Thank you Obe-Won.

Apparently, you come from a place where they don't recognize that the icon means a person is joking or being facetious.

Moore acknowledges in his last book that he reports to his handlers in Cuba every hour.

Seriously, however, Moore has admitted to being very, very, liberal.

So his idea of "conservative" is not the typical definition of conservative.

If you're going to make inflammatory statements, trying to hide behind an icon is a very lame cop out.
Liberals and communists are two different things. One group are very taken with Karl Marx, the other is composed of capitalists who don't like to see the untermensch getting shat on. Unless you can get your head around that detail, there's little point in your even trying to discuss politics.

why do people get their panties in such a bunch over wise cracks about moore? he's made a career out of making absurd comparisons of people he disagrees with, and when he gets cracked on you always have people chiming in your not fair!

I don't give a shit about that, to be honest. I was just pointing out that he isn't a communist and anyone who thinks that he is probably doesn't have any business talking about politics until they've worked out how socialists differ from liberals. Clear now?

I think the message board people at Snopes are misreading the intro.

I think that what happened is that an ABC commentator published a satirical piece about an imagninary poll, as part of making a point of admitting their biases. Unfortunately, some readers took the poll as real.

As a result, the next day, ABC printed an "editorial" saying, in effect, "the poll was a fake/joke, meant to illustrate our point. Here is our point...the press, like anyone else comes in to the game with certain biases, etc. Please don't cite the fake poll."

Furthermore, if ABC was only joking about being liberal, why not print a SECOND clarification?

After all, this editorial has now been cited all over the place (mostly by conservative comentators) as 'proof' ABC was admitting the press was liberal: Wall St. Journal, Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy Show, NewsMax, etc. Why would ABC want to keep this up unclarified, and handing their detractors ammo, if the piece was a joke?

Have they?

Can't be arsed running a Google search. There must have been some feedback from ABC if there was this consequential stir.

I just went back to ABC site and couldn't find either a retraction or clarification.

And the Wall St. Journal, where I saw this linked to in the first place, is actually pretty good about running corrections when they receive them. And, so far, nothing has run to indicate this wasn't legit.

As such, I still think it was serious

Oh, and just to get sort of off topic for a second...

Previously on this thread, there was a bit of side discussion about Al Franken and the veracity of his book.

Here is a web site that purports to documents distortions, inaccuracies, etc., in Franken's book.

http://www.frankenlies.com/

Judge for yourself.

It DIDN'T run with a satirical poll.

The satirical poll/piece ran THE DAY BEFORE.

The next day they ran a WHOLE NEW PIECE on the fact that the poll FROM THE PREVIOUS DAY was satirical and then explained how the previous piece was meant to illustrate that the press was liberal.

Now I'm confused, and keep thinking about pole-dancers.

Speaking of pole dancers:

Cornell Dormitory votes to purchase dancing poll

"When people hear 'dancing pole' they think of stripping," says Nick James '04, explaining why the approval of a $324 free-standing dancing pole might raise some eyebrows on campus. Risley Hall's "Kommittee," the representative body that vets such purchases at Cornell's arts-themed dorm, approved the purchase at a Feb. 8 meeting.

"[Students] began researching this years ago, when there were other students in Risley who did performance art involving a pole," Kommittee chair David Schoonover '05 said.

Robin Liu '07 thought the pole, like "make your own sushi at Appel Commons," would draw students to attend Risley events.

"I guess it will be okay because it will draw people to Tammany on Friday," Liu said, referring the dorm's regular entertainment program.

Spalding Warner '07 agreed. "Curiousity itself will draw people in," he said.

Today's Wall St. Journal has a column that questions whether the media bias towards Kerry had the effect of defeating him:

..once Mr. Kerry won the nomination, he had--or seemed to have--something else going for him: the support of the liberal media, which loathed President Bush and yearned for his defeat. "The media, I think, wants Kerry to win," Evan Thomas of Newsweek said last July. "I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards--I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox--but they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all. There's going to be this glow about them . . . that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Mr. Thomas later revised his estimate downward, to five points.

If Mr. Thomas was right, then, Mr. Bush would have won re-election with a popular-vote margin of between 7.5% and 17.5% of the total vote--rather than the 2.5% he actually got--but for the liberal media. Yet there's a case to be made on the other side: that the liberal media actually helped President Bush, rendering the Kerry campaign ineffective by telling Democrats what they wanted to hear rather than what was true.

[For example] Mr. Kerry's ... Vietnam story was, to say the least, complicated. He first rose to public prominence not for his exploits in combat but for his leadership of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

These calumnies left many veterans angry and resentful, and they made it likely that Vietnam would prove to be the candidate's Achilles' heel rather than his silver bullet. One veteran quoted in "Unfit for Command" summed things up pointedly: "In 1971-72, for almost 18 months, [Mr. Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains--there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it."

The Kerry camp evidently hoped the media would gloss over the candidate's antiwar activities, and for the most part, for many months, they did. One exception was ABC's Charlie Gibson, who in April 2004 confronted Mr. Kerry about the 1971 medal incident. Mr. Kerry answered evasively, then muttered into a live microphone that Mr. Gibson was "doing the work of the Republican National Committee." This was a telling comment. Mr. Gibson was, in truth, doing the work of a journalist: asking a politician tough questions. But Democrats expect the mainstream media to treat them sympathetically--an expectation that has ample basis in experience.

Yet it's far from clear that such sympathy serves the Democrats' interests. Suppose that, once Mr. Kerry secured the nomination, the media had aggressively investigated and reported on his antiwar activities. The candidate would have been forced to respond. If he had been smart, he would have delivered a major speech in which, without renouncing his opposition to the Vietnam War, he repudiated and apologized for his decades-old slanders against fellow veterans. He might have concluded by saying of the Vietnam conflict, "I hope and pray we will put it behind us and go forward in a constructive spirit for the good of our party and the good of our country"--the words with which he ended a February 1992 Senate speech criticizing fellow Vietnam vet Bob Kerrey for trying to make Bill Clinton's draft avoidance an issue in that year's Democratic primaries.

This surely would have gone a long way to defusing the issue. Instead, Mr. Kerry bet that the media's silence would carry him through to the election--and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those meddling Swift Boat Veterans. A month after the Democratic Convention, they launched their first round of anti-Kerry ads, coinciding with the publication of "Unfit for Command." The claims that Mr. Kerry had falsified his heroics in order to win medals and an early end to his tour of duty were mostly unverifiable, and fair-minded Americans probably would have been inclined to give Mr. Kerry the benefit of the doubt. But the ads goaded Mr. Kerry into responding, which in turn forced the media to pay attention. Whereupon the Swift Boat Veterans turned their attention to Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities, on which they had him dead to rights.

Then, in early September, CBS News aired its disastrous story on Bush's National Guard service. So eager were Mr. Kerry's supporters in the media to believe the worst of the president that Mr. Rather and producer Mary Mapes went to air with a report based on obviously fabricated documents, then stood by their story for an agonizing two weeks. Yet even if it had been true--or had gone undebunked--it's unlikely it would have made a difference. As the Washington Post's liberal TV critic, Tom Shales, acknowledged with hindsight in an Inauguration Day column, "It's common knowledge that Bush was a spoiled little rich boy who did not serve with any great distinction, so this story wasn't exactly a blockbuster."

The CBS debacle marked the end of Vietnam as a campaign issue. In the remaining weeks before the election, Mr. Kerry talked a lot less about Vietnam and more about matters of contemporary concern. He performed adequately in the debates, and with the help of a massive get-out-the-vote effort he avoided a landslide defeat.

After the Swift Boat Veterans and Rathergate, it must have been clear even to Mr. Kerry that campaigning on Vietnam had led him into a quagmire. If the media had treated his war-hero narrative with more skepticism in the first place, he might have reached this realization--and developed a better campaign strategy--much earlier. Conservatives love to complain about liberal media bias, and for the most part they're right. But they should count their blessings, too. Were it not for the media reinforcing the Democrats' spin, John Kerry might be president today.

This points out an interesting theory: the need for candidates of both parties to have both liberal and conservative media, not only to trumpet "their" side, but to help "test" them.

I'm liberal (according to rex I'm a commie) and I don't see the media as being liberal at all. The reporters themselves may be but the guys up top with names like Disney, Eisner, Redfern, Welch, Hearst and Murdoch certainly aren't. And editors keep their jobs by seeing to it that the stories don't stray too far from world view of THEIR masters. Unless it will make lots of money.

I'd like to see a return to the days of yesteryear when the media outlets were highly partisan. Each city had a liberal paper and a conservative paper. If you wanted balance you could read them both. Let the reader decide whom to believe. Objectivety in media means bland stories without context. I'll take bias, thank you, preferably from both sides. Then you could see things on TV Bill Buckley getting angry and calling Gore Vidal a 'little faggot' on ABC.

I like news that presents both sides. The I can look at the issue in its entirety and take a bias liberal stance.

there's no liberal bias, there's a money bias. All media is money-biased based on what will sensationalizeand sell. If it was Liberal Bias then there would've been no real Monica Lewinsky or Gary Condit coverage.

This whole Liberal Bias idea probably goes back to Nixon when he saw his poor ass being attacked for Watergate.

The only news outlet that I've ever heard of that was run politically was Fox. They're run by an ex-Bush sr. official, hire mainly conservatives, echo many White House policies overly-positive in their reports and trash a lot of Democrats. Watch Outfoxed. Even if you don't buy the testimony of ex-employees, look at the memos and the comiled news coverage, and listen to the opinion of Walter Cronkite in the movie of how reporting used to be done.

The Press and The Public Are Worlds Apart

The press and the public remain... "worlds apart."

This split has been visible ever since a groundbreaking article 23 years ago in AEI's Public Opinion magazine. In it, academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman presented results of a careful study of media elites. They discovered that from 1964 to 1976, 81 percent of journalists voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

A later survey by Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of Washington-based reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and only 7 percent for George H. W. Bush. Meanwhile, 59 percent viewed the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" as a "campaign ploy," while just 3 percent called it a "serious reform proposal." The public disagreed, and the GOP captured the House for the first time in four decades.

Today, the media and the public are drifting even farther apart. In the new Pew study, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as "liberal," compared with 22 percent in 1995. Only 7 percent of reporters say they are conservative at present. For the general public, the results are again reversed: 33 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives; 20 percent, liberals.

