservative commentators on FOX. Can you name any that are on CNN? How about CBS? NBC? ABC has John Stossel. CNN has Anderson Cooper, but he doesn’t really make his politics known.
Other than those two, I can’t think of a single on-air personality on any of the major networks that could be considered conservative.
FOX is nothing more than the right-wing version of CNN. The reason you guys think these other networks are so centrist is because A) you don’t see bias when it confirms what you already believe, and B) most of the people in this discussion as so far to the left that “The Michael Dukakis Show” would be seen as a conservative program.
But all you have to do is look at the specific incidents that came out this year. When the Swift Vets came out, they were ignored. They held a press conference way back in February, and the mainstream media totally ignored it. Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe, when questioned about the total silence of the mainstream media over the Swiftboat Vet allegations, said in a sneering tone that the mainstream media had standards of evidence much higher than those silly bloggers.
But damned if Bush’s guard service didn’t hit all the papers again, based on totally flimsy evidence. Then CBS runs its big scoop with forged memos that bloggers spotted as fake within 24 hours. So much for their standards of evidence. Now we know the truth. When a story comes along that’s harmful to Democrats, suddenly the mainstream media is all about high standards of evidence. But a half senile old base commander can say, “Hmm, I don’t remember Bush”, and it’s all over the front pages.
But you know what? I think this is better for conservatives this way. It forces them to hone their arguments, get their ducks in a row, and present the best candidates. Because look what happens when they don’t: Bernard Kerik gets proposed to run homeland security, and swarms of reporters descend on everyone around him, digging for dirt. But Al Sharpton can run for president, and hey we’re not going to talk about his race baiting, being caught in a drug trafficking sting, and running the same kind of protection racket Jesse Jackson ran for years. No news there - nosirree.
But it would be good for Democrats if they were scrutinized as hard as Republicans, because it would help separate the idiots from the quality people before they wind up as, say, a Presidential candidate.
Really? Liberals control CNN? That went through with their devestating investigative reporting into Bush’s lies, and reported about hte horrors of the Iraq war-
Wait a second… NO THEY FREAKING DIDN’T! You’re LYING!
Please. CNN is neutral as mothers’ milk, no one watches MSNBC, and NBC, ABC, and CBS run nightly news shows that no one cares about in between zany sitcoms about a conservative and a liberal family merging.
Dude, not even people in LA read the LA times, and the LA times is certainly not liberal.
Following Sam’s advice, let’s take a sampling of what the horrid liberal media outlet CNN offers up as today’s headlines…
whistles Quite the liberal agenda. I like the way they attack Bush subtley by not attacking him, making him more vulnerable to a surprise attack in the future. And that Cuban billboard thing, yea, that’s promoting liberalism. Blatant.
Let’s take a peek at Fox:
Stranded cow gets airlift, eh?
Notice how the liberal CNN blithely gnaws on the strafing of a school by a F-16, and publishes the horror of the Americans wanting Muslim-American’s rights curbed, and counts the number of dead kille-
Oh, wait, that was Fox saying that…
CNN’s flagship political show is Crossfire. It features well known conservatives Bob Novak and Tucker Carlson. It contrasts them with centrists James Carville and Paul Begala. Not a liberal in sight. Begala and Carville are strong minded Democrats but that doesn’t make them liberal. They helped Bill Clinton orchestrate the Democratic Party’s move to the right by co-opting Republican issues of welfare reform and free trade. They are sell outs.
No, it isn’t. At FOX they actually get a daily memo that outlines how they should frame the issues. Apparently they sometimes seem to come directly from the GOP. Thankfully they were the only major outlet to copy the Bushies Newspeak of “homocide bombers”. If CNN got talking points from the Democrats, or even the appearance of such a thing, you would hear conservatives howl to the moon.
Sure, a large majority of people in the mainstream media are socially, as opposed to fiscally, liberal but those outlets attempt to balance their coverage. They go out of their way to hire conservatives. So far out of their way that even incompetent conservative pundits can hold down jobs at otherwise respectable news organizations. The NYT has David Brooks, who I rarely see misleading his readers, and Bill Kristol who is a clown. Their “liberal” economic columnist, Paul Krugman, is a free trader.
Bloggers don’t have standards except those they set themselves. They can write whatever they want with no fear of getting fired. Reporters, at least at respectable news organizations, don’t have that luxury. Nor should they. The SwiftDolts should have been ignored until they substantiated their claims. They never did yet the “liberal” press began covering them anyway.
The evidence was hardly flimsy. Yes it is embarassing for CBS to have gone to air with a few fake documents but there were around 200 other documents as well as testimony from many witnesses all saying the same thing: Bush got special treatment. There was nothing wrong with the story, it is the only explanation that fits the facts. So far as I know it is the only explanation period. Bush didn’t even bother to say anything different.