My belief is that, no matter how unbiased an attempt any source makes (and I agree that the vast majority make no such attempt), the source can only report what its human vision and mindset permit.  All news is some sort of “spin,” in other words.  We as members of a semi-educated culture MUST thoughtfully separate the wheat from the chaff.  Certainly, we make mistakes in judgment according to our own vision and mindsets, but when I can’t depend upon my own sorting out– my own thinking– I don’t want to be here anymore.

You would disagree with some of the most famous advice found in all of the Bard’s words:

This above all: to thine own self be true–
                                 –HAMLET

I liked Dr. Shermer’s comment that we must be open-minded, but not to the extent that our brains fall out.  That leaves plenty of room for thoughtful analysis of all the “parroting” we must process, then at last arriving at some conclusions that are true to what we can personally accept. Neither blindly believing the conservative/liberal bias of the media OR
shutting it all out to the point of not thinking at all–denial–is going to solve anything.  

I don’t think you should deliberately isolate yourself from ANY information input. Even stupid terrible TV shows like Coupling (which blissfully was cancelled almost instantly) or (I’d better duck) Friends (which wasn’t) are sources of valuable insight on the people who make such shows and those who watch them.

Same with Fox News and even BBC. Sure. you can turn them off because they’re drivel. But you can also learn a lot from drivel. Just don’t forget you’re watching from the outside and don’t be sucked in.

Happy New Year, Calia!

But…did you read all the way to the last line, by any chance?  That was the point of the WHOLE article, R.  

“…But the aims of journalism, I’ve always thought, go beyond establishing basic facts to sifting competing claims about the truth. In this latter task, it seems, the thoughtful news consumer walks alone.

Of course, he can also turn off his TV.”

And I didn’t feel that the critique was exactly favorable to Fox, either.  So I can’t quite figure out what you thought was ironic about the whole thing.  

Hope we can at least agree that most news sources are fairly corrupt.  I.e. don’t listen to anybody – especially not to yourself!  ;)  

You’ve gone on record here saying you’re disappointed to think that I have merely parroted previously expressed stands by the pop-media and academia. In Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, we’ve reached a stage here called the Showdown, where the posturing is over and you gotta show your cards.

Show mw a link where the pop media / academia have discussed or noted that :

1. Invading Iraq (which has never killed Americans in a terrorist attack) while negotiating and sending in UN inspectors to Libya (which has, more than once) over nukes is somewhat hypocritical and shoulda been done the other way around (like WWRJD after the Saudis got done ‘splaining).

2. Abandoning Iraq by next summer is a political election year ploy by Dubya far more than a prudent timetable for establishing promised democracy there

3. Watching Iraq after next summer may well be a skybox seat to all manner of unpleasantness

Find those references (or come up with them yourself without parroting, like I did) and you’ve got yourself a hand of three aces. I think the pop media / academia have left all of them in the deck while they play with other, lower trash cards. That leaves ‘em with a weak hand. They lose. Too bad…for all of us.

Political stuff aside…a very, very happy new year to you, Ricky !

Will get to the rest when I have a little more time.  Have some concerns that an achieved article may not work so…

The second-dumbest people in the news:[Daily Edition]

Bret Stephens. Jerusalem Post. Jerusalem: Aug 8, 2003.  pg. 16.B
Full Text (1327   words)
Copyright 2003 The Jerusalem Post)

EYE ON THE MEDIA

Let’s stipulate from the outset that not everything about Fox News is appalling. Brit Hume is an able journalist. Neil Cavuto is watchable. I like some of their political commentators, Fred Barnes most of all.

The rest of it is bunk. Talk-show host Bill O’Reilly is a self- righteous bully. Anchor John Gibson gives the impression of being not very bright, although that may have to do with his hairdo. Political commentator Monica Crowley was caught plagiarizing by the Wall Street Journal. News items are treated as if they were offerings on Fox’s line- up of action shows debuting this fall: “We got the Jakarta explosion, we got the hunt for Saddam!” There is no in- depth reporting, while a great deal of air time is wasted on chit-chat. I hate the use of the term “homicide bombing”: All bombings that result in death are “homicide” bombings; “suicide bombing” accurately describes a specific act. And there’s something about the way that Fox mixes salacious reporting with censorious commentary that’s totally repulsive. Is Kobe Bryant guilty of sexual assault and adultery? Well, we’ve got the vaginal trauma to prove it!

Simply, Fox News is more of a parody of a news program than an actual news program. Not that this seems to bother the Fox people themselves; part of their almost-redeeming charm is that they are blissfully not in earnest. Beyond all the tub-thumping, the American flag waving in the corner of the screen, this is “news” that seems to have an audience of Bart Simpsons in mind. As such, Fox News comes close to being a parody of America itself.

Would that it went all the way. But thanks to people like Hume and Barnes, Fox retains a patina of seriousness that turns what would otherwise be a good joke into a bad caricature, the very picture of what the rest of the world thinks of as Right-wing America. And because Fox News has leapfrogged over its more staid competitors in the ratings, it is also seen as the journalistic equivalent of 1984, a dystopic universe in which Rupert Murdoch’s boot stamps forever on the honest reporter’s face. The upshot – depressingly – is an excellent argument for the old behemoths.