On social issues, the gap is even wider. For example, the national press states by a margin of 91 percent to 6 percent that "belief in God is not necessary to be moral." The general public says, to the contrary, that belief in God is necessary, by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.

I can agree with you that reporters are simpletons who will readily latch onto stories involving sex regardless of politics.

Again putting the liberal media meme to death, right-wing loon Ann Coulter explains to fellow winger Brent Bozell on the 7/26 Sean Hannity Show that Bush should appoint a more extreme Judge than Roberts to the Supreme Court because “we have the media now”. Audio.

One more:

Bill O’Riley:
“One major casualty in the war on terror is the liberal press in the USA. Don’t believe the right-wing ideologues when they tell you the left still controls the media agenda. It does not any longer. It’s a fact.”

That's right-winger opinion, not lefties. Still, continuing to call the media "liberal" does help to further move the middle more rightward.

Did she mean that "the media is all conservative" or did she mean "we have a conservative media (ie, talk radio, columnists and blogs) that stands side by side the liberal one (ie, NY Times and major networks)"? Knowing Ann she meant the latter, not the former.

Knowing Ann she probably assassinated a moderate photojournalist in the parking lot on her way in.

Hey, that's not fair.

Ann maims, she doesn't kill.

The Wall Street Journal has taken a look on how the media portrays the economy.

The paradox of the year is why so many Americans tell pollsters they feel bad about an economy that's been so good, with solid job growth and corporate profits, rising wages and home prices, and a huge decline in the budget deficit. Perhaps one reason is because the media keep saying the economy stinks.

That's the conclusion of a study to be released today by the Media Research Center, which finds that so far this year 62% of the news stories on the Big Three TV networks have portrayed the U.S. economy in negative fashion. The "negative full length TV news stories on the economy outnumbered positive stories by an overwhelming ratio of 4 to 1," the MRC reports

The Media Research Center conducted this study and alleges:

The federal deficit is shrinking, unemployment has fallen, and America has seen more than two straight years of job growth. But broadcasters have been describing the economy as “dicey,” “volatile” and “slow.” A Free Market Project analysis of economic stories on network evening news shows since President George W. Bush’s second inauguration showed negative news prevailing 62 percent of the time (71 out of 115 stories). That number was deceiving, however, because even good news often was portrayed as bad. In 40 stories classified as good economic news, journalists undermined the good news with bad 45 percent of the time.

Good news was relegated to short reports, or briefs, 68 percent of the time, while bad news was treated with full stories. When briefs on both sides were excluded, the comparison of full-length news stories showed an overwhelming ratio: negative stories outnumbered positive ones almost 4-to-1.

A similar study last year to contrast how the media presented the economy when there is a Democratic and a Republican president in office:

When GDP growth is reported, Republicans received between 16 and 24 percentage point fewer positive stories for the same economic numbers than Democrats. For durable goods for all newspapers, Republicans received between 15 and 25 percentage points fewer positive news stories than Democrats. For unemployment, the difference was between zero and 21 percentage points. Retail sales showed no difference. Among the Associated Press and the top 10 papers, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, and New York Times tend to be the least likely to report positive news during Republican administrations, while the Houston Chronicle slightly favors Republicans. Only one newspaper treated one Republican administration significantly more positively than the Clinton administration: the Los Angeles Times' headlines were most favorable to the Reagan administration, but it still favored Clinton over either Bush administration.

Is anyone surprised by all these results? I think these findings are too large to be due to mere happenstance. I'm not saying that the reporters get together and say, "Hey, a Bush is president; let's convince everyone that the economy is doing terribly." But that is the template through which they view the news. They don't look at economic results as a point on a graph but as part of an overall story about where the economy is headed. And they have made up their minds that policies such as tax cuts will trash the economy. So, they're ready with the gloom and doom. As the WSJ writes:

Media coverage of President Bush's tax cuts has been particularly slanted. During the 2003 tax-cut debate, three of every four major TV network news stories were negative. The favorite criticisms were liberal echoes that it would bust the budget and favor the rich. Earlier this year, a news story on National Public Radio announced that "as everyone knows, the primary cause of the budget deficit was the Bush tax cuts." No word yet on whom NPR is crediting with this year's revenue surge of $262 billion.

NPR doesn't need to give anyone credit. They'll just downplay the story or not even report it. It will be a brief blurb in the roundup of headlines and they'll resist the opportunity to explain how the tax cuts have helped create a increase in revenue. That will fit their pattern of talking about the shaky, greedy economy of the Reagan economy, the sinking economy of the G.H.W. Bush years, the thriving economy of the Clinton years, and the fragile economy of the G.W. Bush years.

Guess I don't see any big deal here. The Journal is also biased and has a slant. And when I personally start feeling the effects of this booming economy I guess I'd be more sympathetic. I'm guessing that wages in general have not kept up with inflation. I know mine haven't. I've been getting by with increased OT created by layoffs.

CNN'er: Katrina Victims Better Off Beheaded

CNN's "American Morning" host Soledad O'Brien said Tuesday that Hurricane Katrina evacuees housed at the Superdome were worse off than beheading victims in Baghdad.

The normally mild-mannered newswoman offered the overwrought observation while speaking at Redbook Magazine's "Movers and Shakers" awards luncheon in New York.

According to the New York Daily News, O'Brien blurted out:

"It is a sad thing to watch military veterans cry as they tell you the beheadings in Baghdad were less horrific than what they saw as 30,000 people marched from the Superdome through a shopping mall and onto buses to who knows where."

Ms. O'Brien didn't identify the veterans who told her that Katrina victims would have been better off being beheaded.

Washington Times:

Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, in an appearance Friday on CNN's "Larry King Live," said Americans are too dumb to vote for the right candidates. "We're an ignorant nation right now," Mr. Cronkite said. "We're not really capable, I do not think the majority of our people, of making the decisions that have to be made at election time ....in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency, of course." ...... "I don't think we're bright enough to do the job that would preserve our democracy, our republic. I think we're in serious danger."

I concur!

It's just fortunate how most of those elections turned out in the end.

It's probably true that the press is not intentionally biased, but naturally constrained by its own points of view and what it deems, based on its own beliefs, is "news."

Here's a fabulous analysis of how a good picture from an anti-war rally covers up the truth of the rally. Is the rally all about some young, compassionate teen, who chose to articulate the statement "People of Color say 'No to War!'" during an anti-war rally, or was that teen a pawn in a crass, juvenile, extremist and communist party organized event?

Check it out below. It pissed off the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle.












Anatomy of a Photograph




An analysis of a single seemingly innocuous photograph, and the pervasive media bias it reveals.




My photo essay of the anti-war protest in San Francisco on September 24, 2005 was not the only report done about the event. A few other outlets ran their own coverage. But the one photo from the rally that was seen by the most people was this:







Why? Because the San Francisco Chronicle, which had the only mainstream media coverage of the rally, published this photograph on the front page of its Web site as a teaser for their article about the event.




Now, let's take a closer look at this image.







By chance, I took a photo of the same girl just a few moments later. Looks practically identical, doesn't it?




But you might notice that my picture is lower resolution. That's because it's a zoomed-in portion of a much larger photograph. I cropped off the other parts of the picture to get a close-up of the girl.




But what would happen if I hadn't cropped off so much? Let's take a step backward and reveal what the San Francisco Chronicle didn't want you to see.






Here's the same photo without as much cropping, revealing more of the context. You can see that the girl's protest contingent also sported Palestinian flags and obscene placards.




Now let's take another step back.









Here's my full original photo, uncropped. Now we can see that the girl is just one of several teenagers, all wearing terrorist-style bandannas covering their faces.




But, as you'll notice, the bandannas are all printed with the same design. Was this a grassroots protest statement the teenagers had come up with all by themselves?




To find out, let's take a look at another photo in the series, taken at the same time:









Oops -- it looks like they're actually being stage-managed by an adult, who is giving them directions and guiding them toward the front of the march. But who is she?




The last picture in the series reveals all.









It turns out that the woman giving directions belongs to one of the Communist groups organizing the rally -- if her t-shirt is to be believed, since it depicts
the flag of Communist Vietnam, which has been frequently displayed by such groups at protest rallies in the U.S. for decades.






The San Francisco Chronicle featured the original photograph on its front Web page in order to convey a positive message about the rally -- perhaps that even politically aware teenagers were inspired to show up and rally for peace, sporting the message, "People of Color say 'No to War!'" And that served the Chronicle's agenda.




But this simple analysis reveals the very subtle but insidious type of bias that occurs in the media all the time. The Chronicle did not print an inaccuracy, nor did it doctor a photograph to misrepresent the facts. Instead, the Chronicle committed the sin of omission: it told you the truth, but it didn't tell you the whole truth.




Because the whole truth -- that the girl was part of a group of naive teenagers recruited by Communist activists to wear terrorist-style bandannas and carry Palestinian flags and obscene placards -- is disturbing, and doesn't conform to the narrative that the Chronicle is trying to promote. By presenting the photo out of context, and only showing the one image that suits its purpose, the Chronicle is intentionally manipulating the reader's impression of the rally, and the rally's intent.




Such tactics -- in the no-man's-land between ethical and unethical -- are commonplace in the media, and have been for decades. It is only now, with the advent of citizen journalism, that we can at last begin to see the whole story and realize that the public has been manipulated like this all along.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




UPDATE: This essay has caused such an outcry that the San Francisco Chronicle has now (on October 2, 2005) run a column about zombietime and the controversy surrounding the photo, defending itself from charges of bias. You can read the column here. (Someone at the Chronicle also wrote to me directly and rather brazenly requested that I update my site with a link to their response -- which I have just done -- although they purposely did not include a link to "Anatomy of a Photograph" in their column. They insist that I allow my readers to see the Chronicle's side of the story, but they won't let their readers see my side of the story. Again, the whiff of arrogance.)




Some of the Chronicle's defensiveness is the result of the paper's having been barraged by emails from zombietime readers, some of whom slightly misinterpreted a couple of points in my analysis above. Please note that I do not claim that the Chronicle cropped its photograph, which is obviously a high-resolution close-up and thus not cropped much, if at all; I only discuss cropping my photograph. I also didn't say that the Chronicle ran the photo on the front page of its print edition, but rather on the front page of its online edition.




