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Old 11-16-2007, 12:01 PM   #1 (permalink)
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Limbaugh, or CBS News 24 Year Anchor, Rather? Reagan's "Noble" Vietnam War, Or?

I'm doing this to examine how we have come to be so divided, so polarized in our political points of view in the US.

As background, Dan Rather culminated a distinguished career as a TV network news reporter, first to report from Dallas that JFK had died, followed by assignments as CBS news white house correspondent, Vietnam and Soviet Afghan war correspondent, and CBS news sunday night anchor, as well as CBS news show, "60 Minutes" reporter, with a 24 year "stint" as CBS evening news anchor:

Despite the disaster to the people of Vietnam and to the US generation that was largely conscripted in a military draft to fight and die in the US war in Vietnam, and the cost of the war to the presidencies of both LBJ and Nixon, and to their credibility and that of key members of their administrations, the division the war caused in the US, and the damage that it did to the reputation of the US military, due to the well documented atrocities committed against the civilian Vietnamese population by US troops, and to the reputations of the FBI and CIA because of their illegal harassment of war protestors, Ronald Reagan described Vietnam as a "noble war".

I'm wondering how the following opinions, close to a mirror opposites of my own, evolve to be assembled in a post like this.... what process is used to embrace or to discard information reported about current events, over a long period. How is it that the 24 year CBS news anchor is regarded as less credible than an openly partisan columnist and talk show host, and how the well documented history of numerous atrocities committed by US troops is minimized to the point of irrelevancy, because of alleged errors in one of the CBS news anchor's investigative reports. Is Reagan's claim of a "noble war", accurate or valid, and was it part of a campaign that made the invasion of Iraq so initially righteous and popular?:
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...28#post2345928
Originally Posted by Charlatan
The difference between Limbaugh and Rather should be that Rather is a news journalist and Limbaugh is a columnist.

The difference should be that a news journalist strives to present the news as objectively as possible. A columnist offers opinions.

Trouble occurs when these two different types of journalist start to slip into each other's realms (i.e. Limbaugh presents his information as something other than opinion or Rather infuses his news with his own bias).

The media today is not as cut and dry as it perhaps once was. Journalists can and do shift their roles and increasing straddle the fence on which side of the news/commentary continuum they are sitting. As a result it becomes increasingly important for the consumers of news and information to be aware of how things are being presented. Aware of the bias going in or at least have more than one source for their news and information so they can sift for something resembling the "truth".
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Thats a good point, but in the end I'll have more respect for someone like Limbaugh then a Rather, the reason being one isn't trying to influence while hiding.

I think the issue is the media was NEVER cut and dry, its always been biased, hell this country was founded around a biased press.

At some point though the media put on a veneer of respectability and trust, but it was only a veneer. With only a few major outlets, who would you turn to if something was biased? You could tell your friends, you could make your own newsletter at great expense but you would need to be a crusader.

Enter the information age. Whats happened is this veneer has been exposed for what it is. Quite suddenly we went from almost no fact checking and analysis of the press to 1000's of educated people picking it apart.

Years ago Dan Rather did a piece on the Vietnam war which was complete bullshit. He interviewed 'soldiers' who were never there who committed war crimes that never happened. It REALLY upset vet groups, but unless you were in those groups you never heard of it.

Then he tried the same type of thing with the Bush 'documents'. Within hours, littlegreenfootballs demonstrated those were obviously word documents, a few hours later, its on drudge, the next morning its on Limbaugh, it can't be ignored. I don't recall which major news organization ran with it first, but they didn't have a choice by then.

Now this isn't all good. Personally I didn't care if Clinton was getting a hummer from some fat chick in the oval office. If I were married to Hilary I'd be cheating too, its a political marriage. The story was deliberately buried by the main stream press, now I'm not sure if they would have done the same if the president was GHB, but thats another story. At any rate, that can't be ignored either, because one guy with a web site got wind of it.

Still I think over all its a good thing, but it requires now more than ever that the person reading is educated and understand this sort of thing, something which is sadly lacking.
We think what we think because of how we regard the information we take in, and the source of it. It's costing us, because we disregard the lessons of history when we ignore the body of facts surrounding policy mistakes. The lessons of Vietnam could have kept us from invading Iraq. Dan Rather was nightly news anchor at CBS news for 24 years, for the same reasons that Walter Cronkite had the job before him. Cronkite toured Vietnam in 1968 and came back and told the American people that the war was unwinable and it shoild be ended via peace talks, ASAP. It took 5 more years for that to happen, and some of us are still persuaded that it was a "noble war",and that the military was forced by liberals to fight with one hand tied behind it's back.

Does anyone see a way out of conditions where a man like Limbaugh could command a large audience and be listened to as if he was at all credible or reliable?
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Old 11-16-2007, 12:10 PM   #2 (permalink)
 
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Quote:
some of us are still persuaded that it was a "noble war",and that the military was forced by liberals to fight with one hand tied behind it's back.
which was obviously a favorite line of german extreme right groups after world war 1.

this might be a good thread for references to systematic work on media politics in the states---information that'd let us push beyond the anecdotal, beyond the repetition of various stock phrases that substitute for argument.
but even there, you have reed irvine type "analyses" that enable conservatives to indulge the "he said she said" game at this level.

traditional conservatives defended the status quo.
this defense of the status quo did not preclude accurate description.
american populist conservatism has a nihilist relation to information, and so are not in a sense defending the status quo in anything like the mode of folk like, say, edmund burke. they are doing something else...and if you think about it, what they are doing relative to information is quite radical and quite new.
so i dont think that people like roger ailes are conservative in the old sense---they are rightwing radicals. perhaps this is why there are so many symmetries that link contemporary populist "conservatism" to right radicals of the 1920s.
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Old 11-16-2007, 04:19 PM   #3 (permalink)
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Old 11-18-2007, 12:38 AM   #4 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by host
I'm doing this to examine how we have come to be so divided, so polarized in our political points of view in the US.
What makes you think that the US being politically divided (progressives vs. conservatives) is a new thing?

I would suggest that the last time there was no political divide was back when the US population was a boatload of pilgrims.

What we are experiencing today is a direct result of the growth in our modern media of a diversity of voices.
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Old 11-18-2007, 08:54 AM   #5 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlatan
I would suggest that the last time there was no political divide was back when the US population was a boatload of pilgrims.
And if you believe that, you don't know much about the Pilgrims

I don't think there has ever, in human history, been a time without a political divide.
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