RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events ABC News:Press is Liberal

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
why do people get their panties in such a bunch over wise cracks about moore? he's made a career out of making absurd comparisons of people he disagrees with, and when he gets cracked on you always have people chiming in your not fair!

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D. McDonagh said:
I don't give a shit about that, to be honest. I was just pointing out that he isn't a communist and anyone who thinks that he is probably doesn't have any business talking about politics until they've worked out how socialists differ from liberals. Clear now?

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D. McDonagh said:
I don't give a shit about that, to be honest. I was just pointing out that he isn't a communist and anyone who thinks that he is probably doesn't have any business talking about politics until they've worked out how socialists differ from liberals. Clear now?

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I know exactly what the difference is.

A communist knows what he's doing and admits what he's up to.



BTW, if you're going to be anal retentive about political labels, should you be using socialist and communist interchangably?

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the G-man said:
Seriously, however, Moore has admitted to being very, very, liberal.

So his idea of "conservative" is not the typical definition of conservative.

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I'm confused. The article says:

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The first version published of yesterday's Note included what was intended as a SATIRICAL report of a fictional ABC News/Washington Post poll. No such poll was conducted. The questions and results listed were not from a real poll.

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Does this statement refer to the text that follows it (i.e., about liberal bias in the media), or does it refer to something else that has since been removed (or appeared on a different page)?

- snopes

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the G-man said:
I just went back to ABC site and couldn't find either a retraction or clarification.

And the Wall St. Journal, where I saw this linked to in the first place, is actually pretty good about running corrections when they receive them. And, so far, nothing has run to indicate this wasn't legit.

As such, I still think it was serious

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"When people hear 'dancing pole' they think of stripping," says Nick James '04, explaining why the approval of a $324 free-standing dancing pole might raise some eyebrows on campus. Risley Hall's "Kommittee," the representative body that vets such purchases at Cornell's arts-themed dorm, approved the purchase at a Feb. 8 meeting.

"[Students] began researching this years ago, when there were other students in Risley who did performance art involving a pole," Kommittee chair David Schoonover '05 said.

Robin Liu '07 thought the pole, like "make your own sushi at Appel Commons," would draw students to attend Risley events.

"I guess it will be okay because it will draw people to Tammany on Friday," Liu said, referring the dorm's regular entertainment program.

Spalding Warner '07 agreed. "Curiousity itself will draw people in," he said.

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the G-man said:
Oh, and just to get sort of off topic for a second...

Previously on this thread, there was a bit of side discussion about Al Franken and the veracity of his book.

Here is a web site that purports to documents distortions, inaccuracies, etc., in Franken's book.

http://www.frankenlies.com/

Judge for yourself.

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..once Mr. Kerry won the nomination, he had--or seemed to have--something else going for him: the support of the liberal media, which loathed President Bush and yearned for his defeat. "The media, I think, wants Kerry to win," Evan Thomas of Newsweek said last July. "I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards--I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox--but they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all. There's going to be this glow about them . . . that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Mr. Thomas later revised his estimate downward, to five points.

If Mr. Thomas was right, then, Mr. Bush would have won re-election with a popular-vote margin of between 7.5% and 17.5% of the total vote--rather than the 2.5% he actually got--but for the liberal media. Yet there's a case to be made on the other side: that the liberal media actually helped President Bush, rendering the Kerry campaign ineffective by telling Democrats what they wanted to hear rather than what was true.

[For example] Mr. Kerry's ... Vietnam story was, to say the least, complicated. He first rose to public prominence not for his exploits in combat but for his leadership of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

These calumnies left many veterans angry and resentful, and they made it likely that Vietnam would prove to be the candidate's Achilles' heel rather than his silver bullet. One veteran quoted in "Unfit for Command" summed things up pointedly: "In 1971-72, for almost 18 months, [Mr. Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains--there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it."

The Kerry camp evidently hoped the media would gloss over the candidate's antiwar activities, and for the most part, for many months, they did. One exception was ABC's Charlie Gibson, who in April 2004 confronted Mr. Kerry about the 1971 medal incident. Mr. Kerry answered evasively, then muttered into a live microphone that Mr. Gibson was "doing the work of the Republican National Committee." This was a telling comment. Mr. Gibson was, in truth, doing the work of a journalist: asking a politician tough questions. But Democrats expect the mainstream media to treat them sympathetically--an expectation that has ample basis in experience.