Part of the Chronicle's attempted rebuttal is the claim that, since some of my readers jumped to the conclusion that the picture was on the front page of the print edition, this somehow constituted an "error" on my part that I refuse to acknowledge. I think that it should be fairly universally understood that when a Web site provides a link to an article or photo it is discussing, it is referring to the online version. Blogs and media-related Web sites deal pretty much exclusively with information and links that are online.




The Chronicle also defends itself by saying that its article about the rally did mention a few of the controversial aspects of the event. A defense which, to me, misses the mark on two counts: first, "Anatomy of a Photograph" was specifically about the Chronicle's photo coverage (and the decision to highlight one specific photograph), not about the textual news article; and second, its article only very peripherally referred to a couple of radical elements, and glossed over almost all of the extremism that was manifested at the rally.




And lastly, the Chronicle claims that the photo was chosen because it was visually arresting, not for any political considerations. And of course the photo is a good image, based solely on stylistic characteristics: the girl is pretty, and her face is in sharp focus.




But this brings up a larger issue concerning media coverage of these events. Newspapers and other mainstream outlets run photos that almost always fall into these four categories:




a. Wide shots of the crowd at a distance, in which individual messages aren't clearly visible. A good example is this photo in the Chronicle (oops, I mean: on the Chronicle's Web page).




b. Close-ups of individuals' faces, with no message visible -- as in this example from the Chronicle.




c. Human-interest images of people, in which the political aspect is peripheral or cut off, as in this photo.




d. Mid-range shots of people displaying "safe," non-controversial messages, like the one visible here.






Now, there's nothing wrong with any of these kinds of photographs; each, in its own way, is a valid type of image. But what media outlets rarely publish are the kind of photographs that I feature on zombietime: mid-range images focusing on individual protesters displaying their heartfelt (and often intense) messages. And that's all a rally is really composed of: thousands of individuals, each with their own messages. By showing them as an overall group, or by showing the individuals without their messages, or by showing only non-controversial messages, media outlets (probably unconsciously) influence the public's impressions of such events as being somewhat less disturbing and less politically radical than they really are.




Yet the public is hungry for the type of uncompromising, in-your-face photography that can be found on zombietime and similar Web sites and blogs, since we show the kind of images that simply can't be found in mainstream media outlets. At least 170 Web sites linked to zombietime's photo coverage of the September 24 rally. How many sites specifically linked to the Chronicle's photo coverage?




If the Chronicle is truly unbiased in its coverage (which I doubt rather strongly: I know several Chronicle staffers, and have been in the Chronicle offices, and I can say that there is -- as there is at most major newspapers -- a overall left-wing/"progressive" atmosphere at the paper), and if it wants to increase readership, then it should take a close look at how it frames and reports on certain issues. Whitewashing potential controversies, or lazily presenting unchallenged the narrative of people or groups it is covering, only leads to a bland paper and a bored readership.








Return to zombie's main September 24, 2005 anti-war rally page.

So the San Francisco Chronicle zoomed in to keep all the expletives on the poster out. What's the big deal?

Heh.

TIMES: LETTER CHOP 'FAIR'

The New York Times defended its treatment of a letter written by a Marine killed in Iraq as "entirely fair" yesterday, after days of complaints by the soldier's family that the story misrepresented the 22-year-old's beliefs.

It was the first public comment by the paper regarding the controversial excerpt from Cpl. Jeffrey Starr's letter in a story published Oct. 26.

In a statement, the paper said the article was "entirely fair and so, within it, was our presentation of Cpl. Jeffrey Starr."

Starr's family has been critical of the paper for selectively excerpting the letter and ignoring a passage in which he praised America's war mission.

Starr's uncle, Timothy Lickness, said: "It was not complete and it left a wrong impression."

The article quoted only part of the letter — which Starr intended to be read by his girlfriend if he died — in which he wrote: "I kind of predicted this . . . A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances."

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police. He takes the mainstream media to task for America Bashing:

Look at the headlines of most US newspapers or the lead stories in broadcast or cable news, and you'll most likely see at least one story telling the world that the United States is corrupt and evil.

Whether it's the war on terrorism, the Iraq counterinsurgency, the US criminal justice system or various institutions and organizations the left dislikes, you can bet the farm you'll see news stories, editorials, opinion pieces, and news analysis articles beating the bash America drum.

And, unfortunately, when reading the newspaper of record, the New York Times, or the venerable Washington Post it's sometimes difficult to distinguish editorial from news story. Sometimes news reporters are cunning in how they are able to blur the lines between opinion and news so that most Americans are unaware they're being spoon-fed a hidden agenda.

Take a story by the supposedly reliable Associated Press that was picked up by newspapers and TV news organizations throughout world. AP reported on the executions Friday of an Australian heroin trafficker in Singapore, and a murderer in the United States -- the 1,000th since capital punishment was resumed in 1977 -- and told readers and viewers that the two incidents revived international debate about the death penalty.

Although the story gave the usual talking points of both sides of the capital punishment debate, what appeared striking was the fact that this widely published story likened the Singapore execution of a drug trafficker to that of a vicious, brutal murderer.

Even the vast majority of death penalty advocates in the United States would never support capital punishment for drug traffickers. While a good case can be made that drug traffickers do contribute to the deaths of the hopelessly addicted, most clear thinking capital punishment advocates would not consider it a crime heinous enough for a death sentence.

America executes murderers. And not just murderers, but the most brutal and vicious murderers in the nation. If after 28 years we've hit a milestone of only 1000 executions, that shows the US justice system utilizes the death penalty sparingly.

The purpose of this news story was not to inform, but to convict. To convict the United States of being a backward, savage country akin to Singapore where caning is common, and death sentences are handed out for crimes in which no one dies. (Caning is the equivalent of flogging only instead of a whip a bamboo cane is used.) The two executions have as much to do with one another as the sentencing of a drunk driver and a rapist.

The United States has witnessed a dramatic decrease in violent crime over the years. Midnight basketball or other feel-good programs did not achieve that. Tough law enforcement did. Meanwhile, the European countries -- France, United Kingdom, Germany especially -- so beloved of the US liberal media, are experiencing annual increases in their crime rates. Britain recently saw a female cop, an unarmed rookie, gunned down while answering a store alarm. The killing intensified the debate regarding the arming of British patrol officers. Yet, the British are not debating the issue of just punishment for the killing a police officer; they aren't debating capital punishment. Not yet, anyway.

America is the most generous, the most compassionate nation on the planet. Americans, for the most part, are a caring people. But when it comes to heinous acts of murder, Americans concern themselves with the victims not with the murderers who've taken away from the victims everything they have and everything they will ever have. Only liberals -- including the majority of the ladies and gentlemen of the press -- are concerned with the treatment of murderers and thugs. And so, while they celebrate the routine killing of unborn babies, they oppose the execution of the most violent and brutal among us.

No where in that editorial did he refute the idea that America is corrupt, and that we should take a closer look at ourselves in how said corruption should be addressed. People that gloss over problems help perpetuate their existence.

Corrupt like the deep thoughts forum?

Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist
December 14, 2005

Contact: Meg Sullivan ( msullivan@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-825-1046

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.

"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches."

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third.

"Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill," Groseclose said. "If these newscasters weren't centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators."

The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

"If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Five news outlets — "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown," Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS' "Evening News" and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC's "World News Tonight," NBC's "Nightly News," USA Today, NBC's "Today Show," Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR's "Morning Edition," CBS' "Early Show" and The Washington Post.

Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op‑Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts.

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

"One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites," said Groseclose. "Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media."

Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined.

"By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," Groseclose said. "Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post's. If anything, government‑funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.8)."

The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research.

"No matter the results, we feared our findings would've been suspect if we'd received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided," Groseclose said.

The results break new ground.

"Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers," Groseclose said. "Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians."

h/t Wednesday

Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade magazine, carries a story under the headline " 'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last."

"At last"

Nope, no liberal bias there.

Do you want to fully understand why many people no longer trust the infotainment industry? Examine just this small sample from the Feb. 6, 2006 issue of Newsweek, in an article called Palace Revolt (emphasis mine):

Counsel to the vice president is, in most administrations, worth less than the proverbial bucket of warm spit, but under Prime Minister Cheney, it became a vital power center, especially after 9/11.

This is what passes for reporting today for Newsweek, and is not the only example of Democratic Underground-quality commentary in this group effort from Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas.

There is one bright side, however. Unlike another shoddily-sourced, politically-driven Newsweek article, it does not appear anyone will immediately die as a result.

This time.

That type of thing is damaging to a news organization credability or at least it should be. To some extent I have to wonder if the success FOX has had with it's biased reporting has changed the rules. News may be becoming more driven by market/demographic factors than before.

Lets be honest. The press as a whole is shitty an without any real integrity.
Fox is the political one that has its little messages and supports Bush as blindly as they bashed Clinton.
The other big networks are more corporate. They follow the "if it bleeds, it leads" philosophy and have no interest other than to get their viewers to watch.

Sure, Ray, surrrre...

A television station in Minnesota is refusing run an ad supporting the war in Iraq because its managers don't like what the ad has to say about the media's coverage of the war, according to the Star-Tribune.

ABC affiliate KSTP in Minneapolis will not run the 60-second spot produced by the conservative advocacy group Progress for America Voter Fund because it complains that media only report bad news about the war. The ad is said to feature images of the 9/11 attacks and testimonials from soldiers who say it's better to fight terrorists in Iraq rather than at home.

KSTP General Manager Rob Hubbard doesn't like what the ad has to say about the media. "We know it's not accurate about how we approach our news and we didn't feel it was appropriate just to take someone's money. We weren't going to let them take a shot at us that wasn't warranted," he said.

I can't really fault the station for this. It's their business and they have a right to choose their advertisers.

However, it points up that the press is no different than any other business or special interest: they want to protect their own "brand" and their own credibility, more than they want an exchange of ideas.

The only people that have freedom of the press are those that own one.

Quite true.

At best, and I doubt even this, Fox is center right, with the other big networks being center LEFT.

As for why you don't have a network that provides far left advocacy, there's always "Air America." Of course, given its ratings, you apparently are somewhat alone in your desire for more of that type of advocacy journalism.

