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Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Your "liberal" media | |||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Time to retire the facile construction of a "liberal" mainstream media that supports Democrats and hates Republicans:
quote: Mike Allen, consummate Beltway "journalist" | Salon.com quote: No webpage found at provided URL: http://mediamatters.org/items/200706020001 quote: No webpage found at provided URL: http://mediamatters.org/items/200705120002 And that doesn't even get into the ridiculous coverage of the Al Gore 2000 campaign, where the media completely fabricated a number of statements supposedly said by Gore ("I invented the internet", "I was the inspiration for Love Story") and then used those fabrications to portray Gore as arrogant and out-of-touch. It's time to abandon the foolish notion that the media bends the truth in favor of Democrats. In a world where a candidate whose staff rents a pickup truck is called a "man of the people" by the media and a rich man promoting policies to help the poor is labeled a "hypocrite", the idea that the media is on the side of the Democrats is just 100% ridiculous.
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AZPaul3 Member Posts: 8564 From: Phoenix Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Sorry, Frog, you can find exceptions to every position. A few quotes do not negate the base premise.
Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.
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Taz Member (Idle past 3322 days) Posts: 5069 From: Zerus Joined: |
I'd have to agree with AZ here. The media, like any other entity, is composed of individual networks, individual philosophies, and individuals. Fox, for instance, have been caught lying in favor of republicans many times before. But the fact remains that the media is largely liberal even if there are a few here and there who are bent toward republican ideals.
We are BOG. Resistance is voltage over current. Disclaimer: Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style. He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3992 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.5 |
AZPaul3 writes: A few quotes do not negate the base premise. And bare assertions do not support it. Real things always push back. -William James Save lives! Click here!Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC! ---------------------------------------
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3992 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.5 |
Taz writes: But the fact remains that the media is largely liberal even if there are a few here and there who are bent toward republican ideals. When, where, and how was this fact of liberal bias in the media established? Real things always push back. -William James Save lives! Click here!Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC! ---------------------------------------
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Sorry, Frog, you can find exceptions to every position. I'm not sure what you think is "exceptional" about what I've quoted. They were representative samples, not the whole of the data set. Are you saying you never heard the media talk about Al Gore "inventing the internet"? Or ridiculing him for asserting that he was the inspiration for Love Story? Which were two things he never said? Are you saying that you didn't hear about Pelosi's "Plane-gate"? John Edwards' $400 haircut? (Mitt Romney's haircuts are equally expensive, by the way, but I can't find a single news story on it. Edwards' haircut returns almost 300 stories on Google News.) How many stories have you heard recently about Fred Thompson having to rent a pickup truck to look folksy? Can you imagine how the media would treat a Democratic candidate for president who had done the same thing? Indeed, if I'm talking to someone who never watches the news, then from what basis are you able to dispute my points? Here's how they treated John Kerry in 2004:
quote: Now, keep in mind that John Kerry has been a life-long hunter, and going hunting is something that he does quite often. (As compared to, say, Mitt Romney - who called himself a "lifelong hunter" but was revealed only ever to have hunted twice in his life.) But in your "liberal media", it becomes just another transparent ploy for votes - just another "flip-flop". The media makes it look like he's just pandering. There's a hundred examples. A hundred hundred. If the best your side can point to is that tired old survey about how liberal reporters are in their own personal politics, then the debate is over. For starters, being personally liberal doesn't eliminate the possibility of a systematic bias against liberals as a kind of "over-correction"; it doesn't eliminate the possibility of bias against liberals as an explicit editorial strategy (plenty of liberals work for Fox News); and it doesn't substantiate the position that just because reporters may be liberal, they'd be biased in favor of liberals. Quite frankly the idea of a "liberal media" has never been substantiated; it's a right-wing shibboleth, nothing more. The hypocritical treatment of Democrats and the reliance on "narratives" about Republicans (i.e. John McCain is a "maverick" who "stands up to the President") being privileged over the facts about Republicans (John McCain has voted in favor of the President's proposals nearly every time) is proof of that. Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
But the fact remains that the media is largely liberal even if there are a few here and there who are bent toward republican ideals. People in the media may be liberal, but that's irrelevant. Their personal politics have nothing to do with slanted media coverage - which, again, predominantly favors Republicans at nearly every turn. How many news outlets carried John McCain's attack on Obama last week ("Obama doesn't know how to spell 'flack'") without noting that, in fact, Obama actually spelled the word completely correctly? All but two of them. How many news networks allow anonymous administration sources to corroborate the administration's official position? Every single one. Liberal bias in the media is a myth that has never been substantiated.
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Archer Opteryx Member (Idle past 3628 days) Posts: 1811 From: East Asia Joined: |
Omnivorous: When, where, and how was this fact of liberal bias in the media established? The leftward political orientation of US journalists as a group (when compared to the general US population) is documented. The amount of 'bias' resulting from the situation is debated. One source:
Journalists consistently register as Democrats in proportionally higher numbers than the general population as well. This skew, though, was also less pronounced in 2002 than in earlier decades.
full article _____________ Edited by Archer Opterix, : url Archer All species are transitional.
