Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(11-26-2020, 06:58 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 26-Nov-2020 World View: News sources

(11-26-2020, 01:22 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   Are there objective means of determining the credibility of media?
>   Yes.

>  

>   Yes. At the top are such entities as the AP wires and Reuters,
>   news often reported in a 'blitz' style in which reporters relate
>   what they see or transmit official statements. This is almost
>   stenographic reporting which says nothing more than the story at
>   hand. This is minimal news, news at its purest. Putting bias into
>   such reports is practically impossible because the reporter has
>   little time in which to analyze or spin what he* gets. This is no
>   zone for any crusading journalist out to change the world. There
>   is no possibility of bias other than from cited sources.

First, this really isn't true.  Yes, AP and Reuters write blitz
articles, but most of their articles are analytical.  And you can
always slant any article by selecting what facts to include.  So my
experience is that AP stories include mostly "left-wing facts," while
I've found that Reuters stories are more balanced in their selection
of facts.

Everyone has values, and those include political and moral positions. High Times is obviously pro-drug. I hate drugs, so I am unlikely to looks sympathetically upon High Times as a news source. It's obvious that as an original wire that TASS was in Soviet times would have an obvious bias. Would it have been useful? Of course -- to the extent that other reporting lacked access. Of course at some point it was questionable whether the Soviet Union was revolutionary or reactionary. Revolutionary ideologies that change little obviously go stale... and reactionary. 
his chart shows few foreign sources: the BBC is the only one aside from the Daily Mail (there is always a better source than that tabloid), and it is shown as left-of-center by American standards. Maybe this changes after Joe Biden supplants Donald Trump. AFP, Deutsche Welle, and NHK are not shown.

The center is where the political median lies, even if that median is largely an average between two polarized distributions of the people.    

OK... a first article on the topic by the AP or Reuters  

Quote:The chart you've posted is far from objective.  It's a piece of garbage.

Then show yours!

Quote:Let's take Bloomberg for example.  The chart shows Bloomberg as the pinnacle
of neutrality.  That's ridiculous.  Anyone who watches Bloomberg TV knows
that isn't true.

It seems to be close enough. It is far closer to neutral than One America News or FoX News.   

Quote:It's even worse than that.  Mike Bloomberg is a committed Democrat and has
donated tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats, and is probably
still donating.  When Bloomberg was running for president, BB announced
a corporate policy of investigating and attacking Trump, but not doing
investigating any Democrat candidates.  And believe me, their bias is
obvious if you listen to them, or read their news stories.

If one investigated Obama one found nothing shady. Donald Trump has a record in business (OK, Obama has never been a profit-and-loss businessman, but that is not good preparation for politics except to be a stooge of ideologues if one isn't a right-wing ideologue oneself because businesses and government have very different purposes and objectives), and his relationships with contractors, suppliers, and others are open to scrutiny. This is not to say that highly-successful entrepreneurs have as much dirt on them. Most want nothing to do with Mafia-like organizations. So if someone tries to investigate Warren Buffett or Bill Gates one finds no juicy stories. Trump has a reputation for extensive adultery... and the stories are salacious. Yes, I know about John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and I am not going to excuse them. 

Good people do not get cited on tape saying "I grab 'em by their (kitty-cats)".  Good people would find porn stars repugnant instead of enticing.

Good people also were not Soviet assets in the 1970's. They are careful to avoid making judgments of alleged offenders (like the supposed attackers of the Central Park jogger) before the courts of law do, let alone suggesting a sentence before a verdict is found. In my experience, jury verdicts in civil and criminal courts are capricious enough to defy personal judgment. Maybe foreign leaders who have much death associated with them (like Bashir Assad) entice one to make judgments. In the past I once said that there was nothing wrong with Saddam Hussein, and earlier Idi Amin, that a well-tied rope and a seven-foot rope wouldn't solve.  But death emanates from such people. 

I have been burned. I thought that OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife and Ron Goldman -- and that Scott Peterson probably did not murder his wife.  We have jury trials for good reason. 