What I'd like to see is a variety of perspectives. Network/cable news remaeiscent of the early 20th century where there were conservative, liberal, pre-fascist and socialist perspectives presented everyday. You apparently think of Fox with far greater generosity than I think of CBS, NBC or ABC. NBC is GE, CBS is Viacom and ABC is Disney. The views expresed are those of corporate USA. PBS represents the views of the permanent government in Washington.

The end result would be a better informed and politically involved public. We wouldn't want that to happen, would we?


BTW, Why did you move and edit my post?

I didn't "move and edit" your post. I simply quoted it in a different thread. The original is still safely tucked away on the other thread.

I wanted to address you point about the need for a "strong left" voice in news on this thread, which is already about whether or not the press is liberal, as opposed to on a thread about the White House Press office, simply because there are a number of posts here that deal with that particular point of yours.

You raise an interesting issue about wanting "a variety of perspectives. Network/cable news remaeiscent of the early 20th century where there were conservative, liberal, pre-fascist and socialist perspectives presented everyday." Personally, I think that's a good idea...as long as the network doesn't try and pretend its not skewing the news.

I miss, for example, the old days where each city had two newspapers a "Democrat" one and a "Republican" one. In those days, the papers often went out their way to make clear where their allegiences lie, sometimes even putting their party affiliation in their title. Having news programs do the same thing would, I think, be a great idea.

Personally, I suspect that day will return. Given the rise of political magazines (National Review, the Nation, etc.), followed by the rise of political blogs, followed now by the coming of "podcasting," I wouldn't be suprised if we didn't soon see "internet" networks that do exactly what you want.

I should note, however, I do have a certain amount of concern over this possibility insofar as it could lead to a greater polarization of our nation, as people find themselves only getting their information from sources that reinforce their own prejudices.

I think you see some of that already with the internet and, especially, with blogs.

Republicans gravitate towards Free Republic, for example, while Democrats gravitate towards Democratic Underground. If those types of sites are the only place where each side gets their information, and if that trend continues to "broadcast" news, it can lead to a certain insular thinking and intellectual laziness that ill serves us as a nation.

What colour is the sky on your planet, Ray?

Me and Mj think G-Man and r3x are living in a fantasy world.... How's that for a haunting?

When it comes to donations, at least one journalists' union puts itself squarely in the "liberal" camp.

According to the Associated Press, "the union representing Newsday's reporters and editors violated its own ethics by contributing money to politicians covered by the daily."

Recipients included Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, the Suffolk chapter of the Working Families Party, the Islip Town Democratic Committee, state Assembly candidate Treewolf West and Islip Councilwoman Pamela Greene.

Only Greene is a Republican.

Newsday has admitted that the donations "could call into question how the paper covers the news," but insist that its staff of trained journalists were ignorant of the contributions.

Newsday is on of the fifteen largest newspapers in the United States, with approximately 481,000 readers. It is owned by the Tribune Company, a media conglomerate whose other holdings include the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

Unless you've been traveling the hinterlands with Borat the last few months, you probably already know what the Center for Media and Public Affairs is confirming today: that coverage of Democratic candidates during this campaign season is overwhelmingly favorable to them. Among the findings, as reported by USA Today:

The media really has kicked their efforts into higher gear in this go-round.

The New York Times ran a story Sunday about mutual funds that cater specifically to liberals or conservatives.

Interestingly enough, the Times failed to disclose the presence of New York Times Co. stock in the portfolio of The Blue Fund, which only invests in companies that make at least 51 percent of their political donations to Democrats.

But I'm sure those donations to Democrats don't reflect the political views of the paper.

Please. Like Republicans are hurting for campaign contributions...

Tucker needs to listen that bowtie, sounds like.

Dude, I've been hopped up on all kinds of cold medicines for the past four days. Bear with me.

You'll fit right in with the coherence of most of the threads in here!

Indubitably.

Very interesting comments today from CBS News business correspondent Anthony Mason about the limited prism through which most journalists view big business in America:

I think too often the business beat is "what are gas prices today?" and "who did those evil corporations fire?" or "what bad CEO is making too much money?" and business is almost viewed as the big bad boogeyman that's not doing enough.

But the fact of the matter is, business is kind the fundamental underlying structure of society that makes it go, and you need to kind of look at it that way.

there is certainly a lack of understanding...there might have been an institutional bias.

I think a lot of people who come into journalism didn’t know much about business, and weren’t that interested.

And I think that’s part of the problem – most of us are on the employee side of things, and not on the employer side. And there’s another side to it.

New York Times public editor Byron Calame has publicly admonished the Times’ chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon, for saying he thinks the US can win in Iraq.

MSNBC and some other news outlets are reporting that journalists donate to democrats over republicans by a nine-to-one margin:

• MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

Not a terribly surprising story, given the obvious leftward tilt of the media's news reporting over the years. However, it is a bit more suprising to read some of the specifics of who donates, especially when the donations are violative of their employers' policies:

• Randy Cohen...writes the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for The New York Times. The former comedy writer gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004 when it was organizing get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bush.

It turns out that "the Ethicist" isn't very ethical. The Times prohibits its reporters from making political donations:

• some major newspapers and TV networks ...prohibit all political activity aside from voting no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations

Also surprising to some may be the democrat donors who work at Fox News:

• Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."

Some of the journalists tried to defend the donation by saying the cash contributions were part of a process of openess and accountability:

• One of the recurring themes in the responses is that it's better for journalists to be transparent about their beliefs, and that editors who insist on manufacturing an appearance of impartiality are being deceptive to a public that already knows journalists aren't without biases.

In principle, as I've stated before, that's not a bad idea. Unfortunately, as the article itself notes, the reporters aren't being transparent and, in fact, often go to great lengths to hide their donations:

• Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.

According to the article, one reporter claimed his donations to John Kerry were irrelevant because he didn't cover U.S. news. He defined U.S. news so it excluded the U.S. war in Iraq. Another claimed that a donation was her husband's until confronted with the documents. A third claimed her father, not her, made the donation to a candidate, even though her "facebook" page showed her endorsing that candidate.

In short, the reporters aren't just biased, they are liars.

No wonder distrust of the media remains at an all time high.

you ever wonder why thre people who have to watch politics for a living and analyze everything that's done happen to decide that the dems are worth supporting?
or is this some liberal conspiracy for you? like wonderboy and black people theories?

There's little, if any, support in the article for your idea that these people were reporters who became democrats.

In fact, if you read the whole article, one of the defenses that many of the reporters try to advance is that they don't cover politics and, therefore, their existing biases aren't tied to their work.

The article also noted that the Press has toughened up their rules in response to the conservative outcry. Now if you cover sports you can't donate to a political party because their bosses are afraid of being labelled as biased. I think it's dumb because their going to be labelled as biased reguardless unless their "fair" like FOX.

The loss of the popular vote while still winning the presidency.
His many vacation days.
Pre-9/11 bungling.
Appointing cronies.
Massive and embarrassing failures in Iraq that have turned the world from supportive to practically fearing we're turning into Nazi Germany.
Katrina.
Plame leak coming from his White House.
Using religion as a wedge.
The controversial nature of the patriot act.
The many criminal scandals involving his people.
Appointed cronies like Michael Brown.
Changing our surplus into a record deficit.
Ignoring the will of the people on Iraq.
Many many more issues and scandals.


Do you ever think that maybe the press goes after Bush or seems tough on Bush because there is a lot of stink coming from his administration? Or that they gave him a pass after 9/11 and he used that to get us into Iraq and now the press is being tough to make up for their failures?
Where was this "liberal bias" when Clinton was in office? I remember the media milking every problem he had, every investigation that ultimately went nowhere, they still milked it. If there was such a bias, they would've twisted it instead of focusing on all the details.
Fox News is the only network that shows a true bias. They attack critics of Bush and lob softballs at his staff, they use weasel words and those cute little questions at the bottom of the screen to spread the GOP playbook, and they do it shamelessly. Fox does speculative stories about how terrorists will bomb us the second the democrats win, or how John Kerry being elected may cause the stock market to crash. That is bias at work, not the reporter who asked Bush a tough question about a war happens to vote democratic.

So? I actually said that contributions don't necessarily mean anything about how they work. Fox news is incredibly bias.

As opposed to any other televised news outlet?

I already wrote my view on that out, but G-man cuts a quote and you respond to his cuts. Just making the debate run around in circles until the original point is lost.

One thing I forgot to mention in response to this point. Waay back at the beginning of the thread, I already addressed this issue when I noted:

people who look at the facts and don't like Bush have a liberal bias?

jeez, the problem is the word bias. you assume that if someone is liberal they will twist everything to fit their world view. that's ridiculous. as i said the "liberal media" covered Clinton with gusto, they like scandals because they equal money.
A lot of people find Bush troubling because there is a lot of death surrounding him.

Media Matters

We ripped that biased Media Matters study apart earlier, Chris.

Reguardless of your opinion, MM makes some good points. Once again we have conservatives making claims that are not based on any actual press content but instead it's how a tiny fraction of 1 percent donated money.



That's some major money & some major bias!

That MSNBC NEWS report must have you really spooked if you're resorting to posting Media Matters EDITORIALS again.

In any event, before you go too far with the canard that the big money from the media goes to republicans you might want to recall or reread earlier posts about how, for example, the heads of CBS/Viacom, ABC and CNN, just to name three, are all lefties.

And you might want to reread the part where I pointed out that just because someone is a liberal doesn't mean they'll lie or distort the truth to show some bias. But fox news is in bed with bush, has close ties with bush, and is very easy going on the president while attacking any critics.

Actually, Fox doesn't really like Bush right now.

Ray keeps trying to turn the conversation back to Fox because he has no answer for the point of how many in the media are democrats.

But even his Fox argument is flawed.

On one hand, Ray says that Fox must be biased because "its in bed with Bush." On the other than, when faced with proof that 90 percent of all reporters are democrats (and, therefore, ideologically "in bed" with that party) he claims that doesn't mean they won't be objective. He's contradicting himself based on the party affiliation of the reporter(s) in question.

Perhaps you've talked about this but how do you feel about FOX G-man? Is that the network that gets it right or does that too also have a liberal bias?

What was the proof that 90% of all reporters are democrats?

