docbungle

I am listening to Fox News' O'Riely Factor in the background. Before this, it was Special Report with Brit Hume.

That doesn't really mean anything, other than it was the spark that made me write this post. It reminded me of how often I hear about the mainstream press being of the liberal political persuasion. And also, it reminded me of my own perception of the differences in behavior between so called "liberals" and so called "conservatives" in the news reporting business.

First, I don't see how anything can be more mainstream than Fox News. And along with that, I don't see how anyone can view their entire programming lineup as being anything other than solidly to the "right", politically. Having said that, I have a hard time finding another news channel that leans so heavily in the other direction.

I guess there is CNN, MSNBC and the like. They seem more nuetral to me, with a few talking head type shows mixed in with a bit of a liberal-ish bent, at least when held up in contrast with Fox News.

But I fail to find a real mainstream news-show with a serious, obvious liberal bent. In the sense that the hosts actually demean those who disagree with them. Or is it just the newspapers that have this reputation, and not the television news? It seems to me that many more people watch the news on television that read the paper on a consistent basis.

But the main point of this post is my perception of the differences in reporting behavior by the two "sides."

The conservative press, such as Fox News, have a disturbing habit of making fun of and demeaning those whos ideas differ from their own, and seem to have a hard time separating their disagreement from their automatic condescending nature. When interviewing or discussing someone who's political positions differ from their own, they seem to just make fun of them and imply that they are stupid, instead of discussing anything of depth with the person.

I suppose someone like Al Franken could merit comparison from the liberal "side," but I just don't see him as being remotely in the same league as far as being mainstream with a mainstream-sized viewer/listening base.

Regardless of which direction, if any, you view the MSP to lean, does anyone else percieve this difference in behavior?

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Mojo_PeiPei

So the problem with the left is Al Franken, whereas all "right wingers" are pompous demagouges. Well I guess as long as I am not relegated to merely being an ignorant sheep, I'll take pompus and condescending. I guess my point is there is no difference in behavior. All left leaners are stupid smelly hippies who don't really know shit, and all right wingers are dumb sheeple of teh bushco.

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docbungle

I guess this first reply is a good example of what I'm talking about. If you'll notice the difference in tone between our posts, and also the lack of addressing the post in any meaningfull way.

Mojo: unless you are a member of Fox News, I don't understand why you would react this way.

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Willravel

Wow. I've never seen a point illustrated so well.

As for liberal bias? BBC News is watched more than any of the American news networks, and it is centerist-liberal even when compared to CNN. I watch Democracy Now!, which is very liberal. The left wing media phenom is gone, though. No longer can you switch through the channels and get pro-democrat propoganda like you could in the mid 90s. It simply isn't there. Why? The ratings aren't there for liberal media anymore. People eat up fear, and fear is peddled by the right currently. While I'm sure a liberal news network could do well, I doubt it could compete with Fox News or Skynews.

Elphaba

You broach an interesting question, Doc, but I ceased watching any form of network or cable news when it became "info-tainment" rather than hard news. Perhaps that is why you find commentators on Fox or elsewhere that fail to meet a standard of journalism that we once could expect.

I don't think I would pin Fox as the sole problem, either. My must see program for years has been 60 Minutes, but since the GE buyout their segments are now more about sports figures or entertainers. GE's squashing of the tobacco whistleblower was the beginning of the end for 60 Minutes.

Deregulation of the airwaves has done a great deal more harm than good, in my opinion. As with the press, there are now mega-industries controlling large segments of our media. Our news is now designed to appeal to the masses who would seem to prefer celebrity updates rather than *real* news.

Sadly, we are getting what most people seem to want.

Ch'i

Is it just me, or does it seem like all the left and right wingers do is argue and insult each other while nothing is being done? You answered this question in another thread doc, "Stop talking about each other and start talking with each other."

aberkok

To me, the idea of the "left and right" really is a fantasy. There aren't just two sides to every issue and I'm continuously bewildered by people of the U.S. and A. who always somehow always turn it into that.

In truth, solutions to issues, and perspectives on the news are multi-faceted, even when they are all true. And that is what I think is really necessary here, not a "left" leaning major news source, but one without a narrow-minded political agenda - one with a reverence for facts, logical analysis and good journalism.

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Applause to aberkok.

Mojo_PeiPei

My post didn't prove any point, it only served to point out the answer you were seeking, the answer lying in your own OP. It is all a matter of perspective, you would tend to see only the fault of bias in the media as a conservative problem, except for Al franken it seems, but even then you said he wasn't in the same leauge as the Faux news crew. Again perspective. I don't really get how you can have a meaningful and open dialogue/critique, when you yourself seem to painting with a rather broad brush. Also if you are assuming I was offended or put off by the OP, you would be wrong, I am merely addressing a contradiction I thought I saw.

