The New York Times Magazine
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/ma...123200&en=66c9
8aeae115de49&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE) this weekend previewed the new movie "
Outfoxed (http://www.outfoxed.org/) " -- a documentary analyzing Fox News,
sponsored by American Progress and MoveOn.org. The movie will premier in New
York City Tuesday night, and, according to the LA Times, MoveOn will promote
the film at house parties across the country on July 18
(http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0704-01.htm) . Featuring
"interviews with former Fox employees and leaked policy memos written by Fox
executives," the film is "an obsessively researched expose" by Hollywood
director Robert Greenwald, who shows how the network "distorts its coverage
to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon
Rupert Murdoch." In one scene, Fox News's chief White House reporter Carl
Cameron is shown hamming it up with President Bush
(http://www.newsignature.com/cap) , telling the president that his wife was
campaigning for the Bush-Cheney ticket. As LA Times columnist Tim Rutten
wrote, Fox has become "the most blatantly biased
(http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/insig...4_3025056,00.h
tml) major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism."
The movie highlights a trend whereby the broader right-wing media is
parroting the conservative line on everything from the war to the economy to
coverage of the presidential campaign -- leaving facts and objectivity by
the wayside.

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 15:15:54 -0400, "Jim" wrote:


The New York Times Magazine
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/ma...123200&en=66c9
8aeae115de49&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE) this weekend previewed the new movie "
Outfoxed (http://www.outfoxed.org/) " -- a documentary analyzing Fox News,
sponsored by American Progress and MoveOn.org. The movie will premier in New
York City Tuesday night, and, according to the LA Times, MoveOn will promote
the film at house parties across the country on July 18
(http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0704-01.htm) . Featuring
"interviews with former Fox employees and leaked policy memos written by Fox
executives," the film is "an obsessively researched expose" by Hollywood
director Robert Greenwald, who shows how the network "distorts its coverage
to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon
Rupert Murdoch." In one scene, Fox News's chief White House reporter Carl
Cameron is shown hamming it up with President Bush
(http://www.newsignature.com/cap) , telling the president that his wife was
campaigning for the Bush-Cheney ticket. As LA Times columnist Tim Rutten
wrote, Fox has become "the most blatantly biased
(http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/insig...4_3025056,00.h
tml) major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism."
The movie highlights a trend whereby the broader right-wing media is
parroting the conservative line on everything from the war to the economy to
coverage of the presidential campaign -- leaving facts and objectivity by
the wayside.



This is so predictable. The one news agency which flies in the face of
typical liberal bias, and offers a different (admittedly conservative)
slant. It's no wonder those who don't want the people to hear the
other side, would be upset about it, and move to smear it.

Fox serves a great purpose. It gives the other perspective. True
thinking people can therefore take both sides of the story and decide
for themselves which makes the most sense.

Partisans like Michael Moore, Moveon.org, and the Hollywood liberal
elite, do not want people to see things from any perspective which
differs from theirs.

America was founded on the principles of choices. Why should this not
apply to our news outlets?

Dave

Dave Hall wrote:




This is so predictable. The one news agency which flies in the face of
typical liberal bias, and offers a different (admittedly conservative)
slant. It's no wonder those who don't want the people to hear the
other side, would be upset about it, and move to smear it.

Fox serves a great purpose. It gives the other perspective.

Fox is crap. There's no relationship between news and Fax. It's simply
the electronic version of the fundie Washington Times, Rev. Moon's house
organ for the GOP.

America was founded on the principles of choices. Why should this not
apply to our news outlets?

Dave



In a perfect world, news would be news.
Anymore, we accept non-stop spin and editorializing as news.

News is supposed to be where people get facts about the world beyond their
immediate daily experience.

Saying that we should have a "choice" about which version of the truth to
subscribe to takes news out of the information category and puts it squarely
into religion.

Yes, you should have a religious choice.
News should be objective.

America was founded on the principles of choices. Why should this not
apply to our news outlets?

In other words, you deliberately choose a news source that is biased
towards your own views, so as to not be faced with disagreeable facts.
This is called "spin." Your news source is spin. You then claim that
everything & everybody that disagrees with you is spin.

Does this sound smart to anybody but Dave?