OF ALL of Fox’s sins, this one is the worst. For those routinely depressed or enraged by the inadequate or biased reporting of CNN or the BBC, Fox News is there to prove that perhaps they don’t do such a bad job after all. I don’t think much of Jonathan Mann and his “Insight” program on CNN, but next to Shep Smith’s “Studio B” Mann looks like Ed Murrow. I was turned off by the BBC’s coverage of the war in Iraq, with its ill-concealed gloating over apparent Coalition reversals. But that’s nothing next to the embarrassment of, say, watching Fox reporter Wendell Goler unable to get right the name of Palestinian arch-terrorist Abu Abbas. Meanwhile, there is no doubting that some BBC programming is fantastically good – Tim Sebastian’s “Hard Talk” above all – as is, in the US, the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” which appears on public television.

The conclusion one is tempted to draw here is that quality journalism and market forces pull in opposite directions, and that any society that wants the former had best devote a subsidy to it. Certainly the BBC makes this argument. Amid increasingly vocal calls to revoke or revise the Corporation’s charter – or to privatize the BBC outright – it warns that such a step would mean losing the very touchstone for objective, informed and independent journalism. Privatize us, they say, and there will be nothing but Fox News.

In fairness, there really is something to this. In America, at least, none of the best magazines turns a profit: Commentary, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Weekly Standard all depend on the largesse of wealthy patrons to stay afloat. Meanwhile, People, In Style, Cosmo and Maxim rake it in.

But there is a crucial difference between a magazine like The Atlantic, which is privately supported, and the BBC, which survives on an onerous compulsory tax. Then too, it’s an open question just how objective, informed and independent the BBC is. “More and more,” writes Labor MP Gerald Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal, “there are accusations from different sections of the political spectrum not that the BBC supports one party or another but that it sets its own agenda on different issues and tailors its presentation to fit that agenda.”

The proximate cause of Kaufman’s musings is, of course, the David Kelly scandal, where it appears that misrepresentation of Kelly’s views by BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan contributed to the government scientist’s suicide last month. But anyone who watches the BBC from Israel could not have been surprised by the affair. According to a study conducted last year by Media Tenor, a Bonn-based media research group, 85% of the BBC’s coverage of Israel was “negative”; another 15% was rated “neutral”; none was “positive.” This has been going on for decades. Nobody noticed in part because Israel is far away, in part because the negative coverage conforms to existing prejudices. With the Kelly story, however, Israel’s once- dismissed complaints about the BBC are beginning to seem like part of a larger pattern of questionable reportage and editorial spinning.

In other words, the journalism on offer from the BBC is often no less tendentious than what you get on Fox. This is not to say that it isn’t better than Fox’s: the breadth of the BBC’s coverage is vastly greater, its biases are not so crudely expressed, and the general tenor of its programming isn’t so sophomoric. But these advantages are offset by the fact that the BBC is so desperately in earnest. It really does see itself as an “independent” and “objective” voice merely because it isn’t governed by considerations of profit. And it also sees itself as a bulwark of decency, duty bound to enlighten the masses and speak truth to power.

The result is coverage that is deceiving principally because it is self-deceiving. How many BBC reporters come to Israel, for instance, sincerely convinced that the core problem here is “the occupation”? Nearly all of them, I should guess. And how many have stopped to wonder how their coverage would change if they tested the proposition that Arab rejectionism was instead to blame? Probably very few.

I’VE DEVOTED this column to Fox News and the BBC because they are often viewed as being the opposite poles of broadcast news: one baldly partisan, the other scrupulously objective; one populist- conservative, the other high-toned and cosmopolitan; one relentlessly profit- driven, the other “in the public interest.” As with most poles, too, they have a great deal in common, political agendas and moral smugness above all. I resent both of them; one for having given a bad name to conservatives, the other for having given it to journalists.

It would be nice to find some middle route. Public ownership is not the way. The fact that the BBC isn’t answerable to advertisers only means that its biases run in favor of statism and all that it implies. It also makes the BBC an arrogant organization, which goes far to explain its present travails. Yet a private news organization that seeks ratings above everything else is going to wind up turning reportage into entertainment, which is exactly what Fox News has done.

Ultimately, consumers will seek, and news organizations will provide, content that is reasonably accurate and sober. At least that’s true when it comes to business news, headlines, the weather. But the aims of journalism, I’ve always thought, go beyond establishing basic facts to sifting competing claims about the truth. In this latter task, it seems, the thoughtful news consumer walks alone.

Of course, he can also turn off his TV.

bret@jpost.co.il

As far as the point I think you’re making that nobody can be sure the press is accurate or correct in their assessments, this is EXACTLY a point I have made repeatedly in my writings here. I have repeatedly urged readers to literally be skeptical of the writings of others, specifically including my own. I offer opinions and opinions only – even when I say something is a fact, I would like readers to always keep in the back of their mind that I could be wrong. I certainly have been before, and publically admitted it on these pages more than once when I was.