Yet it's far from clear that such sympathy serves the Democrats' interests. Suppose that, once Mr. Kerry secured the nomination, the media had aggressively investigated and reported on his antiwar activities. The candidate would have been forced to respond. If he had been smart, he would have delivered a major speech in which, without renouncing his opposition to the Vietnam War, he repudiated and apologized for his decades-old slanders against fellow veterans. He might have concluded by saying of the Vietnam conflict, "I hope and pray we will put it behind us and go forward in a constructive spirit for the good of our party and the good of our country"--the words with which he ended a February 1992 Senate speech criticizing fellow Vietnam vet Bob Kerrey for trying to make Bill Clinton's draft avoidance an issue in that year's Democratic primaries.

This surely would have gone a long way to defusing the issue. Instead, Mr. Kerry bet that the media's silence would carry him through to the election--and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those meddling Swift Boat Veterans. A month after the Democratic Convention, they launched their first round of anti-Kerry ads, coinciding with the publication of "Unfit for Command." The claims that Mr. Kerry had falsified his heroics in order to win medals and an early end to his tour of duty were mostly unverifiable, and fair-minded Americans probably would have been inclined to give Mr. Kerry the benefit of the doubt. But the ads goaded Mr. Kerry into responding, which in turn forced the media to pay attention. Whereupon the Swift Boat Veterans turned their attention to Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities, on which they had him dead to rights.

Then, in early September, CBS News aired its disastrous story on Bush's National Guard service. So eager were Mr. Kerry's supporters in the media to believe the worst of the president that Mr. Rather and producer Mary Mapes went to air with a report based on obviously fabricated documents, then stood by their story for an agonizing two weeks. Yet even if it had been true--or had gone undebunked--it's unlikely it would have made a difference. As the Washington Post's liberal TV critic, Tom Shales, acknowledged with hindsight in an Inauguration Day column, "It's common knowledge that Bush was a spoiled little rich boy who did not serve with any great distinction, so this story wasn't exactly a blockbuster."

The CBS debacle marked the end of Vietnam as a campaign issue. In the remaining weeks before the election, Mr. Kerry talked a lot less about Vietnam and more about matters of contemporary concern. He performed adequately in the debates, and with the help of a massive get-out-the-vote effort he avoided a landslide defeat.

After the Swift Boat Veterans and Rathergate, it must have been clear even to Mr. Kerry that campaigning on Vietnam had led him into a quagmire. If the media had treated his war-hero narrative with more skepticism in the first place, he might have reached this realization--and developed a better campaign strategy--much earlier. Conservatives love to complain about liberal media bias, and for the most part they're right. But they should count their blessings, too. Were it not for the media reinforcing the Democrats' spin, John Kerry might be president today.

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Wednesday said:
I like news that presents both sides. The I can look at the issue in its entirety and take a bias liberal stance.

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True. But sometimes I like to get REALLY pissed off, so I read the Op-Ed page of the WSJ. Then I come here and chew on Pariah for awhile

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I'm liberal (according to rex I'm a commie) and I don't see the media as being liberal at all.

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The press and the public remain... "worlds apart."

This split has been visible ever since a groundbreaking article 23 years ago in AEI's Public Opinion magazine. In it, academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman presented results of a careful study of media elites. They discovered that from 1964 to 1976, 81 percent of journalists voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

A later survey by Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of Washington-based reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and only 7 percent for George H. W. Bush. Meanwhile, 59 percent viewed the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" as a "campaign ploy," while just 3 percent called it a "serious reform proposal." The public disagreed, and the GOP captured the House for the first time in four decades.

Today, the media and the public are drifting even farther apart. In the new Pew study, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as "liberal," compared with 22 percent in 1995. Only 7 percent of reporters say they are conservative at present. For the general public, the results are again reversed: 33 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives; 20 percent, liberals.

On social issues, the gap is even wider. For example, the national press states by a margin of 91 percent to 6 percent that "belief in God is not necessary to be moral." The general public says, to the contrary, that belief in God is necessary, by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.

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the G-man said:
The Press and The Public Are Worlds Apart

The press and the public remain... "worlds apart."