No matter what any liberal can ever say they have to at the very least acknowledge that Fox changed the way news is reported. I think it was for the better. Before Fox you would have a guest come in GOP or Dem and spin the interview any way they wanted with alot of bullshit.....Fox started having one person from each party/point of view to discuss/spin any way they wanted and let the viewers decide.....Fair and Balanced.

Since then almost every news program has adopted the same format.

The past year or so I have found myself gravitating back to CNN...not because of any bias...but they are simply reporting the news a little more fairly now and I like their anchors better. (kiran chetry switched to CNN so did I, plus Juliet Huddy left) MSNBC is more or less the same thing too now.......I'm not talking about guys like O'reilly Olberman or Blitzer or Hume.....they all have different types of shows and don't hide which way they lean. But more or less Fox made news reporting better for everyone.

'UNETHICAL' WRITER TOLD: MOVE ON

Novak's advice for conservative journalists

• The veteran conservative journalist Robert Novak was on the Diane Rehm Show on Monday. He was talking about his 50 years in journalism, and talked about how liberal the profession is. He said that conservatives don't want to go into journalism, but for those who do:
  
  
   Quote:

  The advice I give them is to go into the closet. Don’t tell anybody you’re a conservative, because you’re not going to get the job, and you’re not going to get the advance.
  
  
  That's smart advice, I think. It is hard to convey how unfriendly, even at times hostile, American newsrooms are to conservatives, especially religious conservatives. I know a person who works at the very top of American broadcast journalism, who is literally afraid that her colleagues will find out that she's an Evangelical Christian, for fear of what this will do to her career. There are so few conservatives working in daily journalism that it's easy for stereotypes to be taken as fact by journalists. The thing that's striking to me, coming to the end of my second decade as a professional journalist, is not that the media are liberal, but that so many journalists have no idea how liberal they are. That is, they take their own political and cultural views as normative, because most of the people they know share those beliefs.
  
  I don't suppose I will ever understand how journalism executives will make such a fetish of "diversity" in hiring, but make no apparent effort to reach out to graduates of religious colleges, or other places where they might actually find people whose beliefs are consonant with a rather large segment of the public whose views are grossly underrepresented in newsrooms. As a purely business strategy, this makes no sense. Nor does it make sense for a publication that wants to report on the community as it actually is, in all its contradictions and complexities, as opposed to the community that one's ideology directs one to see.

I think it's funny that a guy like Novak who made lots of money being a conservative press person is acting like it hurt his career. It clearly didn't. I use to like Novak but now he just seems like a whiner. That is as attractive as when a liberal whines & mopes about unfairness btw.

There are conservatives in the media that I actually like that offer a perspective but they get overshadowed by those who are really less about conservatism & more about political propaganda. The media would do better looking for true balance than giving that crowd so much airtime IMHO.

That's not a completely invalid point about Novak's success.

However, Novak did begin his career many years ago, when it seemed as if the mainstream press was not so uniformly liberal. I took his comments to be directed at the younger people just breaking in, not the guy with 40-50 years of journalism under his belt.

Which way would you say the press has been moving towards since the 60's & 70's, more conservatism or more liberal? Novak & others seem to be ignoring that things have changed.

I think the traditional news outlets (NY Times, the big three networks, etc.) have moved to the left.

In turn, that leftward migration allowed the rise of non-traditional outlets for conservative opinion (e.g., talk radio, the internet).

However, as noted ad nauseaum in this thread and elsewhere, the media itself seems to label only one side of that dichotomy. Conservatives are labeled "Right Wing" and sent to the talk radio/cable TV ghetto, while liberals are allowed to wear the mantle of "mainstream" or "objective" and allowed to host the network news.

I really dissagree that the media has moved left especially since the 70's. For those of us who are older it would be interesting to see what others think. This was before FOX & when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. Conservatives have been busy over the decades!

The labelling you refer to is done by the folks themselves who are quite proud to be conservative & it makes them money. (guess that makes them the drug dealers & ho's of the "conservative ghetto") If there are any that you feel are really mainstream, who exactly?

Fox News and conservative talk radio are a direct result of liberal hegemony over the news media. Conservatives' alternate-media struggle to challenge liberals reporting only the liberal side of issues. Where conservatives were not able to give any counter-point rebuttal to liberal advocacy in the news media.


Again, refer to Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias, where a 30-year veteran of CBS news deconstructs how the news is slanted to a liberal perspective.

Goldberg points to the Reagan era as the point where the liberal media took a sharp left toward slanting the news.
One of several examples he cites is "homelessness" and how it was reported as a major crisis that was getting increasingly worse during the Reagan and Bush years. But suddenly when Clinton was in office, while there was no government action or decline in homelessness, the media ceased reporting it. How did Clinton stop the homeless crisis? He got elected.

The labelling of "conservative" and "right-wing" is by reporters, and not by conservatives themselves. And Goldberg points out that, on Sunday-morning talk shows and the broadcast evening news, that radical left wing liberals are not proportionately labelled, and that's largely because liberals reporting the news agree with the liberal radicals quoted.
To liberal reporters, including Dan Rather, these radical liberal views are "mainstream" or "middle of the road" whereas their perception of more conservative notions is that they are radical, and thus have to be clearly labelled as not mainstream.

I noticed a sharp uptick of liberal partisanship during the 1992 presidential campaign coverage, especially contrasting the Democrat and Republican conventions. Reporters glowed with enthusiasm in their reports of Clinton, Gore and the Democrat convention.
Conversely, they sneered at the Republican 1992 convention as boring, and tried to portray it as uninteresting and just repeating of old ideas, and often would have lengthy comments by reporters while key Republicans were giving speeches, and I would think: Get out of the way and shut up, let me hear him speak, so I can hear him and evaluate for myself what he is saying!

I felt the media helped Clinton get elected (with only 43% of the vote, I might add). If you saw Bush Sr live giving a campaign speech on CNN, his campaign arguments were persuasive and logical.
If you heard it soundbyted on the 6 o'clock news, Bush was defensive and repeating tired canned arguments.

And I think since November 2000, the liberal press has been more partisan than ever. Even before 9-11, the press portrayed Bush as an idiot, and portrayed his presidency as failed before he had a chance to enact anything.
As I said elsewhere, Ann Coulter's book Slander goes into how the media called Florida for Gore prematurely, and how that is estimated(comparing Republican voter turnout to the 1992 and 1996 elections) to have cost Bush a decisive 35,000 votes, that would have eliminated any question of Bush's winning Florida in 2000.
Coulter also tabulates how quickly states were called for Gore with a fraction of the votes counted, and how much more hesitantly any state was called for Bush, across all the liberal-dominated networks.


The liberal bias of the media was certainly made evident by several 60 Minutes stories in 2003 and 2004, where the author of every book critical of the Bush administration was given an infomercial on their program (Richard Clarke, Bob Woodward, Michael Moore...) where there was absolutely no challenge or counter-argument given of these authors' ideas, in anything resembling a balanced investigation of their allegations.
In the earliest ones, CBS neglected to even point out that the books were published by a subsidiary of CBS. Thanks to bloggers, they gave brief acknowledgement to this fact with the later books presented on their program.

And the ultimate example of partisan liberal bias, CBS/60-Minutes' forged letter expose about Bush's military service in October 2004, such an embarrassment that it finally cost Dan Rather his position as CBS news anchor.


It is only the appearance of seeming unpatriotic and looking like treasonous partisan assholes that the liberal media make the slightest effort to even appear to be objective.

Reagan & Bush gutted HUD & a couple of other programs in their first year that resulted in the number of homeless doubling. I see it a case of the cuts pleasing many conservatives but they of course didn't want what followed reported.

I totally don't agree that conservatives have lost ground since the 60's & 70's in the media. I would say it's just the opposite & that they've been busy building not only their own private clubs where balance isn't welcome but have also worked in being more effective using the mainstream media. All the while yelling charges of bias in an effort to bully the press.

Slander is a vulgar book. I've read the bulk of it (until I felt ill). It's full of hatred and ad hominem attacks. Every single point goes to how evil liberals are and if we just embraced the republicans then it would all be ok. There is not a single page of the book that doesn't spew anger.
Contrast that with Al Franken. His books are obviously bias towards his view, but his attacks are done with more a sense of mirth and satire rather than flat out insults. He also doesn't make the simplistic "black/white" assumptions Coulter does.
Now I dare Wonderboy to respond without calling me liberal or assuming that my post is part of a liberal hive mind.

Considering the level of hatred, profanity, ad-hominem attacks and insults that you post on pretty much a daily basis here on RKMB, I find it laughably ironic that you would use the word vulgar to describe anyone else's writings.

I think I answered the rest of your remarks about Coulter in a previous post:

Reason magazine:

• There's a new tool that lets you see the sources for anonymous edits made on Wikipedia. Naturally, hilarity ensues. The best one so far is an edit to the "George W. Bush" page originating from the ever-impartial New York Times:
  
  

Nope. No bias there. No siree, Bob.

wow. G-man you keep reaching. What matters is what goes on the air, what gets printed.
Fox News gives Bush and friends on air blow jobs daily. From what I've seen the regular press likes going after scandal. If they were so liberal than they wouldn't have had 24 hour coverage of Clinton during the impeachment. And they wouldn't have given it as much coverage (actually more) than they give the numerous legitimate scandals Bush has.
Maybe instead of bitching that the press is liberal for doing stories on Bush and his fucked up job as president you should be bitching that the president from your party is doing such a fucked up job. Or you should be glad that there is someone keeping some semblance of honesty in government by going after everything.
If it was all Fox News flag waving and softball interviews where would we be?

Editor & Publisher, trade journal of the journalism trade, reports on what Seattle Times executive editor Dave Boardman calls "an awkward moment" at a news meeting:

• What happened? According to Boardman in the latest email installment of what he calls "Dave's Raves" it was this: "When word came in of Karl Rove's resignation, several people in the meeting started cheering. That sort of expression is simply not appropriate for a newsroom. . . . As we head into a major political year, now's a good time to remember: Please keep your personal politics to yourself."

Boardman himself then sent another "Dave's Rave," which E&P reprints in full. Here's an excerpt:

• I ask you all to leave your personal politics at the front door for one simple reason: A good newsroom is a sacred and magical place in which we can and should test every assumption, challenge each other's thinking, ask the fundamental questions those in power hope we will overlook.
  
