Full story here.

Heh. Fucked up but not surprising. Thanks for the link.

One of the reasons I prefer getting the majority of my news by print medium is because it removes the tone bias. There's still writing bias (which varies) but when I am getting my news online, I can usually immediately search, and find, the entire section I'm interested in. So if I see a speech snippet that interests me, I can go get the entire thing, and understand it in context.

I really don't know why people seem to love news sources that tell them what they should think, on either side of the street. That's not to say that hearing people's OPINIONS can't be informative and bring more to the story for you, especially informed opinions that offer insight and viewpoints one might not otherwise consider...but it must be clear that it's opinion (as well as the expertise and biases of the person proffering the opinion).

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Well, it does help explain, at least in part, those "Wow, how the fuck did you arrive at *that* conclusion?!?!?" moments when talking to my Fox-adherent family members.

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Hope is the new black.

Sadly, it's becoming more and more difficult to find alternatives to this. If not for resources on the internet, I imagine there would be more condemnation for this, or maybe it wouldn't be the case.

I was going to write that I blamed the long lingering death of newspapers, or rather the lack of new media there (the birth rate of new papers is something to look up, it pretty much all but stopped happening at one point) but then I quickly recalled Hearst's bullshit, and where the term 'yellow journalism' comes from.

It's nothing new. In fact, in a weird way I think that television reporters initially added a new era of integrity to journalism, you could put your trust in the man (it was generally a man) giving you the news, because you trusted THEM. They were putting their personal rep. on the line. Then that began the slow decline.

Today it seems to be bloggers. Yeah, there's a lot of bad things about it, but it's sorta the same thing, people putting their name on the line to bring you information, sometimes first hand.

Cell phones, cell phone video cameras, and easy internet access have made everyone potential reporters, as long as they have a medium to upload the information to.

All of it has it's bias though. Even the most honest person reporting perfectly (okay it's never perfect but let's assume) what they see...has bias. They're only able to report what they see of the event, from their angle. It's rarely the whole story, and they can be manipulated.

But I think the big problem here is the intentional manipulation for an outcome, and FOX and others are clearly doing it. The entire 'tea bagging' bullshit could never have happened without them.

I find it scary that any media source (even if it's Jon Stewart) can weld that much political power. I'd say I'd find it scary that people are such sheep, but that's nothing new. We can all be sheep.

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Ever read old newspapers from say... 1900? Many of them were just as biased and crazy as they are today. It's definitely not new.

NPR and the BBC for the win, though-- I can't stand pretty much everything else out there.

I'm not sure when Hannity and Laura Ingram became journalists. I mean, you can sorta expect to see opinionated slants - yes with cut and pasting and editing things out of order - during an *opinion show*. You don't see as many people complaining(or startled, acting as if it is something new) about Rush and others doing it because they don't have the "Fox News" logo in the lower-right corner of a screen. Just because it's a news channel doesn't mean you'll see nothing but journalists on there.

While I'm entirely against the idea of any governmental controls on the media. (Well, I guess that's a more complex topic.) Intentionally editing videos and displaying them to the public for the express purpose of assassinating someone's character (Seriously, not in clear parody situations.) should at least be strongly discouraged by the media community or even allow for some sort of civil action by the target.

But I know that'd be one hell of a slippery slope. It's just an unfortunate side effect of our freedoms that asshats like these are allowed to do things like this.

That's what slander laws are for.

It also wouldn't fix the problem.

The problem isn't the fact that people are cheating. People have always cheated. People will always cheat. Make laws, they'll find new ways to bend them.

The problem is that the people absorbing information aren't thinking. In a way...they want to be told what to think.

That is what needs to be fixed.

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Well, unless you want to fact-check everything you see everyday, it's kinda easy to let yourself get misled when you see a media outlet release a cropped video where Obama answers, "Do you eat babies?" with "Yes we can!"

Granted, I don't watch any of this shit. But it's a shame to think that people have to run around playing detective just to make sure that some "legit" videos they see on TV aren't so legit after all.

You exaggerate with your comment, and yet there are people right here in the school where I teach that believe almost exactly that, when it comes to abortion. It annoys the hell out of me, but I have overheard high school students say several times things like, "Obama WANTS to abort as many babies as he can! Obama is an abortionist activist who pushes abortions on people who don't want them" blah blah blah.

