"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
Rich Wood wrote:

On 23 Sep 2004 07:02:40 GMT, Mark Crispin
wrote:


FOX News is not "conservative" media. A Yale University study on media
bias showed that, while FOX is right-of-center, it is was no more to the
right than USA Today is left-of-center. CBS is much further to the
left.
FOX News is actually closer to the center than any other TV news.

There is no conservative news channel.


Damn! Tha must be good weed you're smoking!



It's actually true. There are of course conservative
talk shows. But no actual "news channel" that is
consistently substantially to right of center. That's
exactly what the previously quoted showed.

All except Fox and MSNBC are very far left of center.

People who say things like "Fox is right wing" are
simply WRONG.

No, you are wrong. That study only examined news stories. 90% of Fox
programming is not news stories.


Whe you ACTUALLY look at the real world, for example,
the Congress, Fox is very close to the center. If you
look at all the people, same result.

Fox's actual news stories may be close to the center, but the majority of
their programming is way right of center.

--
McWebber
No email replies read
If someone tells you to forward an email to all your friends
please forget that I'm your friend.

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...

It's actually true. There are of course conservative
talk shows. But no actual "news channel" that is
consistently substantially to right of center. That's
exactly what the previously quoted showed.

Yes, you are correct: while Fox is extremely right-wing, it is not a "news
channel". Rather, it is Republican propoganda in the guise of entertainment
loosely disguised as "news". Sort of like a neo-conservative Saturday Night
Live, minus the humor. Or at best a political Jerry Springer or Howard
Stern, with politicians etc. as the dysfunctional guests/entertainment.

All except Fox and MSNBC are very far left of center.

True, if you are looking at things from the point of view of John
Poindexter, Dick Cheney, or John Ashcroft (or the point of view of Rupert
Murdoch or Roger Ailes). Some years ago one of the initiators of the
"liberal media" myth essentially admitted that the media was "liberal" only
because all of society was liberal form that person's point of view. These
people wanted a definitively right-slanted media in order to influence
society, not to reflect it. And they came up with the scam (which they are
fully conscious of, even admitting publicly that it's a wonderful racket) of
accusing mainstream media, which strives not to be biased, of being biased,
when it is they, the accuers, that are actually biased and making no attempt
to be fair. But if you keep saying it, people will believe it, right?

People who say things like "Fox is right wing" are
simply WRONG. They are weong because they are using
a cloud cookoo land definition of center. That is, they
simply assign themselves ... quite left wing people ...
as center.

Whe you ACTUALLY look at the real world, for example,
the Congress, Fox is very close to the center. If you
look at all the people, same result.

You are naive enough to believe that Congress is a good reflection of the
real world?

In the "real world", the large majority of the population disagrees with
actual Republican policies in virtually every area, when they are each taken
in isolation and stripped of rhetoric: universal health care, abortion,
welfare, taxes, gun control, separation of church and state, education,
drugs and crime, media ownership, environment, labor relations, workplace
safety, civil rights, corporate accounting abuses, etc. But the right wing
have become masters of deception and framing the issues in such a way that
their bad positions are made to look good and their opponents are forced to
debate on their terms. Continual mudslinging and misdirection of blame onto
their opponents only helps their cause.

They also have their own right-wing "news" outlet in Fox, which doesn't
bother with fact checking or even trying to tell the truth, freely mixes
editorializing with "reporting", gives no time at all to balancing
progressive points of view, and generally plays out the Republican
leadership's philosophy that politics is war, to be won at any cost (get all
the spoils and kill your opponents). There is nothing in the current
Republican philosophy about building a better world or country, about
benefitting the population as a whole, about accommodating different points
of view, or about reasoned debate about policies. It is all about winning:
disparaging and degrading your opponents and discrediting them and their
points of view. Then you can get all the spoils.

