On news, politics, and who is right and wrong

FF Drifter · 09-05-08, 03:09 PM

Addressing directly the media bias issue, specifically those in the McCain thread and similar thread about Obama, Palin, etc. in the past few days:

It's in the nature of the work that any sort of reporting will have some bias thrown in. When casting light on a subject, it is incredibly difficult to frame a story such that it states purely facts with no tinge of personal opinion from the reporter/writer/editor or even the disconnected CEO who owns the media company. When such "unbiased news" does appear it is often so bland that no one pays attention to it, for lack of an angle.

It is for this reason that I can say (opinions, of course) that Fox News is about as conservative as CNN is liberal. And it is especially for this reason that I feel it is a real dis-service to yourself and those you argue with if you rely on the news from only one source or political slant.

My attitude is that since any media outlet is bound to have its biases, we should really be looking at several news sources (or as many as we practically can anyways) and making judgments ourselves ~ deciding like well-informed consumers of news which stories are connected, which ones are "true and factual," and which ones we can discard as thinly disguised op-ed pieces.

No one who eats McDonald's all their life can be considered an authority on which burgers and fries are the best; any In-N-Out, Burger King, Checkers/Rally's, Sonic, or Carl's Jr/Hardee's fan can tell you that *it's lunchtime, damn I'm hungry*

Here's my personal arsenal of choice for political debate (as I'm sure you guys have noticed):

iGoogle News Feeds.

This is by no means the only source of readily digestible news for rapid-fire debate regurgitation, but it's certainly one of the handiest. Please ~ before threads about Palin/Obama/terrorists/who-is-right-and-wrong get further drawn out of context and peppered with angry personal attacks, let's take a look at the facts... ideally as many as we can pick out from as many angles as possible.

Ouda147 · 09-05-08, 03:17 PM

Great post ! Having a variety of information sources ensures that you get a good cross section of info. Great post.

jkurl · 09-05-08, 04:01 PM

Looks to me like most of those news outlets would be Associated Press supplied, not that your not getting a fuller picture you are, its just something to consider. For all fox news is perceived as being conservative in comparison to the mainstream news its just that a perception. Everything has some bias or another, discerning minds are aware of this and act accordingly, most are just led.

FF Drifter · 09-05-08, 04:11 PM

Right; I'll agree with you jkurl. There are relatively few 'able' news companies that are out there getting the information (Reuters and AP are the best known I think) ~ most other "news sources" just rehash what they can from those and then add flavor of their own.

The perception about Fox News being "conservative" is a relative statement. I'd say it is often more conservative than CNN and NBC so it's easy to place it to the right. Fox News is still tame though compared to Al-Jazeera

The main thing is to realize who is saying what and why they might be saying it that way ~ then making an informed decision for yourself. As you put it, "most are just led" and it's this tag-along of independent minds (voters!) that I'm worried about.

williadb2000 · 09-05-08, 04:34 PM

Thanks FF Drifter.

. I'm glad you took the time to lay this out there for everyone to read. In some of my previous posts, I just assumed that this was common knowledge. I quickly realized that it was not.

93LegendSedan · 09-05-08, 04:37 PM

Very nice post, and makes me respect your opinions on politics even more because you obviuosly do your research and stay up to date.

reboticon · 09-05-08, 09:12 PM

Murdoch owns 52% of all media in this country. That should be scary as hell to anyone, regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on.

jkurl · 09-06-08, 02:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reboticon

Murdoch owns 52% of all media in this country. That should be scary as hell to anyone, regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on.

no he doesn't. prove me wrong whats the source for that? he may own 52% of news corp the company that owns the fox stations. Media is very centralized, I was trying to point out to Fred, but Rupert does not own that much sorry.

Fred, I believe Associated Press owns Reuters or vice versa. They only appear as two entities to maintain the appearance and idea of separate news sources but they are not. Al Jareza and the Asian paper you listed are the only ones that might be independent of the elite controlled press.