It saddens me, but it seems impossible to combat. I say otherwise and ask them to go check their sources and they just say, "well that's what my parents say" and turn away.

This is precisely where healthy skepticism steps in, and common sense. If it's something simple, like, "3 additional people have been confirmed to have the swine flu in North Carolina" you can usually take something like that at face value - though even then you wouldn't go to court with it. I've more or less gotten into the habit of double-checking things, so the "grand search" doesn't take too long.

But, the more important scenario is when something is political or something contains some obvious bias. "Barack Obama said X" 99 percent of the time falls into this category, because context is EVERYTHING even if they don't crop it. If you're really interested in getting to the bottom of it, it absolutely requires deeper searching. Very few political or controversial things can be covered with a single sound bite.

Further, even without video editing and/or bias by the media, you're still susceptible due to errors in reporting - or even more common lack of context that was overlooked or deemed unnecessary. So... sure, it'd be nice if it went away, but unfortunately that's not going to fix it when people decide to take every single thing said on TV at face value. Rugen's absolutely correct there. And frankly, you probably would see this type of thing die down a bit if people were more skeptical.

Well yes, errors and context are one thing.

And I don't disagree that people should be more skeptical and pay more attention and use some more common sense.

But when a media outlet just blatantly takes snippets of a video in an "answer-question" format and fucks with it to corrupt the answer portion into something else, that's just absurd. It's not surprising that people might be fooled by it, since they would think they have the context, they have the full question and answer, etc.

I'm not defending stupidity or laziness...I guess I'm just expressing disgust. And not really giving any solutions with it. =D

By that standard, should the company that happens to broadcast Rush Limbaugh's radio show be held accountable for the words and contexts he twists on there in some way? Believe me, I think Fox News does all sorts of stupid stuff, but I can't hold them to what someone says and twists around in a pure opinion segment that reflects only their views(and their views also include any twisted, biased, dishonest version they spew out).

If people are not double-checking on things (especially)said during a biased opinionated segment of the news, that's a far more serious problem than the actual act of deception will ever be. It's not surprising to me either, but mostly because too many people seem to be easily fooled, and it's really unfortunate that they would actually think they have all the context from watching that.

Course the other question is how much context is too little context? I am every bit serious when I say you could take a 30-second news bite declaring that Obama signed a bill and turn it into HOURS of context - and *every* bit of it would be important to the issue at hand in knowing the full story. Even with no deception, people cannot simply fool themselves into thinking they have the full context from a quick blurb on the TV.

I find it hard to believe that this type of thing happening is news to anyone. or at least that people don't automatically verify what they see on any news agency. Heck I've been double checking everything I am interested in for years because the liberal side of the media did this type of crap just as much as the conservative side of the media does.

Watching cable news is just an easy way to find a topic you might be interested in finding out about. It definitely isn't fact base anymore... it's pure opinion/slant/spin everywhere and anyone that thinks it's just Fox and that THEIR favorite station would NEVER do that is just delusional.

This board has a healthy dose of skepticism so I doubt more then one or two of you delusional in that way but I see people out there (like my dad) who believe everything MSNBC says is pure gospel truth.

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

I'm going to disagree with you, at least if you are including radio news in your statement. I find it very hard to believe that NPR would ever deliberately distort someone's comments as much as those above-posted examples.

I guess I'm delusional?

This sort of thing isn't aimed at people like you, anyway.

It's aimed at people who might watch TV over dinner or something and don't REALLY care about the topics, but have a vote anyway and might be swayed by BS info.

I was actually specifically talking about cable news and news programs on TV. I pay very little attention to radio news programs, but you are still delusional.

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

I would dare say that it wasn't aimed at the majority of people on this board. I consider this group to be some of the most informed people I've ever met. Even if they are always wrong and I am always right... at least they are informed and wrong. *Smile*

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

ok!

I am glad to see that you are not in denial about your delusional state. I gave up denying mine years ago

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

So are we wrong when we agree with you (and I think you and I agree on more things that we don't)?

I've only followed this tangentially, but I've seen a lot of liberal bloggers point out Shep Smith on Fox as one of the few voices of reason. I saw this clip on Andrew Sullivan, for example:



I like the question: Should America be torturing people, for any reason, ever?