And the mainstream media have played along: despite being "liberal" (if
that's really the case: a 1998 study showed that the Washington press corps,
at least, were more conservative than the general public on issues such as
trade, taxes, Social Security, health care and corporate power, and the
majority of newspapers have endorsed Republican candidates in virtually
every election this century), individual reporters have been unable to
provide accurate and meaningful information in the face of this propoganda
blitz, largely as a result of their rules of proper journalism: since most
of what Bush and his cronies say has a tiny grain of truth mixed with
subjective opinion and gross exaggeration, they can't be called the liars
they so clearly are (it's also not in the nature of journalists to make such
accusations: rather, they try to present the facts and let the reader or
viewer decide for him or herself; the Republicans know this very well). All
journalists can do is put such statements up against what Kerry (or whoever)
says in return, and hope the reader can judge. But with all the noise,
misdirection, deception, outright lies, continual repetitions of untruths,
accusations, and false impressions, it's difficult for anyone to tell what's
true or not, and at best they may come away confused and not knowing whom to
believe. See: http://www.fair.org/press-releases/swift-boat.html

Also, due to the massive, well funded and organized letter/email/phone/fax
attacks the stations or papers receive any time anyone says or writes
something not quite conservative enough, they've been cowed into taking a
right-of-center view much of the time. (Not all of the time, but moreso than
they would naturally.)

Even when they can do meaningful reporting, it often gets drowned out. See:
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/c...documents.html

Another reason reporting glosses over many issues is that the media is far
more concentrated now than it used to be, and owned by major corporations.
This is something that's happened without most people being aware of: most
media in the U.S. are now owned by a small number of major corporations, due
to relaxations in media ownership rules by the likes of Michael Powell (but
starting many years earlier). Clearly there are many potential conflicts of
interest when, for instance, NBC covers news about GE, ABC about Disney, or
CBS about Viacom. (see
http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/ge-boycott.html for one old example.
There are plenty more, and the situation is certainly not getting better.)
But in addition, large corporate media are concerned about keeping large
corporate advertisers happy, and also about keeping the recipients of large
political donations happy so that policies will move in the direction of
unrestrained profit-making. "News" is really about profit, by way of being
entertaining enough to hook an audience and hence major advertisers. None of
this creates an atmosphere conducive to reasoned and penetrating reporting
in the best interest of U.S. citizens.

"Leonard Martin" wrote in message
...
But in the US the whole "true left" end ot the spectrum of public
opinion, socialism, is missing, neatly excised by the long pressure of
the Cold War. Now the American right wing is busily propogandizing us
into believing that traditional liberals, who have always been staunchly
pro-capitalist and are more like libertarians than anything else known,
are "leftists".

They'll probably succeed, too.


Leonard, that is a very telling statement. Is that an observation of your
own as I'd love to pass that along with proper attribution.

Charles Tomaras
Seattle, WA

Steve wrote:

to quote an earlier poster, damn, that must be good weed you're smoking.


Whe you ACTUALLY look at the real world, for example,
the Congress, Fox is very close to the center. If you
look at all the people, same result.


Actually, as I quoted from a scientific study, I am
correct.

People who think Fox is right wing are generally
from very close to the coasts, in areas where Fox really
is right of the center for that local groups of people.

Go to Alabama or Wyoming and you will find Fox to
be well to the left of the center of those people.
Limbaugh would be closer to their center. When
you average over the whole USA, as represented in
Congress, Fox is centrist.

Doug McDonald

Doug McDonald wrote:


People who say things like "Fox is right wing" are
simply WRONG.

Doug McDonald

You must be joking. By international standards Fox is far to the right.

/Sven

Leonard Martin wrote:

But in the US the whole "true left" end ot the spectrum of public
opinion, socialism, is missing, neatly excised by the long pressure of
the Cold War.



You mean the Communists and Socilaists.

"Center" means what it means. Of course, to quote the
famous Centist Democrat, Bill Clinton, it all depends on the
meaning of the word "is".

Those that say "Fox News is right wing" are simply
misusing the word "is", not the phrase "right wing".
These people are living in the world of 50 years ago
when Communism and Socialism were actually active. Today,
Fox is centrist.

Doug McDonald

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
McWebber wrote:


What did the study examine? News? Or all of the Fox broadcasts including
their commentators?



snip irrelevant stuff

These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the
outlets.

And if anyone can watch the majority of the Fox network, (90% of which would
not be considered news stories), and still say they are not biased way to
the right, I'd like to see their nose grow as they say it.