Gould 0738 wrote:
In a perfect world, news would be news.
Anymore, we accept non-stop spin and editorializing as news.

It's the Age of MacLuhan, Part 2... *everything* is advartising.

Advertising is fine when you're choosing between Coke or Pepsi, but in
choosing political leaders it is a bit more destructive.

The issue here is that Dave (and his fascist whacko pals) are trying to
foist their advertising on us and insist that it's true. But it doesn't
work in real life, and while they admit it's all fantasy, they insist
that everyone must dance to the tune. The question is how long democracy
can survive under this assault. Maybe not even until November...

DSK

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:26:44 -0400, DSK wrote:

America was founded on the principles of choices. Why should this not
apply to our news outlets?

In other words, you deliberately choose a news source that is biased
towards your own views, so as to not be faced with disagreeable facts.

That's what you do, so why shouldn't I?

This is called "spin." Your news source is spin. You then claim that
everything & everybody that disagrees with you is spin.

Mine spins to the right, while yours spins to the left. Hopefully the
truth will fallout in the middle.

That's exactly what everyone else does when they watch the other news
outlets which are spun and biased the other way.


Does this sound smart to anybody but Dave?

It does when you aren't living in that large river in Africa.



Gould 0738 wrote:
In a perfect world, news would be news.
Anymore, we accept non-stop spin and editorializing as news.

It's the Age of MacLuhan, Part 2... *everything* is advartising.

Advertising is fine when you're choosing between Coke or Pepsi, but in
choosing political leaders it is a bit more destructive.

The issue here is that Dave (and his fascist whacko pals) are trying to
foist their advertising on us and insist that it's true.

As opposed to the socialist wacko liberal network pals trying to foist
their advertising on us and insisting that it's true?

But it doesn't
work in real life, and while they admit it's all fantasy, they insist
that everyone must dance to the tune. The question is how long democracy
can survive under this assault. Maybe not even until November...

Oh get down off your high horse Doug. You make it sound as if Fox news
is biased horribly to the right, while the rest of the news agencies
are perfectly objective. If you truly believe that then you are a
bigger nut case than you accuse me of being.

If not, then why do you believe that Fox has any less right to present
a counter bias to that of the other networks?

Dave

Pardon me for jumping into the middle here, but I have to respond to this.

Gould 0738 wrote:
News should be objective.

That's impossible. News is *always* biased, and the whole notion of
objectivity in journalism is the biggest single factor in the political
dumbing-down of Americans that has occurred over the last few decades.
It's a recent invention, too, created in the 20th century by well-meaning
people who didn't understand that it couldn't ever work. It would be a
good idea if it could work, but it can't.

Why not? Because news is collected and reported by people, and people have
biases. No matter how hard you try for complete objectivity, it can never
be achieved, because everything you see, hear and read is filtered through
your own worldview.

"But if they just report plain facts, with no interpretation, that's
objective by definition!" you may respond. But that's not true either, at
least not in a world as large and complex as the one we inhabit, for the
simple reason that it's not possible to report *all* of the facts. The
journalist must filter the raw facts and decide what is worth reporting and
what isn't. This filtering introduces obvious bias. Even less obvious but
perhaps more pernicious is the problem of fact-checking. While journalists
should check all of the facts they report, there are many, many levels of
checking, ranging from simple verification of the source to full-on
investigation. In an ideal world, every fact reported would be fully
investigated and verified through multiple channels, but that's simply not
possible, so journalists have to make judgements about what level of
checking is required. Naturally, "facts" that appear to violently
contradict the reporter's own worldview will get checked more thoroughly
than those that seem patently obvious, meaning that errors that the
reporter agrees with are more likely to be published than errors the
reporter does not agree with.

Finally, even if individual reporters and editors were able to be purely
objective and avoid biasing their reports in any way, a few individuals
with an agenda can intentionally introduce their own biases.

What makes all of this really nasty is when the consumers of this biased
news are convinced that they are getting straight, objective news, so they
don't bother to look for and take into account the biases.

Personally, I think we as consumers of the news were much better off 100
years ago when the newspapers wore their biases on their sleeves, so to
speak. Then, at least, people knew what they were getting, and they could
use multiple, opposing sources to get a more accurate view of the world.

Shawn.