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3992 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.5 |
Archer writes: The leftward political orientation of US journalists as a group (when compared to the general US population) is documented. The amount of 'bias' resulting from the situation is debated. I asked for oranges, and you gave me apples. It is true, though, that you did note they were apples. Real things always push back. -William James Save lives! Click here!Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC! ---------------------------------------
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Archer Opteryx Member (Idle past 3628 days) Posts: 1811 From: East Asia Joined: |
I asked for oranges, and you gave me apples. I gave you data. Crash gives you anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data. Archer All species are transitional.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The leftward political orientation of US journalists as a group (when compared to the general US population) is documented. This is the same tired old survey that gets trotted out every time we talk about media bias. Of what possible relevance could this be to media portrayals and bias? None whatsoever, that I can see. Can you defend this as being anything but non sequiter?
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Well, who a journalist votes for is far more important than what is actually printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV. Why does this sort of reasoning surprise you? We see it all the time among the creationists and evangelists on this very site.
Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I gave you data. Well, hell, I can give you data. I could give you: 1) The average yearly rainfall of the Amazon basin;2) The batting average of each hitter in the starting lineup of the 1996 Yankees; 3) The number of motorcycle accidents involving alcohol in 2003. Take your pick. All of that data would be equally relevant to media bias as the survey you've presented. For what we're talking about? I wonder how you respond to this informal survey:
quote: Geoffrey Nunberg - Media Bias Indeed, it would be very difficult to construct a controlled survey model of media bias, because the media reports on current events, not fictitious ones, by definition. It's impossible to control current events. But it's time to retire the ridiculous idea that a survey about reporter voting habits is authoritative on the issue, particularly since it's rarely reporters who determine editorial stance. (For that matter, it's barely editors who determine editorial stance.)
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anglagard Member (Idle past 867 days) Posts: 2339 From: Socorro, New Mexico USA Joined: |
crashfrog writes: People in the media may be liberal, but that's irrelevant. Their personal politics have nothing to do with slanted media coverage - which, again, predominantly favors Republicans at nearly every turn. I was a journalist for a year. It is not the reporters but rather the editor (with the implied permission of the publisher) who decide what appears in print. If the publisher feels they are losing money because their advertisers don't like the unvarnished truth, you can forget the truth. This is why the broadcast media is nothing more than a propaganda ministry for the politics of their advertisers, which are large corporations such as pharmaceutical, oil, and auto companies. In many cases these are the very same companies that buy off conservative politicians to prevent health care reform and serious fuel conservation measures.
Liberal bias in the media is a myth that has never been substantiated. If anything, the media has a pro-advertiser bias. Once they let drug companies and lawyers advertise on TV, any professional ethics concerning independence from advertiser pressure disappeared. The myth of liberal bias is just a preemptive strike to hide the actual bias, which is conservative if anything. Where were all those TV reporters asking the hard questions prior to the Iraq War? They were silenced by the administration and their big business friends, through pressure on media executives, by threatening to withhold access and advertising. Edited by anglagard, : improve sentence
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Archer Opteryx Member (Idle past 3628 days) Posts: 1811 From: East Asia Joined: |
crashfrog: This is the same tired old survey that gets trotted out every time we talk about media bias. The survey is conducted and published anew every decade. The journalistic profession itself finds this data significant enough to track. The poll provides data about journalists as a group in much the same way as the Gallup Poll provides data about the general population.
Of what possible relevance could this be to media portrayals and bias? One reason it is significant is because, while bias itself is an elusive thing to define and measure, the self-professed political affiliation of individuals is not. The surveys show that for the past forty years US journalists as a group are at least twice as likely to identify themselves as liberal (no scare quotes) than the general population. A significant skew in one direction is consistent with an assertion of bias in that same direction. It is not proof of bias but it represents relevant data. Why? Because the skew is exactly what one would expect to find if assertions of bias were true. The converse also applies. If one asserts bias in the opposite direction, one is obliged to explain, given the data, how a group acquires a bias against beliefs its members hold as individuals. It's odd that you should need to have this explained. I suspect the significance of the data would be apparent enough to you if, for example, a survey of CEOs of the corporations buying the most expensive media advertisements showed that these same people were twice as likely as everyone else to register as Republicans. Data about the political affiliations of media sponsors would also be relevant to the discussion. And welcome.
Can you defend this as being anything but non sequiter? Done. Can you defend your OP as anything but partisan whining about stories you don't like? __________ Edited by Archer Opterix, : html. Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity. Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo. Edited by Archer Opterix, : ongoing quest for literary perfection. Archer All species are transitional.
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