B+O · 09-06-08, 09:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jkurl

no he doesn't. prove me wrong whats the source for that? he may own 52% of news corp the company that owns the fox stations. Media is very centralized, I was trying to point out to Fred, but Rupert does not own that much sorry.

Fred, I believe Associated Press owns Reuters or vice versa. They only appear as two entities to maintain the appearance and idea of separate news sources but they are not. Al Jareza and the Asian paper you listed are the only ones that might be independent of the elite controlled press.

When I read him speaking about "Fox news" I took him to mean the Cable Station "Fox News" not the local fox news stations for every region. The cable station itself is relatively slanted to the right. It's actually scary to listen to the completely asinine and sometimes ignorant things they throw around. Like that girl Michele Malkin, she's crazy. Bill O'Reilly, people say he's unbiased, but the fact remains that he's really ignorant in a lot of the stuff he says and he bases his stances on his blissful ignorance of these situations (basically, the conservative mantra). That makes it incredibly hard for me to watch him because He thinks of himself as a non-slant person especially with his "No Spin Zone" He makes good points sometimes, but it's only if he talking about himself or something close to him.

CNN? I can't even really tell you what's on CNN most of the time. It's hard to watch that news because it's sooooo Left slanted it's comical. I don't particularly watch that side of the news because I'd agree with somethings and then they'd take it too far and it's like "well no...That's not really the case" so it felt like i was getting brain washed. I have a hard time watching CNN without bursting out laughing at who might be watching this absorbing it and believing it.

MSNBC is just the right balance. they have some left slanting and right slanting people on the same shows all over the station. Keith Olbermann will be talking to Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews...

Pat Buchanan= Big Right Slant
Keith Olbermann= Big Left Slant
Chris Matthews = Left and Right slant...

I tend to agree with Chris Matthews a good bit of the time. I think.

I like to read so I read articles from the AP, and Gallup.com.

Good post fred

reboticon · 09-07-08, 02:03 AM

What Rupert Murdoch owns
This is publically available, but most people don't even think about what exactly it is that these huge corporations are doing with their money. I am copy/pasting this from a pdf document outlining the ownerships of GE, AOL/Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch, Disney Corp, and Viacom

Rupert Murdoch owns:

Murdoch family controls 30%
AT&T owns 8%

Rupert Murdoch: NEWS CORPORATION 2000 revenues $14 billion

Twentieth Century Fox Licensing
NEWSPAPERS
NY Post; In UK: the Sun, the Times, News of the
World; The Australian, The Telegraph, The Herald
Sun, and others in Australia, New Zealand and the
South Pacific

BOOKS
News America imprints include HarperCollins,
Regan Books, William Morrow and Avon;
Zondervan, largest commercial Bible imprint

PRODUCTION
Twentieth Century Fox Television
Twentieth Television; Fox Television
Studios; Greenblatt/Janollari Studios;
Natural History Limited; Fox Family
Worldwide, Inc. (50% w/Saban)
Regency Television (50% w/Monarchy
Entertprises); Fox Television Library

FOX
203 affiliated stations

TV NETWORKS
FOX, FX, Fox Family Channel, FXM
(50% w/AT&T), Fox Sports Net (stakes
of 40-50% in 21 regional sports
channels w/GE, Cablevision and ATT
through it's 38% stake in Cablevision),
National Geographic Channel (67% w/
25% GE and National Geographic
Society), MSG (20% w/40% AT&T and
40% Cablevision); TV Guide Channel,
TV Guide Sneak Prevue (44% w/ 44%
AT&T) text display of pay-per view
schedules; generates 65% of all PPV
orders; International holdings include
stakes in Zee Network (50%), ESPN
Star (with AOL/TW), Channel V (50%
with AOL/TW, EMI, SONY, and
BERTELSMANN) and National
Geographic Channel (50% w/others);
FOX Sports International (w/ATT)

CABLE & SATELLITE TV
DirecTV (currnet merger talks would give
30% stake w/GM adn 10% combined for
Microsoft and AT&T); international stakes
include holding sin FOXTEL (50% w/Telstra
Corp., and Publishing and Braodcasting Ltd.);
BskyB (40% w/25% Vivendi) in the UK;
JskyB in Japan, and Star TV in India

