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Author Topic:   Fox news = false news
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 202 of 313 (661096)
05-02-2012 3:59 AM
Reply to: Message 200 by Dr Adequate
05-01-2012 7:50 PM


Re: Department Of You Don't Say
I'm not sure how 'fair and balanced' the Parliamentary committee was, though. The vote to approve this report was split strictly down party lines - all the Labour and Lib Dem MPs agreed, all the Tory MPs voted no.
A similar pattern is noticed when you look at the investigations into News Corp's attempts to take over BSkyB, and whether it breached competition laws. The minister originally charged with investigating this was Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable; but the responsibility was transferred to the Dept. of Culture, Media and Sport after Cable was caught on secret camera saying that he'd 'declared war' on Rupert Murdoch. Now, of course, the Tory Cuture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is being investigated for improper links with News Corp.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to let politicians act like judges?

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Replies to this message:
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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(2)
Message 292 of 313 (809244)
05-17-2017 11:38 AM
Reply to: Message 289 by Taq
05-09-2017 1:56 PM


News is limited since they only have so many outlets and so many hours in the day. Limited isn't biased. They can't publish every single event that every person experiences every second of the day.
At the end of the day, they report what they think the public is interested in.
Of course limited is biased. It's one of the reasons that true objectivity is not possible.
There are always millions of things happening in the world, and as you say there is not space to print all of them. You need to select some - how you make you selection decides on the bias of your publication.
You claim the criteria is publishing what they think the public want to hear. That may often be the case; but what if Joe Editor thinks the public mainly wants to hear about Muslim immigrants raping European women? Even if every word they print is the unvarnished truth; if they're hunting around for every case they can find of someone being raped by a Muslim immigrant then they are producing a biased picture of the world.
And of course news sources don't only publish what they think people want to hear; they publish what they want people to hear (or, often, what they think their advertisers would like people to hear). There have been two big scandals here brought to light by secret recordings recently.
Scandal number one involved the chief news editor of one of our major commercial TV stations explaining to his reporters that they had to stick to the editorial line if they wanted to keep their jobs; and that the editorial line was that Syrian asylum seekers should be presented as a crisis and a threat to European values and security. His station did, indeed, focus on stories about Muslim refugees out of all proportion to their presence in society (no-one wants to come here - we get a couple of hundred asylum applications a year; most from Ukraine); and on stories that made them look bad.
Then we have another, more recent scandal. The deputy Prime Minister owns one of the largest media organisations in the country. This caused something of a brouhaha when he came to power, but he assured everyone that he was now a silent partner and would not be influencing media coverage in any way. Somebody then secretly recorded him explaining to a newspaper editor which stories about his political rivals to promote and when (this one should come out now - save this one for election etc.)
Now, you can choose to convince yourself that this only happens because we're some backwards, ex-communist backwater, but you'd clearly be wrong. The reason news sources with different ideological slants look different is because they pick their stories and how to present them differently. I fail to see how this would be controversial.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 289 by Taq, posted 05-09-2017 1:56 PM Taq has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 293 by Taq, posted 05-17-2017 11:53 AM caffeine has replied
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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 296 of 313 (809491)
05-18-2017 2:36 PM
Reply to: Message 293 by Taq
05-17-2017 11:53 AM


Who assumes that every single news agency is reporting everything that ever happens?
Well. no one, of course.
The expectation is that every news agency will produce a limited view of the world. What we also expect is that a news agency will accurately and fairly report on the news they do present. Bias becomes a problem when a news story is purposefully skewed to favor a certain political view.
News stories are routinely skewed to favour a certain political point of view. But this is not the only way bias is a problem. You mentioned earlier that news sources don't report on all the people who aren't murdered. But they also don't report on most of the people who are murdered - how could they? It's an enormous world and there are more murders than anyone could cover.
But this is where your selection comes in. How many of those murders do you cover? And which? It's irrelevant how accurately and fairly you cover the stories. A news source which covers loads of murders and one which covers few present fundamentally different worlds to people; even if they never lie. And this does shape people's views of the world. The murder rate in the UK is at historic lows; but the public perception does not match this. It seems naive to deny that this is due to media coverage of murders.
In a way, we get the press we deserve. News agencies are not subsidized by independent pools of money, but are instead fueled by ad revenue that depends on eyeballs. Profit drives news, so news agencies will typically show news that will get the most eyeballs. At the same time, many journalists (I would say a vast majority) still have some integrity. While they know certain news stories can drive ad revenue, they still report on less popular news on the backs of the profit driven by other news stories.
Our press is a reflection of our culture. It is a formalized version of the town gossip. As long as our culture cherishes the truth then we will expect the truth from our press, and that is what we mean by bias.
As revenue depends on more than eyeballs. It depends on which sort of eyeballs, for one - eyeballs connected to empty wallets are of less value to advertisers. And it depends on the advertisers being willing to have their image associated with your message (though I think the different way advertising is displayed on the internet has changed this and weakened the power advertisers have to control publications).

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 309 of 313 (811175)
06-05-2017 2:13 PM
Reply to: Message 303 by LamarkNewAge
05-25-2017 6:02 PM


Re: Conservatives should (like the rest of us ) not trust the media.
A candidate for the Democratic Presidential Primary got 496,000 votes (out of around 9 million cast ) against Clinton in 1996, but was blacked out by the media.
In 1996, a political extremist promoting bizarre conspiracy theories ran for the Democratic party nomination. He did this every election - 1996 would be his fifth consecutive attempt
(and not the last). Weirdly, this was not considered a major event by the press.

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Replies to this message:
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