Is all news media biased...

micky wrote: SteveG wrote: And this is a serious problem. Right wingers get all of their news from these kinds of hacks and have lost touch with reality. It's the only logical explanation for a Trump Presidency, IMHO. ahhh  no you can't blame the bat sh*t crazies..ie.. right wingers  they've always been around but not in enough numbers to win on their own. It is the middle you can blame for Trump... where we as a nation failed..and sent ever founding father spinning in his grave.. thus proving why they distrusted the gen. pop..... is when the middle got stupid....

Correct, you can't blame the wingnuts (there aren't enough of them to blame, as you point out)--  it was Pete and Becky up in Idaho with their two kids and two dogs.   And it is largely why the Electorals were established, concern over mob-rule.   Not sure about what the Founders would think.   In the words of a departing Barack Obama: "That's how it works."

All news sources were reporting that Hillary was going to win, seems most of the world believed these news reports.

HackettFan wrote: dr wu23 wrote: I think the idea that the news is biased is exaggerated. If one simply reports an event....whatever the event....where's the bias ? I can see how the opinion pieces like those from O'Riley and Hannity are biased but not just general reporting. There's always a bias. Simply choosing what is newsworthy is a bias. The very justifications one uses to arrive the decision of newsworthiness are definitive of a bias. They may be sound, reasonable, uncontroversial and unobjectionable decisions, but they are still the very essence of bias. For instance, covering crime betrays a law and order bias. Covering downtown development projects betrays a commercial and corporate bias. Covering people who are put out of their homes by eminent domain betrays a bias that values the interests of the less advantaged. The representation is necessarily biased. Simply deciding what appears on camera betrays a bias. There is no objective way of representing anything, unless one means to say unslanted or impartial, but this is not to the same as unbiased. Bias isn't necessarily bad. What is bad is when the biases are not openly acknowledged.

timothy leary wrote: micky wrote: it was the electoral college the failed the nation in the end I suppose hahah.. the very system put in place a safeguard for the just the thing the Founding Fathers feared.. and took 250 years to actually do.. when the American voter showed the ignorance, lack of thought, and lack of respect they owed to the right to vote.  Seriously.. anyone care to disagree... the American voter elected someone with no experience, no temperment, someone who is (debatably? come on!!!) racist and misogynst who.. oh yeah.. just paid out milions for bilking his fellow Americans in a business scam.. and  OH YEAH... had very serious unresolved (lack of tax returns) questions about his ties to Russia. Not f**king Italy.. but Russia who are not led by a warm and fuzzy friendly benevolent  leader. While I agree with all this perhaps the democrats should not have run such a deeply flawed candidate.

dr wu23 wrote: HackettFan wrote: dr wu23 wrote: I think the idea that the news is biased is exaggerated. If one simply reports an event....whatever the event....where's the bias ? I can see how the opinion pieces like those from O'Riley and Hannity are biased but not just general reporting. There's always a bias. Simply choosing what is newsworthy is a bias. The very justifications one uses to arrive the decision of newsworthiness are definitive of a bias. They may be sound, reasonable, uncontroversial and unobjectionable decisions, but they are still the very essence of bias. For instance, covering crime betrays a law and order bias. Covering downtown development projects betrays a commercial and corporate bias. Covering people who are put out of their homes by eminent domain betrays a bias that values the interests of the less advantaged. The representation is necessarily biased. Simply deciding what appears on camera betrays a bias. There is no objective way of representing anything, unless one means to say unslanted or impartial, but this is not to the same as unbiased. Bias isn't necessarily bad. What is bad is when the biases are not openly acknowledged. By that definition  then everything we do in life is bias so the word becomes meaningless for the most part. I don't think that is what people mean by bias when they refer to the news bias....at least I don't. IMHO it's not bias to simply pick an article piece to report....if you judge in that manner then everything is bias in life so the word becomes useless. IMHO that's over analyzing the use of bias. The bias for me comes in when a left or right slant is put on that reporting ...then that is obvious to us.

I over analyze everything, true, though this is actually not my analysis, but what I was taught in college writing classes a long long time ago. And it gets down not just to the choice of subject-matter but the way it's portrayed. Yes, there is bias in everything. That only makes it useless if you want to say 'X is biased' without explaining how. That is the crux of the matter. How are things biased? When the media picked on Al Gore about inventing the internet (which he actually had a part in legislatively), I thought they were biased, but that doesn't say enough. It wasn't a conservative bias. It was a bias favoring clarity of expression, a bias toward thoughts packaged in short snippets, and a bias toward sensationalizing some of those snippets as a hook to get people to watch. Trump made effective use of these biases when they worked in his favor, and then complained bitterly, playing himself out as a maligned underdog when they didn't. The media's bias was no more liberal with Trump than it was conservative with Gore. Using bias only as left or right slant is a red herring. Many people intuit bias of some vague sort in the mainstream media and then misattribute it to a bias toward whatever boogeyman political philosophy is the opposite of theirs.

The right is far worse about this than the left, imo. I had to throw that in.



Edited by HackettFan - March 09 2017 at 14:54

^CNN likes intrigue in a wonkish way. They like to be organized around specific issues that are current, and they expect government to be organized and on message. They are ready to pounce if it is not, or sometimes just outwardly incredulous and mystified if it is not. This little segment illustrates some of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WTZBvrMKbU0

The CNN Host gets a little exasperated by the Trump person, Amy Kremmer, who thought she should be talking about things other than the charge that Obama(administration's?) alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower. The host objects that they're talking about it because Trump himself brought it up. Later Paul Begala wants to connect the issue up with rigging of the election. The host objects to him also that he should not even go there (apparently because that was too far removed from the current wiretapping charge). Thus, CNN's seeking of discipline in their own agenda leads to a bias leading to outward dismay of the lack of it in the Trump administration. This probably looks like partisan bias to Trump supporters, who see CNN as not letting Trump duck and weave as own "genius" leads him to do. But I think it is really more as I described.

The week night program line-up of MSNBC does have a liberal left-leaning bias. It's more than just that, though. They concentrate on analysis. And they are much more interested in connecting the dots than CNN. CNN wants to find stuff and uncover stuff. MSNBC wants to elaborate on the current events and connect them to patterns of behavior from past events. No one characterizes this more than Rachel Maddow. Her show would never be allowed to run as is on CNN. She conveys very lengthy connect the dots openings in her show that may go on for twenty minutes before a guest even comes on. MSNBC hosts are like scientists with a theory and they want to not just rally the faithful, but educate their audience. It's a bias I approve of and that is why I am quite happy with them.

FOX does have a right wing bias. Unlike MSNBC, they're not much into analysis and not much into educating their audience. They rally the faithful and not a lot more. This is perhaps historically due to the educator role for conservatives being held by various institutes, the KATO Institute and the like (They're speakers are frequently covered beginning to end on C-Span), which had driven the conservative movement up until now (I don't know how that role may be shaping up in the Trump age, though). The left never gave as much over to such think tanks, and I think that is why MSNBC takes on that role of left leaning philosophers.

Sorry. No more. I'm tired now.





Edited by HackettFan - March 09 2017 at 20:41

Would a medium that publishes anything sent to them be considered unbiased? A medium like Nervous Horse™, for example?

In France, opening a newspaper is a political act. They are all biased, from right (Le Figaro) to extreme left (L'Humanite is communist) to christian (La Croix). But we know the bias...