Gould 0738 wrote:
News should be objective.

That's impossible. News is *always* biased, and the whole notion of
objectivity in journalism is the biggest single factor in the political
dumbing-down of Americans that has occurred over the last few decades.

Congrats on a very insightful post.

Many of our major news sources make *no* attempt to be objective. As you
observe, that's not a problem until some of these highly biased sources declare
that they are bastions of objectivity and that all *other* sources, with a
different agenda, are hopelessly biased.

The most hilarious thing I hear, several times a week, are multi-million dollar
radio personalities with the largest listening audiences in the country moaning
and wailing about being victimized by the "mainstream media."

Gould 0738 wrote:

Many of our major news sources make *no* attempt to be objective.

Probably. It's hard to get inside their heads to know for sure. I suspect
they do try to be objective, but not very hard, and not all the time.

The most hilarious thing I hear, several times a week, are multi-million
dollar radio personalities with the largest listening audiences in the
country moaning and wailing about being victimized by the "mainstream
media."

One nice thing about those radio shows is at least they're up front with
their biases, mostly. Their audiences mostly haven't caught onto the idea
that it's a good idea to listen to conflicting points of view and think
critically about the content, but I think that's mostly the fault of the
supposedly objective media, which has trained the last three generations to
simply accept whatever is broadcast as truth. I welcome the rise of these
blatantly biased sources in the hope that people will eventually catch onto
the idea that all news should be taken with a grain of salt.

BTW, with regard to my auto carb, I've gotten several other confirmations of
your (and Fred's) point of view from a Bayliner owner's forum. Not one
dissenting opinion, in fact. Darn it.

Shawn.

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:36:22 -0600, Shawn Willden
wrote:

Pardon me for jumping into the middle here, but I have to respond to this.

Gould 0738 wrote:
News should be objective.

That's impossible. News is *always* biased, and the whole notion of
objectivity in journalism is the biggest single factor in the political
dumbing-down of Americans that has occurred over the last few decades.
It's a recent invention, too, created in the 20th century by well-meaning
people who didn't understand that it couldn't ever work. It would be a
good idea if it could work, but it can't.

All it takes are indiscriminate adjectives inserted into the account
to establish a point of view, and at that point objectivity is gone.


Why not? Because news is collected and reported by people, and people have
biases. No matter how hard you try for complete objectivity, it can never
be achieved, because everything you see, hear and read is filtered through
your own worldview.

Exactly!


"But if they just report plain facts, with no interpretation, that's
objective by definition!" you may respond. But that's not true either, at
least not in a world as large and complex as the one we inhabit, for the
simple reason that it's not possible to report *all* of the facts. The
journalist must filter the raw facts and decide what is worth reporting and
what isn't. This filtering introduces obvious bias. Even less obvious but
perhaps more pernicious is the problem of fact-checking. While journalists
should check all of the facts they report, there are many, many levels of
checking, ranging from simple verification of the source to full-on
investigation. In an ideal world, every fact reported would be fully
investigated and verified through multiple channels, but that's simply not
possible, so journalists have to make judgements about what level of
checking is required. Naturally, "facts" that appear to violently
contradict the reporter's own worldview will get checked more thoroughly
than those that seem patently obvious, meaning that errors that the
reporter agrees with are more likely to be published than errors the
reporter does not agree with.

Then there are guy like Jayson Blair. But that's another story.....


Finally, even if individual reporters and editors were able to be purely
objective and avoid biasing their reports in any way, a few individuals
with an agenda can intentionally introduce their own biases.

What makes all of this really nasty is when the consumers of this biased
news are convinced that they are getting straight, objective news, so they
don't bother to look for and take into account the biases.

There are people who actually believe the articles in the National
Enquirer. Some people's B.S. filters don't work very well. This
usually has a lot to do with their education.


Personally, I think we as consumers of the news were much better off 100
years ago when the newspapers wore their biases on their sleeves, so to
speak. Then, at least, people knew what they were getting, and they could
use multiple, opposing sources to get a more accurate view of the world.

I find it interesting that the group of people who's idealogue have
been infiltrating the mass media and educational institutions in order
to rewrite history and promote their agendas for years now, suddenly
have a problem when the other side tries to counter it in their own
arena.

Dave