This split has been visible ever since a groundbreaking article 23 years ago in AEI's Public Opinion magazine. In it, academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman presented results of a careful study of media elites. They discovered that from 1964 to 1976, 81 percent of journalists voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

A later survey by Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of Washington-based reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and only 7 percent for George H. W. Bush. Meanwhile, 59 percent viewed the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" as a "campaign ploy," while just 3 percent called it a "serious reform proposal." The public disagreed, and the GOP captured the House for the first time in four decades.

Today, the media and the public are drifting even farther apart. In the new Pew study, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as "liberal," compared with 22 percent in 1995. Only 7 percent of reporters say they are conservative at present. For the general public, the results are again reversed: 33 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives; 20 percent, liberals.

On social issues, the gap is even wider. For example, the national press states by a margin of 91 percent to 6 percent that "belief in God is not necessary to be moral." The general public says, to the contrary, that belief in God is necessary, by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.

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the G-man said:
I can agree with you that reporters are simpletons who will readily latch onto stories involving sex regardless of politics.

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magicjay said:

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the G-man said:
I can agree with you that reporters are simpletons who will readily latch onto stories involving sex regardless of politics.

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Remember guys, the only reason TV and news papers' have content is to get you to watch the commercials!

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Remember guys, the only reason TV and news papers' have content is to get you to watch the commercials!

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The paradox of the year is why so many Americans tell pollsters they feel bad about an economy that's been so good, with solid job growth and corporate profits, rising wages and home prices, and a huge decline in the budget deficit. Perhaps one reason is because the media keep saying the economy stinks.

The federal deficit is shrinking, unemployment has fallen, and America has seen more than two straight years of job growth. But broadcasters have been describing the economy as “dicey,” “volatile” and “slow.” A Free Market Project analysis of economic stories on network evening news shows since President George W. Bush’s second inauguration showed negative news prevailing 62 percent of the time (71 out of 115 stories). That number was deceiving, however, because even good news often was portrayed as bad. In 40 stories classified as good economic news, journalists undermined the good news with bad 45 percent of the time.

Good news was relegated to short reports, or briefs, 68 percent of the time, while bad news was treated with full stories. When briefs on both sides were excluded, the comparison of full-length news stories showed an overwhelming ratio: negative stories outnumbered positive ones almost 4-to-1.

When GDP growth is reported, Republicans received between 16 and 24 percentage point fewer positive stories for the same economic numbers than Democrats. For durable goods for all newspapers, Republicans received between 15 and 25 percentage points fewer positive news stories than Democrats. For unemployment, the difference was between zero and 21 percentage points. Retail sales showed no difference. Among the Associated Press and the top 10 papers, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, and New York Times tend to be the least likely to report positive news during Republican administrations, while the Houston Chronicle slightly favors Republicans. Only one newspaper treated one Republican administration significantly more positively than the Clinton administration: the Los Angeles Times' headlines were most favorable to the Reagan administration, but it still favored Clinton over either Bush administration.

Media coverage of President Bush's tax cuts has been particularly slanted. During the 2003 tax-cut debate, three of every four major TV network news stories were negative. The favorite criticisms were liberal echoes that it would bust the budget and favor the rich. Earlier this year, a news story on National Public Radio announced that "as everyone knows, the primary cause of the budget deficit was the Bush tax cuts." No word yet on whom NPR is crediting with this year's revenue surge of $262 billion.

CNN's "American Morning" host Soledad O'Brien said Tuesday that Hurricane Katrina evacuees housed at the Superdome were worse off than beheading victims in Baghdad.

The normally mild-mannered newswoman offered the overwrought observation while speaking at Redbook Magazine's "Movers and Shakers" awards luncheon in New York.

According to the New York Daily News, O'Brien blurted out:

"It is a sad thing to watch military veterans cry as they tell you the beheadings in Baghdad were less horrific than what they saw as 30,000 people marched from the Superdome through a shopping mall and onto buses to who knows where."

Ms. O'Brien didn't identify the veterans who told her that Katrina victims would have been better off being beheaded.

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Bush's poll numbers are in free fall, but CNN's Malveaux claimed they are improving

On the September 12 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux claimed that "we have seen poll numbers improve" ...

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Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, in an appearance Friday on CNN's "Larry King Live," said Americans are too dumb to vote for the right candidates. "We're an ignorant nation right now," Mr. Cronkite said. "We're not really capable, I do not think the majority of our people, of making the decisions that have to be made at election time ....in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency, of course." ...... "I don't think we're bright enough to do the job that would preserve our democracy, our republic. I think we're in serious danger."

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Pariah said:

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