Now, I don’t believe I’ve ever said here that Dubya is stupid. I don’t believe he is. In fact, I’ve written in this very thread (last paragraph of my comment What Iraqi Sovereignty Really Means) that “Dubya and his people aren’t dumb.” I do believe that despite his history degree from Yale and his MBA from Harvard, he is not a very intellectually “deep” person and looks for “social engineering” and “wheel and deal” solutions rather than rational or logical ones to the problems he confronts. In this, he is a consumate politician. However, I personally believe that his actions with Harken Oil to avoid going bankrupt were illegal, his actions with the Texas Rangers to build his fortune using public funds were immoral, and both are blemishes on his reputation and character that are conveniently ignored today. There is no equivalent to Ken Starr investigating Whitewater when it comes to Dubya, which for the life of me I don’t understand.

Finally, I don’t want to be prez for six weeks, and I don’t want to set myself up as an authority as is implied by “WWRJD”. I am just an opinionated citizen. I try to remain openminded and call things like I see them until somebody can show me why I should think otherwise. I’ll try to listen when they do. I agree that no matter how fervent the hue and cry today, only history can judge if a Prez has done good or blew it. If I were Prez, I don’t know if history would judge how I’d play my poker hand any better or worse than the way Dubya is playing his poker hand.

I do know I’d play it differently. For one thing, if I were Prez, Saddam would still be in power, along with all of the other tinpot dictators out there in the world who are no better than him that we aren’t doing squat about, and as another Ricky once said, the Saudis would have a whole lot ‘o ‘splaining to do to the American troops tossing THEIR corner of the world. And the North Koreans would be looking at a whole lot more troops than we’ve got over there now to get a REAL nuclear threat shut down.

When persons sort of parrot what the pop-media/academic culture happens to be saying, I am, quite frankly, disappointed.  

And precisely how does one even know which issues have been thought through very ‘critically’ by people we listen to, or which sets of ideas have any basis in reality at all?  On a superficial level, one really does not initially know these things.  (by thinking critically, I don’t mean, of course, “I feel, therefore I think ” …” “)  Judging by most of what you’ve said so far, RJ, the bulk of what you listen to seems to be highly reactionary.  I guess I don’t perceive the pres as stupid at all.  And outside of listening to what other “political” sources have said about him, where exactly do you get this idea from?  

One can carry on endlessly about the presidential foreign policy missteps, but only time will tell what he really did and how he performed his duties.  People with misgivings (another word for “FEELINGS”, mind you) towards a person’s, or politicians, ideology just don’t seem to have the patience to wait for the outcome.  But whatever the public perception of the pres. may be, he is certainly not a man of poor character.  

Let’s make you the pres for six weeks or so – alright?  What would you have done if some opposing state sponsored a terror group which attacked your beautiful state, and killed a few thousand innocent human beings?  hmmm?  

All kinds of solutions seem “perfect” in hypothetical-ville, don’t they.

You can’t name a single US president (save for Washington, maybe) where that isn’t true. Even Jefferson had contemporaries that may have been far better leaders. Honestly, was Gore, the guy who flunked out of college, the best the Democrats had? That’s why when he and W debated the only thing they disagreed about was HOW they were going to “save medicare” and not much else. Since W is such a bad leader with no more experience than Howard Dean (they were both govenors and both have substantial professional experience) why didn’t Gore push that point? Were Dole or Clinton the “best leader” this country could come up with? We’ve got far bigger problems than the president if that’s the best we’ve got. Reagan and Mondale? We have Bush because Gore was the best we came up with against him, that’s why many of us voted Green. If you put two losers in a race, you end up with a loser as the winner.

And then a war for personal power? The few democrats of consistency right now are playing the war as a negative thing. First it’s only about oil, then we’re pulling out too soon for the election. A) It’ll never be as bad as Nazi Germany, Germany had peaceful neighbors, Germany had power, money, and means. Iraq only has oil and a fairly well educated population and they are hated by every other country in the area. B) It is about oil, that’s a very large variable in this equation, we don’t pull out if we can’t move the oil. Will we pull out before the election? I think you’re dreaming, too much money and power at stake.

Now you’re supposed to argue that Imperial America is interferening with Afgani and Iraqi democracy by not pulling out and letting them establish it on their own (with the help of Syria and Iran…) That’s what Amy Goodman would say.

We should get back to science, this is far from it and has little to do with it, this is a great web site and I’d hate for it to go down the toilet because of politics jading anything.

But rather than ranting about the problem, perhaps it’s time for scientifically-oriented people to work on solutions. Personally, I’ve become involved in Howard Dean‘s campaign; I was out on our local streets last week getting petition signatures for our state, and I’m one of the moderators of the “Science and Technology” topic at the Dean Issues Forum – the blog over at Scientists for Dean is pretty active too. Come check it out, if you’re at all interested in defeating “Dubya”.

And now I need to spend a bit of time thinking about an interesting suggestion from gypsysoul…