--
McWebber
No email replies read
If someone tells you to forward an email to all your friends
please forget that I'm your friend.

do you think we can get them to share at a reasonable price of course :-)

Rich Wood wrote:

On 23 Sep 2004 07:02:40 GMT, Mark Crispin
wrote:

FOX News is not "conservative" media. A Yale University study on media
bias showed that, while FOX is right-of-center, it is was no more to the
right than USA Today is left-of-center. CBS is much further to the left.
FOX News is actually closer to the center than any other TV news.

There is no conservative news channel.

Damn! Tha must be good weed you're smoking!

Rich

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...

Actually, as I quoted from a scientific study, I am
correct.

That study is, to put it politely, bunk. First, there was absolutely no
attempt to measure whether Congress is really a good reflection of the views
of the American public. (And no, it's not self-evident just because "we
elected them".) Second, there was no attempt to show that the rate of
quoting publications of think tanks is a valid or useful measure of the
political views of members of Congress, or of the media. And those are just
the first two fundamental flaws that could be noticed right away.

A "scientific" study should account for all such things, or not try to make
claims about something that it is not measuring -- a real scientific paper
would have only been titled "A Comparison of Quotation Rates from Think
Tanks Between Congress and Major Media", wouldn't have editorialized about
its results, and wouldn't have claimed to have greater meaning than it
really did. Such a paper would also be peer reviewed before publication,
which this paper was not. In addition, any true scientific study would not
be widely accepted as fact until it had been even further reviewed, all
experiments re-run by other researchers for confirmation, parallel
experiments and data collection done to corroborate from different angles,
and thoroughly gone over and re-tested and re-analyzed until its results
were considered ironclad. At this point, the paper in question is nothing
but opinion with some selected statistics to back it up, and you know what
they say about statistics...

Even if it does say something about the relative positions of the news media
to Congress in terms of quotation rates from think tanks, it is just as
likely saying something about how conservative Congress is as about how
liberal the media is.

But I think it is mainly saying that right-wing think tanks are quoted a lot
precisely because they are nothing but influence organizations. Traditional
think tanks (like Brookings and Rand) primarily existed to do research.
Modern Republican think tanks (like Heritage, American Enterprise, and
Cato), exist to further a conservative political view, and to publicize and
promote that view. They generally spend more on PR than they do on research,
so it's no surprise they have a lot of visibility (as that's the entire
purpose of PR).

People who think Fox is right wing are generally
from very close to the coasts, in areas where Fox really
is right of the center for that local groups of people.

Go to Alabama or Wyoming and you will find Fox to
be well to the left of the center of those people.
Limbaugh would be closer to their center. When
you average over the whole USA, as represented in
Congress, Fox is centrist.

You may be right that progressivism is more concentrated near the coasts,
but an awful lot of people live in those areas. There are 70 times as many
people in California as in Wyoming, for instance, and almost 8 times as many
as in Alabama.

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
Steve wrote:


Whe you ACTUALLY look at the real world, for example,
the Congress, Fox is very close to the center. If you
look at all the people, same result.

Actually, as I quoted from a scientific study, I am
correct.

People who think Fox is right wing are generally
from very close to the coasts, in areas where Fox really
is right of the center for that local groups of people.


Go to Alabama or Wyoming and you will find Fox to
be well to the left of the center of those people.
Limbaugh would be closer to their center. When
you average over the whole USA, as represented in
Congress, Fox is centrist.

By that logic, then, a cool day on Venus would be somewhere around 350C, rather than
400C.

You can't measure the centre based on the average of a pre-selected group.
Left/right, when considering politics, can be easily determined in a vacuum if you
look at the policies and values of each group. Conservatives view the world as
entirely self-actuated, self-rewarded and assumed risk at the individual level.
Facism extends this concept to business, where the relationship between government
and business is distinctly favoured over individual rights. Socialists and, going
further, communists (and not the Soviet kind) view the world as mutually-actuated,
mutually-shared rewards and mutually-shared risk. By that measure, Congress is
distinctly conservative, FOX News is clearly right-wing, and we're all going to hell.

CBS, as is the case for all legitimate news organisations, is better at covering a
story with balance and provides opportunities to hear opposing views. FOX exhibits
no such behaviour. And Steve is right.
--
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