STATIONS
WNYW and WWOR, New York; KTTV and KCOP, LA; WFLD,
Chicago; WTXF, Philadelphia; WFXT, Boston; KDFW and
KDFI, Dallas; WTTG, Washington DC, WJBK, Detroit; WAGA,
Atlanta; KRIV, Houston; WTVT, Tampa; WJW, Cleveland;
KSAZ, Phoenix; KDVR, Denver; KTVI, St. Louis; WDAF,
Kansas City; WITI, Milwaukee; KSTU, Salt Lake City; WBRC,
Birmingham; WHBQ, Memphis; WGHP, Greensboro; KTBC,
Austin; KPTV, Portland; KBHK (58%), San Francisco; KMSP
(58%) Minneapolis; KUTP (58%) Phoenix; WUTB (58%),
Baltimore; WRBW (58%) Orlando; KMOL (58%) San Antonio
and KTVX (being sold), Salt Lake City; Satellite
Primestar and DirecTV-- (Current merger talks would give 30%
stake w/GM and 10% combined for Microsoft and AT&T)

TV PRODUCTION
Twentieth Century Fox Television and Fox Television Studios (83%), Fox Television
Studios Regency Television (w/New Regency Enterprises), TV Guide Television
Productions (44% w/ 44% AT&T); XYZ Entertainment Pty. Ltd. cable television
programming in the Asia-Pacific region (50% ATT w/ 50% Foxtel [partnership between
News Corp., Telstra Corp., and Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd.]); Main Event Television
(33.3% ATT w/ 33.3% each Optus and Foxtel [News Corp., Telstra Corp., and Publishing
and Broadcasting Ltd.]) produces Main Event and adults only PPV channels in Australia

INTERNATIONAL TV
Channels in Europe:
Vox (49.9%),TM3 (66%),
Stream (35%)
In Latin America: Canal Fox,
Cinecanal (20.2 %),
Telecine (12.5%)
FOX Sports Americas (50%)
In Asia:Channel V (with others)
STAR News;Zee India TV
and Zee TV (50%);
STAR Sports (50%)
Phoenix Chinese Channel (45%)
Phoenix Movies (45%)
Viva Cinema (50%)
• • •
various satellite joint ventures
including STAR in Asia and
FOXTEL in Australia

MARKETING
News Corp. controls about half the US coupon
business through stakes in in-store and printed
coupon businesses;
newspaper inserts in 630 U.S. and 140 Canadian
Sunday newspapers;
telemarketing

...and more on the web

Thats damn close to 52%.

FF Drifter · 09-07-08, 10:54 AM

About media ownership: I'm sure that Murdoch is indeed a very large part of media ownership, but there are several other tycoons that own a large slice also. Don't forget about Ted Turner ~ Turner Enterprises owns (among other things) CNN, Time-Warner, TBS, and even Cartoon Network. Between Turner and Murdoch, there is still NBC, CBS, and ABC unaccounted for. I was browsing through a couple sites earlier about 'media ownership' and to my understanding there are major U.S. anti-trust laws that prevent any single entity from owning more than 20% or so of media outlets. This of course doesn't apply outside of the US but in many countries, government media arms are much bigger than multi-national corporations can hope to compete with.

On Reuters/Associated Press ~ WikiPedia is not the best source but the citations seem legit: Reuters is owned largely by the Thomson family and Associated Press is run by a consortium of publishers and newspaper/TV channel presidents all over the U.S. As far as I can see there is no overlap between their management.

Al-jazeera of course is very independent of either source (interesting to note that Al-jazeera is considered extremely liberal amongst Muslim-majority states although very conservative to pretty much everyone else).

Xinhua News is the Chinese government's media arm and reports directly to the Communist Party.

ChannelNewsAsia is a Singapore-based media outlet that focuses (duh) on East and Southeast Asia.