Also to be fair, I fail to see what is so meaningful, or objective about your OP. To see the slant in politics, you needn't channel surf, you can stop at reading your own opinions, you really seem to sit on one side looking out against another.

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Willravel

No one said you were stupid, Mojo, but you ascerted someone did in your first post. You were unable to actually answer the question. That did prove a point, didn't it?

Slant is not a matter of perspective, it is based on a conclusion from factual evidence. It is not my opinion that Fox News is biased, it is a fact that Fox News is biased. Look at it this way: if slant were based on perspective, how could I tell if a program were slanted left?

Mojo_PeiPei

Perhaps I have incorparated much experience from these boards and my dealing within, I expanded on the OP, deciding not to merely limit it to the points, television news, brought up. From there it was easy to see, for me at least the Doc answered his own question, which I did answer in kind; I see no difference in behavior, only in perspective.

Slant is most certainly a perspective Will, you know that. I'm not saying it is my reality, but what if I were to hold Fox as Fair and Balanced, where they report and I decide, are you to tell me I am wrong? What makes you "right"? What makes them right? Would that then make you left? Or are you merely an objective center dweller?

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Willravel

Slant is a bias or prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. Can one prove that a news station has a prefrence to a particular viewpoint? Why yes, yes one can. For example:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FI4e1FvZLBk"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FI4e1FvZLBk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

docbungle

Mojo, you're first post did prove a point, and your second post nails it home. My op was a simple question regarding perspective; I supplied my own perspective and asked for those of others.

And instead of a nice discussion, I get whatever it is you are trying to say. And the way in which you choose to say it. Which, ironically, is a nearly picture-perfect example of what I was attempting to describe in my op as the way conservative-type news shows speak to/about people with differing political views.

I ask you a question, you react with an accusatory diatribe.

I said Franken wasn't in the same league as Fox in regards to the size of his viewer base, and you immediately attempt to change the entire context of my sentence, making it sound as if I don't find him to be very liberal. Or as if I blame Fox (I never said Faux) for anything at all. They were the only example I used for what I percieved as 'right,' whereas I used three examples for possible 'left' leaning sources.

Which only distracts from my actual question. Regarding the manner in which these people report what they report.


And I didn't imply that my post was meaningfull or objective; it was a stated perception, and a querry for other perceptions. If it's not up to your standards for intelligent conversation, then simply go somewhere else to type.

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Mojo_PeiPei

I didn't argue the fact that slant exists. I merely commented on the fact that the OP begged a question of critiquing political slant, but only addressed the slant of one side, in what was a less then pleasant light. On top of that, the OP was full of personal perspective, which was clearly Less than objective and slanted, seemed to take away from the discussion, it also seemed to answer it's own question, or maybe there really wasn't one to begin with.

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Willravel

Mojo, do you think Fox News is slanted to the right?

Do you belive that overall the American News Media is slanted right?

Mojo_PeiPei

I apologize about the misrepresentation of what you said about Franken, although I humbly disagree. And I don't see you putting out a possible three sources, you interjected CNN and MSNBC, but only for half a sentence followed up by a statement lending to neutrality. No need to harp however.

You don't need to be on fox news to be mainstream, people still read the newspaper or news sources, just because O' Reilly or Limbaugh have popular radio/tv shows, doesn't mean the left doesn't. The New York Times comes to mind as completely liberal, I'd say as slanted in it's reporting of news, if not more so then fox. I'm sure that that statement would be rebutted with the standard, what makes the NY Times so liberal? It's obvious, and can be answered the same way if the question were begged of Fox for its conservative nature; it's in what they choose to report. Also if you talk about news, albeit improvised "funny" news, watch Comedy Central at 8pm eastern time, there is an hour straight of the exact same shit Fox does, only from a different slant. People would no doubt argue it's mock news, but it definently pushes an agenda, and were it not for the chickey field reporting could be entirely construed as a news journal show.

Fox news is slanted to the right. A lot of people watch Fox news. A lot of people don't. A lot of people read the news paper, news texts I find tend to be more "liberal". I don't really know where I put the news media, Fox represents a bastion of conservative thought, but I couldn't state really how to allocate the overall scene as it is not clearly all represented by Fox.

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docbungle

Mojo, I'll try this one more time, even though you don't seem to be reading what I actually write.

I state, flat-out, that this is my perspective. But your 'retorts' state a problem with my posts because they "are full or personal perspective."

You are missing the point entirely.

I am asking for YOUR perspective, perhaps as a contrast to mine. At no point am I implying that my perspective is correct or widely accepted. I don't state that Fox is a problem and I don't state that Franken is a problem. But if we don't describe our perspective, then why do we have a forum?