*head explodes*

HAHA

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

Sick and twisted. I love it

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"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."

I find NPR's bias against Israel to be particularly bothersome. I say that as a person who thinks Israel is responsible for its fair share of problems in the Middle East, but bias is still bothersome. I will say I think they've improved to some degree over the years, but it's not altogether forgotten and done with either I don't think.

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_conte ... rticle=281

(From Nov. 2000)"In a two-month review of all major news and interview programs, CAMERA found Arab and pro-Arab speakers were given 77% more time on the air (in words spoken) than Israeli and pro-Israel speakers. Entirely one-sided programs were commonplace, whether devoted to assailing Ariel Sharon as a “war criminal,” to characterizing Israel as a “Jim Crow” nation which should be done away with in its "apartheid" form, or to blaming Israel for excessive violence, anti-American riots in Arab capitals and erosion of supposed Arab commitment to peace. There were 41 segments in which only Palestinian/Arab or pro-Arab speakers were heard and just 24 programs in which only Israeli or pro-Israeli speakers were heard."

That may or may not be a reliable study, but it certainly coincides with some of the stuff I've heard on NPR(as well as BBC to a degree).

It's amazingly retarded when people do studies like that.

Just wait 'til the guys on "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" hear about this...

Yet I wouldn't be surprised if it were accurate. After reading the transcripts from "The Mideast: A Century of Conflict" I was even more convinced of it, personally.

Welcome to reporting on sound bites. The media did it with the Bush administration too.

There's sound bites, and then there's cherrypicking.

That news coverage website was interesting. I didn't go look into the organization that created it, but I didn't find anything there that seemed unreasonable. All of it seemed to be possibly true.

I personally have found their coverage to be refreshing. The rest of the US media is generally so incredibly pro-Israel that I always thought of them as just trying to push the country back toward the center. They actually seemed to take the time to try to publish stories that show more of the Palestinian side of the conflict, while I don't feel like I can say the same about any of the other US networks.

I also notice that the dates of all the reporting studied are between 2000 and 2002. I assume you know that cooincides with the sudden escalation of violence that began at that time. During that time, Israel / Palestine coverage was heavy all over the world, and for every Israeli killed, 5-7 Palestinians died (depending on which source you choose to look at). With the casulties being as one-sided as it was, you can understand perhaps why there would be more coverage of killings of Palestinians than Israelis.

I personally never realized the extent of the American media's bias toward Israel until a friend of mine began to work in Ramallah at an elementary / secondary school there. This school was run by Quakers and included classes on non-violence and peace as well as regular classes, and has been there for decades. Twice while my friend was there an Israeli helicoptor attacked it with missiles. One of those two times it was even reported on briefly in the US news-- and the US news called their pacifist school a hideout for Hamas militants.

Unless my friend is a terrorist himself and lied to me, I know for a fact that this is simply not the case. This is simply what Israel told the US, and we don't bother to check. Why check? The Palestinians are all animals, right? While it's been a long time, I've people say those exact words right here on these boards, in fact.

I think when that happened (several years ago now-- approximately during the time of these 'studies' on NPR) was the first time I realized that the American media really could have an agenda beyond trying to tell the truth. Perhaps before I was naive.

I just spend the last 10 - 15 minutes or so browsing that website. The more I did, the less impressed I was by them. I still don't feel like I have enough information to make a final judgement, but my feeling while reading it is that for a "non-partisan" website it seemed very heavily biased toward Israel. For example, in it's "about CAMERA" page (linked here: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=24 ) I read this:



This immediately sent up red flags in my mind as not being even-handed. I hope the reasons why are obvious. My misgivings were given more weight when later in the same page they have quotes from people talking about CAMERA, and two of the quotes are clearly pro-Israel while the other two are merely neutral.

Finally, when I went to their "media analysis" section and randomly picked several media sources, every one of their analysis' I clicked were very pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian in feel. Even the one you linked here Venen uses language that is very negative about Palestinians and people who support them.

I'm still witholding judgement due to lack of time to continue checking it out, but I'm not impressed.

Plagiarism at the NYT:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/ta ... agiari.php

She's claiming someone "told her the line" and she used it without realizing it was his. It was almost verbatim, and it was "told" to her? Shenanigans!!

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