  If we wore our politics on our sleeves in here, I have no doubt that in this and in most other mainstream newsrooms in America, the majority of those sleeves would be of the same color: blue. Survey after survey over the years have demonstrated that most of the people who go into this business tend to vote Democratic, at least in national elections. That is not particularly surprising, given how people make career decisions and that social service and activism is a primary driver for many journalists.

America’s “leading news magazine” has apparently dropped its only two conservative-leaning columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol.

• Asked by The New York Observer if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post, replied that he didn’t have a choice. “It’s a hypothetical that didn’t arise,” he said.

The (NY) Times, they are a changin'

Guess they felt the need for a loud conservative but couldn't they have found one with a better track record? When was the last time Kristol was right about anything?

With all due respect, the fact that you can pull a clip, or several, from YouTube proves nothing.

All that shows is that someone was able to take an isolated clip from a show, regardless of context, and post it to an internet provider. It doesn't address whether the clip is representative of the show, or the network. It doesn't address whether the clips posted to YouTube are a fair sampling of the entire network's output.

It's, at best, anecdotal evidence, and certainly doesn't compare to the studies, such as those cited above, that were actually carried out in a more scientific method which do, in fact, tend to show an overall leftward tilt to the US media.

True, it's not absolute. But let's not kid ourselves. Just about everything we use as "evidence" is subject to being doctored or flat out wrong. Including the links and quotes you post.

So what are you saying? That you know your sources are inaccurate, or potentially inaccurate, but you use them anyway because you think someone else is doing the same thing?

Furthermore, your comparison isn't really valid. I pointed out how a YouTube clip, even if accurate, is not necessarily a representative sampling for the purposes of making the kind of determination you want to make. You didn't address that.

The bottom line is that you wanted to use an invalid methodology to prove a point.

No, what I'm saying is nothing is absolute. I would never post a Youtube video in defense of a point if I thought that video was false.



So your saying a video of somebody saying something can never be accurate? I didn't address it cause I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm saying that anything can be doctored or flat out false. The problem with facts is that they're only as good as the source or the people stating them.

I mean "with all do respect" here you are completely fucking up what I said in my last post, purposely or not.



I don't see how it's an invalid methodology? In court they allow video's and recordings, why should it be any less valid here. I realize there are all sorts of experts to decide if those things are valid in court but...none of us are experts here and even we are there are no way of establishing expertise. IE, I don't know that your info is anymore valid then what I post from Youtube. It's no hard to type a bunch of shit up. In fact, it's probaly easier then doctoring a video.

the Rasmussen polling firm

• Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure. The paper's ratings are much like a candidate's and divide sharply along partisan and ideological lines.
  
  By a 50% to 18% margin, liberal voters have a favorable opinion of the paper. By a 69% to 9% [sic], conservative voters offer an unfavorable view. The newspaper earns favorable reviews from 44% of Democrats, 9% of Republicans, and 17% of those not affiliated with either major political story.

Historian David Greenberg, over at Slate Magazine, argues that the media protected Obama:

• Throughout the year, Obama was often spared the task of defending himself because others with prominent media platforms did it for him. As the campaign progressed, a whole slate of possible criticisms—including legitimate concerns about his record or his foreign-policy chops—were deemed, as if by cultural consensus, beyond the pale. Indeed, it's worth recalling that October's hyperbolic claims about McCain's negativity echo similar (and similarly unfounded) claims about Clinton's campaigning back in the spring. Does Obama somehow invite historically unprecedented negativity? Or are his enthusiasts just unusually quick to perceive it? In any event, Obama benefited more from labeling his rivals as uniquely sleazy than he suffered from whatever sleaziness they displayed.

Speaking of media protectiveness, notice that Greenberg saved his defense of McCain (and criticism of the press handling of Obama) for after the election?

Who Else in the Press Is Hoping to Be Hired by the Obama Administration?

• Jay Carney, editor at Time magazine, is leaving the publication to become Vice President-elect Joe Biden's director of communications
  
  Job offers don't come together overnight, and for obvious reasons, the hiring process and job interviews are usually confidential. But this means that now we have two examples where members of the press were "covering" the Obama campaign while at the same time angling for a job with them. Not exactly an ideal circumstance for criticism, fairness or objectivity.
  
  Did these reporters'/editors' superiors know they were interviewing for staff jobs? Don't they have an obligation to disclose that to their editors? And shouldn't readers know if a reporter has that potential conflict of interest?
  
  we don't know if this is the only member of the media who interviewed for a position with Obama or Biden, and whether anyone else is interviewing with his campaign, or other campaigns. Who else in the press has been hoping to be hired by the Obama administration?

From the looks of the campaign coverage they were all interviewing for a job.

Husband of Obama UN Ambassador Is ‘This Week’ Producer:

• “The executive producer of a top Sunday show is married to a top Obama official? Shouldn’t this be disclosed on air, at least when they are discussing foreign policy?”

hope and change!

The New York Times reports that the Associated Press will distribute stories from four leftist nonprofits in addition to its own liberal reporting:

• Starting on July 1, the A.P. will deliver work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University (cranks out many of the FMSM journalists), the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica to the 1,500 American newspapers that are A.P. members, which will be free to publish the material.
  
  The A.P. called the arrangement a six-month experiment that could later be broadened to include other investigative nonprofits, and to serve its nonmember clients, which include broadcast and Internet outlets.

they must be positioning for a UAW scale bailout......

http://www.drudgereport.com/flashaot.htm

Goebbels would be proud.

That's a nutty statement.

Not really. Without firing a shot, we have a president who, for all intents and purposes, has a "free press" that acts as a branch of his administration.

Even if you accept ABC's "spin" of the event, you still have a major network providing, in essence, a free block of airtime and refusing to air the opposing viewpoint (contrast this with, for example, the fact that networks used to air the opposition response to major presidential speeches such as the state of the union).

NBC is going to be pissed that ABC is trying to move in on their man like that.

It was a nutty statement. ABC is free to do what it pleases, that wouldn't have happened in Nazi Germany.

Associated Press:

• ABC News is crying foul over a report that says "World News" most likely had its smallest audience ever.
  
  The network has asked Nielsen Media Research to investigate. The company initially reported that a little more than 4 million people watched "World News" last Friday, the first night of the digital switch over.
  
  Usually, more than 7 million watch the ABC broadcast on Fridays. ABC says a drop-off from the average could have been expected, especially given the slow summer season, but a disappearance of 3 million people didn't make any sense.
  
  Nielsen Media Research says it is looking into the case.

First they move into the White House and then they want to lean on the ratings-agencies.

But they're not acting like a "state run" media.

Ooohkay....

New ABC News Theme Song Revealed:

• exclusive preview of ABC's just-completed news theme song, scheduled to debut during the June 24th broadcast:
  
  
  
  

Goebbels Media Part Deux: ABC News is refusing paid ads for its health care program at the White House. Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR) inquired about purchasing ad time and was willing to do so. As of now, ABC is not accepting paid advertising, thus they're refusing even a paid-for alternative viewpoint.

Wow turning down money for advertising, what exactly is their business model? Maybe they have some stimulus money coming their way.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49625

When Are Gay Rights Groups 'Far-Left'? When They Criticize Obama
During the Bush administration, do you recall the MSM ever describing a gay rights group such as the Human Rights Campaign as "far-left"? Neither do I. To the contrary, such organizations were sympathetically portrayed as proponents of mainstream values.

But let such groups criticize Pres. Obama and—what do you know?—the MSM suddenly decides they're "far-left."

That's Joe Solomnese, head of the Human Rights Campaign, in the screencap, branded as far-left by the Early Show this morning.

Solmonese appeared as part of a segment this morning on the way that gay rights groups in general are disappointed with Pres. Obama for not doing more on behalf of their agenda. Isn't that convenient? By positioning them as "far-left," CBS places PBO in the middle, the victim of their attacks.

Double-standard, anyone?

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/06/17/roff_abc_obama/

http://www.thefoxnation.com/jimmy-kimmel/2009/06/17/jimmy-kimmel-mocks-obama-media-infatuation

Have they announced Kimmel's cancellation yet?

He's prolly just trying to goad Sarah Silverman into some hate sex.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/19/abc-employees-donated-heavily-to-obama/

Longtime Democratic strategist Tad Devine, however, said he detected the vast right-wing conspiracy of the last Democratic administration, and warned Republicans that complaining could backfire.

"It's the same old, same old from Republicans. People who run political parties have a responsibility to get their side of the story out, and they're attacking ABC to do that. ABC is the vehicle," said Mr. Devine, whose Democratic roots go back to the presidential ticket of Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale.

"Republicans think they must undercut news organizations who give President Obama favorable coverage - or they will lose elections. They're going to go after anyone who gives Obama a showcase," Mr. Devine said. "But it could backfire. If the GOP keeps this up, everyone will tune into that ABC special on Wednesday."


At least he is admitting its a Dem infomercial I suppose.

Matter-eater Man argumentative User Fair Play!
6000+ posts 20 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

Smith's 'Truth To Power' To Obama: What's Up With Bo?

• Pres. Obama told Harry Smith that "I would not want just a calm, passive dog. I want a dog with a little bit of spirit." Maybe so when picking a family pet. But when it comes to the media, PBO apparently prefers a lapdog. Witness Smith's tail-between-the-legs performance that won him a huge smile from the prez.
  
  Over the course of two days, the Early Show aired clips of Smith's recent interview of the PBO. Toward the end of today's segment, Smith says: "People in the mainstream media have been accused of being afraid to speak truth to power. I've got some truth to power for you."
  
  Was Smith building to a hard-hitting question on, say, PBO's firing of the inspector general who was too diligent in his duty of discovering corruption in the AmeriCorps, PBO's pet project? Of course not. In a pathetic display of precisely the kind of MSM wimp-out Smith had described, Smith asked the president a question about . . . his dog.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/...s-a-media-flap/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/23/AR2009062303262.html

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd...al-ratings-game

http://www.cleveland.com/obrien/index.ssf/2009/06/obama_presses_the_press_into_s.html#more

RKMB

What are you going on about now? Are you fucking stoned again?