Again, I feel what you have had to say thus far only serves to exemplify my point. But not really, because I was only referring to NEWS-HOSTS, and the way in which they report the news.

I was not speaking about 'liberals or 'conservatives' in any sort of a broader sense.

You bring up newspapers, but I thought I addressed that in the op. I am aware of the bias there; it is my perception that more 'everyday-people' tend to get their news from television nowadays, as opposed to print media, which is why I posed the question regarding televised news and used the examples I did.

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shakran

You're almost right, but it needs some tweaking.

You are absolutely, 100% correct that deregulation of the broadcast industry has had an appalling effect on the quality of TV news. Largely gone are the days when we could count on people like Murrow to have the real story.

And you're absolutely correct that there are mega industries controlling our media, but you're not broad enough in the scope. With the exception of PBS/NPR, a few college stations, and some stuff on local cable-access channels, mega industries control ALL of our broadcast media. Every last bit of it. This is one reason the myth of the liberal media is so idiotic. Megacorporations do better under republicans than democrats. Why would these megacorporations have as the most visible part of their company a bunch of people shouting messages that are against the republicans?

Where you're wrong is when you say the media is designed to appeal to the people. Nope, it's not. The people have been trained to be appealed to by the drivel that's on television these days. As these megacorporations have bought up the media, the variety of programs on television has shrunk markedly. This explains why there are 70 billion reality shows out there. It's not good television, but there really isn't much else to watch so if you want to watch television at certain times, it's gonna be reality shows. Then the consultants come in and say "hey look, at 7pm everyone's watching reality shows!" (they fail to mention that's because nothing else is on) "Let's make more of them! That's what the people want!"

And pretty soon you see crap from reality shows trickle down into the serious programming such as news. And I'm not just talking about a package about the latest guy to be kicked off the island, I'm talking techniques from those reality shows.

The first reality show was not survivor. It was Cops. One of the big draws in Cops is watching the police chases. Now every time there's a police chase near a station that has a helicopter, it's fed up to the network live and stations break in with it. So you could be sitting in East Jesus Iowa, watching a car chase in Miami, and wondering what in hell it has to do with you. But it's REALITY TELEVISION and the consultants say the viewers love it because dumbed-down news is all they understand.

Actually in my overly-long career I've talked with a lot of viewers and not ONE has EVER said "Ya know big guy, you guys really need to dumb down that news cast for me."

Far more often I hear "the paper had this and that angle, why the hell didn't you?"

That tells me that the viewers are a lot smarter than news managers and consultants give them credit for. But since smart viewers are more expensive to serve (it costs money to dig on a story and smart viewers insist that you dig) and since the television industry is one of the most profit-greedy industries out there (where else can you find an industry that has situations like a station in a low-population area that's clearing 7 MILLION a year after taxes, yet only pays their photographers $17,000 a year if that) they're sure as hell not gonna waste money programming for the smart viewers if they can just pretend you're all dumbasses who want to see random car wrecks and segments on how to keep your toothbrush clean.

So it's not that the viewers want crap news - they don't and they're proving it by watching the news less and less - -- the viewers want smart news and the industry simply isn't giving it to them.

In fact it's almost amusing to watch, if my livelihood didn't depend on it - because viewers are going away in reaction to these circus tactics that newscasts have been trying to use to snare them. And the more viewers leave, the louder and more insane the circus becomes. Suddenly everything is breaking news, even if it happened yesterday, everything is "shocking" we have Reporter X "LIVE" from somewhere that absolutely nothing is happening, but by-God he's LIVE so it must be URGENT. .. . and yet all this screaming and posturing for attention is failing to attract the viewers.

Those of us on the inside of this industry have been predicting its death for years, and sadly we're not seeing much hope that those predictions will be proven wrong.

host

Would a "completely liberal" newspaper, ever publish this admission?:
<b>Even with the strength you exhibited in declaring an opinion about the bias of the NY times that is half opposite of my POV, Mojo_....can you see how the preceding admission by the Times editors, dovetails nicely with this "goal", described by L. Brent Bozell III, in 1992?:</b>
Mojo, here's just a few examples of a total of 264....dating back only to June 9, 2004, that indicate you may be wrong about the "liberal bias" of the NY Times. Since the Times offices are located in NYC, home of a population teaming with liberals, a population that polled an evenly divided POV, in aug., 2004, that the US government either had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and decided not to interfere with them or earnestly prevent them from happening....
....wouldn't so many examples of avoidance of reporting of details that would be accurate and portray "non-liberal targets" in a negative light, be an unexpected thing to find out about the NY Times? As I described to Ustwo in another thread yesterday, my posts are meant to counter your resolve. You seem to have tremendous resolve about the NY Times being "completely liberal"....so, considering that, forgive me for not posting all 264 examples of NY Times, less than liberal bias. That would be overkill. The critiscism of the Times, by Media Matters, seems in the spirit of what the 9/11 Commission's former vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, said, just the other day:
You ought to read the NY Times, more often, Mojo. It contains a great deal of original reporting, and a great deal of domestic national political coverage and reports filed by foreign correspondents on the Time's staff. It's reporting is balanced enough to draw legitimate criticism from both liberal and conservative spectrums. It was caught red handed, just 3 years ago, and it's editors finally admitted it,
....caught repeating the intentional contrivances of a US presidential administration committed to a preemptive war of aggression, as the NY Times helped it to publicize the "facts" that had to be "fixed" around the policy.

....the trouble with that was, the reporting of the Times, was not reporting of "facts", it was the unquestioning, prominent display on the front page of the Times, of whatever the administration wanted to publicize to "support the foreign policy objectives of the United States".

That isn't a "really liberal" thing for the Times to have done.....for so many months. It mislead people, all over the world, who trusted the news reporting of the Times. Not very liberal, not very American, but it meshed with Mr. Bozell's goal, and he bragged in that same 1992 speech, that 90 percent of the references to the "liberal media" that appeared in the press, were the result of his MRC's ( www.mrc.org ) "research"....(translation - "influence")

I don't think that it's as cut and dried as you make it sound, Mojo. IMO, the NY Times, as time passes, exhibits fewer and fewer redeeming qualities, as a source for reliable news reporting, but as far back as I've been acquainted with it, Fox "News" exhibits none.

stevo

Let me refer you to an article I've posted before entitled "How much does it cost to buy global TV News?"

I think this article still does a good job of showing where our news comes from and why it takes a certain slant. I know I've posted this article before, but I think its relevent in this thread.

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roachboy

nice post, shakran....

more generally, it seems like questions are getting blurred a bit here.

1. within the invert universe of conservativeland, the tactic of projection--directly in particular at the hallucination conservatives call "the left" or a variant thereof---has been very prominent and heavily used. there is a long list of features--generall, conservativeland posits "the left" as the mirror image of itself...in conservativeland, "the left" is a unified bloc that operates in a top-down manner (in the fabrication and relay of official positions)....it uses "the left" as a counterpoint against which it can position its fairly extremist rightwing claims as representative of some variant or other of "mainstream" opinion (this particular device worked better while the right was still in opposition)...in conservativeland, the left is quite extreme (without the slightest bit of evidence to support the use of this adjective) and in that functions as an important device to conceal the right's own shifts away from anything like centrist positions into some bizarre-o twilight zone between the militan movement, the john birch society and far right protestant evangelical church organizations. so "the left" in conservativeland serves multiple functions:

1. it enables a clear boundary line to be drawn between "us" and "them"--which is self-evidently a transposable mode of defintion, as the surrealist theater that is the "war on terror" demonstrates

2. the treatment of "the left" in conservativeland is an exercise in the construction of signifiers that can be used for orwellian moments of "group hate"---so it functions as a mode for directed affect at those groups that fall outside the conservativeland boundary maintenance operations of the moment. in this regard, the construction of "the left" can be seen as a kind of collective mental calesthenics for the real work of sustained manpulation of racism that is at the core of the bushleague "war on terror" and its various marketing subsidiaries.

3. "the left" as conservativeland has constructed it funtions to normalize shifts within the conservative movement both ideologically and organizationally by projecting those same features onto its hallucinated opposite.

4. in conservativeland, "the left" as Other is also always a Persecuting Other, a satanic adversary, a Threat, The Threat...same logic/dynamic you now see in full repugnant flower at the center of the world according to george w. bush

you can see the results of this structure of mapping political co-ordinates onto the direction of affect onto a paranoiac fear of a (phantom) persecuting Other on this board, particularly in the flights into wish-fulfillment of some of the conservative set when they get onto the things they blame on political dissent in america. the logic of this ideological construction explains the recurrent equation of dissent with treason that seems to operate as an important therapeutic story for those few remaining supporters of this administration in explaining to themselves fiasco after fiasco.

another way of seeing this projection game: it has been an element of the far right's attempt to co-opt and redirect petit bourgeois anxiety generated by the reorganization of capitalism.

this redirection is only really possible in informational contexts that treat capitalism itself as an unqualified good--from this it follows that breakdowns and problems caused by restructuring of capitalism have to be explained on other grounds. whence the need for Persecuting Others.

this is yet another register of the ideology of conservativeland that very closely resembles its radical nationalist ancestors.

poujadisme anyone?

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