I was just helping you out since I know how you feel about "cut and paste" posts

Yes helmet, I don't like them. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm sure everyone else with brain aids forgot it as well.

you'll have to excuse MEM rex, liberals and conservatives feel the need to agree on everything, they dont understand moderates who dont kiss each others asses or agree on everything.

I completely agree with you.

Me too.

And now we know it is possible for both of you to hump each other's leg simultanously.

And we know you miss sarcasm when its staring you right in the face.

You're still humping his leg aren't ya?

Rexy you never have to worry that I take you seriously. I'm gay and naturally love the good theatre you boys put on.

even the liberal media is starting to eat their meal ticket:


http://www.thrfeed.com/bill-maher-obama-obsessed-with-being-on-tv.html

Because he showed absolutely no signs of being an attention whore before the election? maher is just bitching at the president because all he knows how to do is bitch.

i dont think Obama has destroyed America enough to his liking.....

it's been a rough week for Obama, uber liberal Helen Thomas even attacks Obama's lack of openness and prepackaged Town Hall meetings:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24441.html

If the editor in chief is given Obama officials to raise money for her paper, whats the chances she will allow criticism and investigations of the Administration?

Having been caught, the Post is already backtracking:

• At 8.04am, Politico's Mike Allen publishes an article: "For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors."
  
  At 10.33am, Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli sends out an email:
  
  A flyer was distributed this week offering an "underwriting opportunity" for a dinner on health-care reform, in which the news department had been asked to participate.
  
  The language in the flyer and the description of the event preclude our participation.
  
  We will not participate in events where promises are made that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our independence from advertisers or sponsors is inviolable.
  
  There is a long tradition of news organizations hosting conferences and events, and we believe The Post, including the newsroom, can do these things in ways that are consistent with our values.

they dont seem to understand that it doesnt matter if the reporters dont attend. if the Obama admin is gunna loan out officials to do fund raising for newspapers there content is tainted whether the reporters are their or not.

Donnie, were you reading the Dude's post? That was already in there.

Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, dude, at least it's an ethos.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=50473

http://cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=50445

TV and Obama: mutual love affair

Expelled From the New York Times: By Ben Stein

• About five or six years ago, roughly, I was solicited to write a column every two weeks for the Sunday New York Times Business Section.
  
  The column went well. I got lots of excellent fan mail and fine feedback from my editors, who, however, kept changing....
  
  I started criticizing Mr. Obama quite sharply over his policies and practices. I had tried to do this before over the firing of Rick Wagoner from the Chairmanship of GM. My column had questioned whether there was a legal basis for the firing by the government, what law allowed or authorized the federal government to fire the head of what was then a private company, and just where the Obama administration thought their limits were, if anywhere. This column was flat out nixed by my editors at the Times because in their opinion Mr. Obama inherently had such powers.
  
  They did let me run a piece querying what I thought was a certain lack of focus in Mr. Obama's world but that was it, and then came another issue.
  
  I had done a commercial for an Internet aggregating company called FreeScore. This commercial offered people a week of free access to their credit scores and then required them to pay for further such access.
  
  This commercial was red meat for the Ben Stein haters left over from the Expelled days. They bombarded the Times with letters. They confused (or some of them seemingly confused ) FreeScore with other companies that did not have FreeScore's unblemished record with consumer protection agencies. (FreeScore has a perfect record.) They demanded of the high pooh-bahs at the Times that they fire me because of what they called a conflict of interest.
  
  Of course, there was no conflict of interest. I had never written one word in the Times or anywhere else about getting credit scores on line. Not a word.
  
  But somehow, these people bamboozled some of the high pooh-bahs at the Times into thinking there was a conflict of interest. In an e-mail sent to me by a person I had never met nor even heard of, I was fired. I called the editor and explained the situation. He said the problem was "the appearance" of conflict of interest. I asked how that could be when I never wrote about the subject at all. He said the real problem was that FreeScore was a major financial company and I wrote about finance. But, as I told him, FreeScore was a small Internet aggregator, not a bank or insurer.
  
  Never mind. I was history. "You should have consulted us," was the basic line.
  
  Of course, there was not one word of complaint when I did commercials for immense public companies. By a total coincidence, I was tossed overboard immediately after my column attacking Obama. (You can attack Obama from the left at the Times but not from the right.)
  
  The whole subject reminds me of a conversation Bob Dylan had long ago with a reporter who asked him what he thought about how much criticism he was getting for going from acoustic to electric guitar. "There are a lot of people who have knives and forks," he said, "and they have nothing on their plates, so they have to cut something."

Maybe they did can that waste over the tv commercial.

Also those other immensely public companies are like Baush%lauhm(sp?) for Visine or whatever.

I find it hard to believe the New York Times hired Stein without knowing his politics.

I find it equally hard to believe they hired him without realizing that he does TV commercials. In fact, as he notes in the full version of the piece, there was at least one incident with Times staffers found out the was doing a commercial with Shaq and (rather than reprimand him) asked him to bring them back souveneirs and autographs.

What was the product?

He doesn't say but I'm guessing Comcast, given the Shaq reference:

I suppose one could try and draw a distinction between the two commercials but it's one hell of a thin one.

In the Comcast commericial Stein identifies himself as an economist and says he's there to talk about finances and being smart with money. Comcast is a large telecommunications company and, presumably, as likely a topic for a column on business as the company that Stein did the ad for that ostensibly got him fired.

Furthermore, Stein's firing seems all the more peculiar when you consider the case of Paul Krugman. Krugman was an Enron advisor and consultant who later, and unlike Stein, went on to write about that company in his Times column. Krugman is still at the Times despite covering a company he used to work for.

Of course, Krugman is an vocal liberal.

Wow, are Comcast and the New York Times owned by the same people?

If not, that is way more of a conflict.

Comcast and the Times are not owned by the same company. I think Time Warner owns Comcast, in fact.

Washington Post editor Jonathon Capehartwas on MSNBC yesterday morning and made a freudian slip about the mainstream press alliance with the Obamanauts, "You know, there are legitimate concerns out there about health insurance reform or health care reform or however we're calling it today. But a lot of this rhetoric: death panels, pulling the plug on grandma, I think is sort of lowering the debate. And we've got two problems here. We, I should say the administration or Democrats have two problems. "

The problem was his questioning of the One. you are allowed to criticize the administration but no one is allowed to criticize him directly. take a look around anyone questioning Obama directly is referred to as a racist and an extremist(even MEM calls critics fringe), now to us it seems silly but in the world of newspapers this is no different than having a legitimate extremist writing for them.

Memo to Rupert:

Spite them. Hire Stein.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/17/obama-merchandise-big-seller-nbc-store/

well this does ease my concerns that NBC is run by left wing whackos, I guess their bias is just greed based.

Google 42 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

This is the same as the people that sold 9-11 books. they're making money off of tragedy.

NBC is owned by GE. GE is headed by Jeffrey Immelt. In the 8 years that he's been in charge, their stock has dropped an astounding 75%, yet not only is his job not in jeopardy, he's been tagged to be one of Obama's economic advisers.

Furthermore:

• Labeled “climate revenues” and totaling $646 billion over eight years, this line item in Obama’s budget has inspired confidence in GE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt. As Immelt put it in a letter this week, he believes that the Obama administration will be a profitable “financier” and “key partner.”

Basically, GE stands to make millions, if not billions off of Obama's "green" policies.

Why do they have to be conservatives to disapprove?

Oh, so Chuck Todd doesn't necessarily want to suck the Obamacock, Jeff Immelt makes him to try and better his bottom line. But, seriously, I think Todd likes it anyway.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2009/08/19/nbc-push-polling-obamacare

the push poll:

NBC's next push poll will probably be to convinece people that the Death Book never actually existed.

MSN 32 minutes 31 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

Damn. They're going to take my joke, steal it, and do it for real.

Tonight On MSNBC: Hate Speech At The RKMBS

Anti-'Obamacare' Ad Rejected by NBC, ABC: Refusal by networks to run national ad critical of president's health care reform plan is raising questions from the group behind the spot

ABC's Gibson: ACORN Story One to 'Leave to Cables'

The Story So Good ... It's Ignored?

Gibson is a piece of shit

Lou says network didn't want to offend president:

• Lou Dobbs said yesterday CNN was eager to show him the door because its top execs didn't want to offend President Obama.
  
  Dobbs made the claim last night on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," saying he took on President George W. Bush's immigration policy with equal force but didn't draw any CNN flak then.
  
  "I discern more of a difference between then, which was under the Bush administration when I was criticizing, and now, when it is the Obama administration -- and an entirely different tone was taken," said Dobbs.
  
  He claims both Bush and Obama are soft on illegal immigration

He must be racist.

AP Digs for Dirt in Palin's Book: News wire assigns 11 reporters to fact-check former governor's book, but didn't fact-check Obama's books.

Nobody knew or thought he was going to be running for the top office when those came out. Those books were looked at when he became a presidential candidate and were discussed.

The AP put two reporters on the Health Care bill Pelosi pushed through. Is your contention the AP did not know that this bill is important? 11 fact checkers for a book, and 2 for a bill that concerns 1/3 of our economy.

They used 11 fact checkers to go through Palin's book quicker not because it was more important. Much more time and resources are actually being spent on the health care bill. The two reporters are still on the bill while the fact checkers that spent maybe a couple of hours on Palin's book are not still on Palin.

Sorry, MEM, but I gotta roll with the them on this one. It isn't that I'm a huge Palin mark or anything, but the fact that they put 11 people on the job to fact check a book by PALIN!!!

I'm fairly sure it is full of enough lies, distortions and contradictions that all it would really take is two guys--tops--and search engine.

Palin's a hot topic and they put some resources into her book to fact check it quickly but comparing the short term allocations to long term ones is deceptive. It's ignoring the actual number of man hours put into each. The 2 reporters assigned to the health care bill will still be covering it while the 11 fact checkers were on that for how long? Probably less than a day.

MEM your being contradictory. first you say there were 11 fact checkers on Palin's book and none on Husseins because he wasnt considered a future candidate, so there was a need for 11 reporters assigned to Palin's book.

In the case of the healthcare bill you say there are 2 reporters but there is no hurry.

The fact is there was less than 3 days from the time Pelosi submitted the bill to the time the vote was taken. If Palin is running for President there is 3 years from publishing her book till she runs. Wouldn't it be more journalistically responsible to put 11 reporters on fleshing out the details of a bill this important before the vote, and 2 reporters however long they needed to fact check a book?

Which is more urgent in your mind, finding out details of legislation that impacts your life before it's voted on, or finding out details of a politicians book quickly?

Try to answer honestly, but if you can't it's ok.

Matter-eater Man argumentative User Fair Play!
7500+ posts 1 minute 32 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

Matter-eater Man argumentative User Fair Play!
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Forum: Politics and Current Events

Come back when you get the official Media Matters spin on this.

Anonymous 2 minutes 57 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

login and let us know what you think

It depends. Is the politician republican or democrat? What has Soros told me to think?
Sincerely,
Nambla Zick

Anonymous 1 minute 44 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

You're trash.

so you can't answer my question, but you can make pedophilia insults? you're a work.

Dude, get help.

You're making a false comparison though. And actually there are probably more than just 2 reporters from the AP covering health care reform. I was going by what you said but what is the 2 reporter number being based on?

You are garbage.

I hope the number is zero

Nambla Zick. Broken. Again.

So a non answer it is.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/fact_check_this_associated_pre.html

yep. broken.

Matter-eater Man argumentative User Fair Play!
7500+ posts 29 seconds ago Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: ABC News:Press is Liberal

that just happened.

You are garbage.

You are garbage.

You are garbage.

Matter-eater Man argumentative User Fair Play!
7500+ posts 5 seconds ago Making a new reply
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: Re: Press is liberal.

Zick's so broken that not ever government run health-care is going to put him back together this time.

You're the one who started the garbage attack G-man instead of focussing on the topic and a discussion based on merit.

Zick, pointing out that you have differing standards when it comes to politicans of different parties and that you seem incapable of expressing a coherent thought that you didn't cut and paste from a Soros-backed website is hardly a garbage attack.

But you already knew that. You just wanted to whine and try and change the subject because you can't justify (on any level) the idea that a major news organization would put eleven reporters on attacking Palin and only two on one of the most significant pieces of legislation since the New Deal.

The usual GOP talking points you regurgitate wasn't what I was referring to as a garbage attack. And I think there are actually more than 2 reporters from the AP covering health care reform. That was something Basams said but I asked where he came up with that number. Maybe he just made it up?

Zick, the thread says what it says. We can all read the post that broke you (this time).

Still wondering what basams based his 2 reporters stat on?

Associated Press: Senate, House Democratic health bills compared By ERICA WERNER and RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR (AP)

Two reporters listed. Unlike the eleven listed on the Palin "fact check".

In addition, please note the following (under "Accountability Journalism") from the Wall St. Journal: On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

• Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
  • ObamaCare bills: 2
  • Palin book: 11
  
  Number of pages in document being covered:
  • ObamaCare bills: 4,064
  • Palin book: 432
  
  Number of pages per AP reporter:
  • ObamaCare bill: 2,032
  • Palin book: 39.3

Seems pretty clear to me...and anyone else not getting all their thinking from Media Matters.

it just takes a little research MEM, dont rely on Media Matters for all your thoughts.

So it's comparing two stories but the AP has done and will do more reporting on the health care reform with more than just the two reporters listed on the one that you and basams seem to think is the only article by the AP on the bills.

So now your going back to your failed time argument. There is 3 years to expose any supposed inaccuracies in Palin's book before she runs, there was a 3 day window to flesh out details of the bill. Which do you think was the better use of resources?

"...any supposed inaccuracies..."

You are such a partisan basams.

Health care reform is hardly a done deal so your 3 day window logic is nonsense.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/partisan

1. an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, esp. a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance.



The same can be said about you mem.

So the press is supposed to cover legislation more extensively after a major vote and not before?

If you really feel that way you have some weird priorities, Zick

Furthermore, neither you (Nambla Zick) or the AP can predict with certainty when a bill will pass. With that in mind, the idea that a chatty tell-all book about last year's campaign is a priority over major legislation becomes even more nonsensical.

Finally, a search of the past seven days of the AP's archive shows 51 additional stories that mention Palin. So, clearly, the AP isn't done covering her either. This further weakens your argument.

Yes it would, so you agree that basams is a partisan?

I see that Zick is trying to change the subject again.

I replied to Rex's post.

Zick is still trying to change the subject.

He can't refute what BSAMS wrote or the news reports that show the AP put more reporters on Palin than on the healthcare bill. So he called BSAMS a partisan and is now trying to pretend that rex is the one who brought up who is or isn't a partisan.

In addition, Zick has never felt forced to respond to all of rex's posts in the past. So why would he pretend he is now?

Clearly, he's on the ropes and back to one of his longstanding tricks, namely, changing the subject and hoping people will forget what was written already on the topic.

Why do you keep bringing up other people? Are you really that afraid of a little self reflection? Are you really that terrified of yourself?

Do you really expect an honest answer?

Nambla Zick crying User Media Matters!
7500+ posts 11/22/09 03:33 PM Making a new reply
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: Re: Press is liberal

I'm not the one running away from the definition you posted. You however seem to be partisan for basams

Stop flirting with rex, Zick, and stay on topic.

G-man wants you to stay on his talking points Rex.

Yes you are. You are running away from yourself every time you deflect your retardation onto someone else.

Nope. You posted a definition and I recognized that it applied to me. I of course also recognized that it also applied to basams and that it's something you can't discuss.

No, I am observing that you are trying to change the subject because you know you've lost.

You're whining about BSAMS being partisan because you hope we'll forget that the Associated Press put more than five times the number of reporters on Palin's book than it did on the healthcare bill.

It's a Palin talking point that pretends one story by the AP about the health care bills equals one story about her book. I think most people understand that the AP probably has more resources invested in the health care bills on a regular basis than a short term time investment it used for the Palin book. It's a classic dodge by Palin herself to distract from her actual mistakes she made in the book. She seems to be good at that as well as blaming others and quitting.

Furthermore, even if BSAMS is partisan that doesn't change what AP did or what it says about their biases.

furthermore her worshippers seem to also be good at running with her talking point.

He is according to Rex's definition. Does anyone have a problem with the definition?

As noted above, the question of BSAMS alleged biases is irrelevant to a discussion of bias at the AP. Therefore, you are trying to change the subject.



As I wrote over an hour ago:



And:


In addition, I note that the AP laid off staff last week. This means that their resources will be more, not less, stressed in the coming weeks and months. With diminishing staff comes diminishing ability to cover healthcare. Accordingly, the decision to devote so much of their (shrinking) staff's time to a biography over policy at this point in time would seem to demonstrate that their priorities lie less in good government and more in attacking politicians they disapprove of.

It doesn't though. Just because the AP mentions Palin in other stories isn't evidence that they are employing more resources on her. The 11 were just used for a short time, some minimally involved according to the AP. Palin and you can cry foul but it's a dodge from reallity.

You have tried to convince that the AP spending more time on Palin's book than on health care last week was excusable because of timing of events and because AP would make up the difference later.

I have demonstrated that the evidence does not support your argument. They are still covering her (and her book) and, further, they have now laid off staff that might have been used on healthcare coverage.

As such, the record clearly shows you're the one trying to "dodge..reality."

That's what I'm talking about, dimwit. Why are you obsessed with bsams?

I'm not. I don't even bother reading much of his partisan stuff actually. You're the one who keeps coming back to be his bitch.

Just go join the insurgency already. They want tards like you there. They're the hive mind you've been looking for.

Scripps Howard News Service: Anti-Palin Bias Grips Media

• So some people asked the AP a question itself ― had it devoted so many people to search out possible error in the autobiographies of other political figures, such as Barack Obama. It did not answer. I've got a guess the answer is ``no," for my impression is that there is not much even-handedness in fact checking among the media outlets I scan. Vice President Joseph Biden's constant flubs seemed to me to get far less attention during the 2008 campaign than Palin's, and when Obama gave a speech to Congress containing a half-dozen big-time errors, I do not recall an AP story telling me his propaganda show on health care had become no truer over time.

I went over to Media Matters and not even Soros is trying to claim the 11 vs 2 reporter story is false. No wonder Zick is flailing on this issue.

You really can't stop being a bitch can you?

You're the one who keeps coming back to discuss it with him. Seems like you're being his bitch.

Any chance you'll get back on topic now?

Try to stay on topic G-man.

Nambla Zick. Still Broken. As noted before:



Rebuttal?

I see you've started that self reflection thing I mentioned.

In a way, rex, you are being his bitch. He doesn't want to talk about the topic (the press) and so he's sucking you in to this whole "I'm not a bitch, you are" side topic.

And you're falling for it. He's doing to you what you do to WB.

Do I give a fuck what you say? You're just as bad as he is. You're both political extremists that lack the ability to think for yourselves.

Just being bitchy isn't really showing an ability to think for yourself Rex. There rarely is a post of yours that isn't anything beyond you complaining about another poster.

So what's your take on the topic? Not on Zick, BSAMS or me. On the topic.

yeah rex!

Seriously, rex, what is your take on the topic?

Yeah, seriously rex!

You just both proved my point from the other thread.

Still waiting.

reax doesn't really care. he does it for the lulz and nine times out of ten one or both of you will take the bait.

You could be right. But other times, rex acts like he genuinely cares about a topic. In fact, he used to be a pretty interesting guy to exchange ideas with (about four or five years ago, admittedly). Therefore, sometimes I try to give him the benefit of the doubt.

People change G-man, you used to be less of an evil partisan whore not that long ago. Now I think I'm the only left leaning person here who will even bother with trying to discuss a topic with you.

Okay, that was genuinely funny.

AFLAC!

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AFLAC!

AFLAC!

Weekly Standard

• With the release of hundreds of emails by advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors -- including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments -- even the New York Times is forced to concede that "the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists."
  
  But apparently the paper... is taking a pass on publishing any of the documents and emails that are now circulating:
  The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
  
  This is the position of the New York Times when given the chance to publish sensitive information that might hinder the liberal agenda. Of course, when the choice is between publishing classified information that might endanger the lives of U.S. troops in the field or intelligence programs vital to national security, that information is published without hesitation by the nation's paper of record. But in this case -- the documents were "never intended for the public eye," so the New York Times will take a pass.