Donald Trump is a slimy person. He's not even a good businessman. They fellow lost money in the operation of a casino, dammit!  His only successes in business are as a landlord in a high-value area (New York City as opposed to Detroit -- an NYC landlord has tenants bidding to keep renting the cash cows that the landlords own, while landlords in Detroit struggle for every penny that they get) and some really-awful reality TV that I could never tolerate. When it comes to television, H. L. Mencken said that one can never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public. (Trump's taste in decorating his skyscrapers is awful. I have my idea of what constitutes good taste: restraint and sophistication. I see bad taste as evidence of either limited learning or poor character. Limited learning explains many farm laborers.

Quote:And this is just one example.  The chart is ridiculous.  It shows CNN
as neutral, which is a joke, but Fox News as hyper-partisan
conservative, despite the fact that it's far more balanced.  The whole
chart is a ridiculous joke.

The chart suggests that CNN skews definitely liberal and that it isn't a particularly good source for news. FoX News is widely known to skew Right in its reporting. I have been priced out of cable TV lately, but I recall that at one time its political stories were often placed between crime stories. Get angry, folks! That is the idea! Although some of FoX News' journalists are objective enough (Chris Wallace) these are the people to whom FoX News turns when it  can no longer give a right-wing spin on a story, as after Presidential elections of 2008, 2012, and 2020. FoX News is definitely to the right of the American mainstream.  

Quote:There's one more dimension not shown on the chart -- purposeful
censorship, which goes beyond simple ideological bias.  Bloomberg has
a stated policy of censoring news critical of Democrats, but CNN,
MSNBC, NYT, WaPost etc.  are the same.  Because of Stalinist
censorship, readers of these sources know nothing about antifa-blm
looting, burning down cities, and violent attacks on Trump supporters.
They know nothing about the growing support among blacks and Latinos
for Republicans.  FNC covers these stories and also the stories you
see on CNN and MSNBC.  That's what "fair and balanced" means.

Liberal media sacrificed Governor Rod Blagojevich,  Senator Al Franken, Representative William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Liberal media showed looting at BLM/Antifa demonstrations and called it looting or violence. People who commit violent acts at what are intended to be peaceful demonstrations are easy people to sacrifice. 

The drift of African-Americans toward the GOP is slight... and for good reason. Blacks in professions are more likely than whites to be in government employment. Even if blacks own businesses, those are most likely to involve fellow blacks, often poor ones using government aid of some kind (Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, Section 8 housing subsidies, legal aid). Although white people doing similarly well are much more to the Right they are less likely to have clients getting government aid and are more concerned with taxes than an income stream. If one's income stream comes significantly from the government, then one is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds one. If one's income comes from other means than the government, then one has more concern about taxes as a drain of income than as a source of income. Blacks are increasingly finding themselves in private employment not related directly to government spending, so that can explain the drift. 

With Hispanics, much the same can be said of Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans. With Cuban-Americans and now Venezuelan-Americans, Trump did extremely well by GOP standards, at least in Florida, by smearing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for being sympathetic to the Marxist socialism in Cuba and Venezuela. Cuban-Americans did drift toward Obama as he promised better diplomatic relations with the Castro regime and making visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans easier. I have not seen the Trump ads directed at Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans, but I did see the canard "Joe Biden es por el Chavecismo". It was introduced late. Trump has been extremely confrontational toward the Commie regime in Cuba and the near-Commie regime in Venezuela. 

I wonder if he was planning aggression... we will never know.       

Quote:So in the chart you've posted, Fox News and Fox Business Network should be
at the top center, and most of the others should be moved waaaaayyyy over
to the left.  And there should be another column to the left of "Most extreme
liberal," and it should say, "Full on left-wing Stalinist censorship of the
news."

The political center is where it is for good reason. Pinochet was clearly on the Right, and Fidel Castro was clearly on the Left. I look at the electoral results of the last few Presidential elections, and even if I see a bimodal distribution (America does not have much of a political center) there is a position in between those distributions FoX News Channel is very much on the Right for its presentation of news, and MSNBC is much on the Left for its presentation of the news. MSNBC is of course much more analysis than its usual sources (NBC News, of course; the New York Times and the Washington Post). FoX News does original reporting, but much less than does ABC, CBS, or NBC News, or for that matter the BBC, PBS, or NPR. But tell people that you saw the story on FoX News, and even if it is true, you might be asked for some other source. 

Story selection is important. It can set the mood and thus reception by the audience, which is very important in presentation of news.    

Quote:So your claim about an "objective means of determining the credibility
of media?"  is total bullshit, and the chart that you posted is a
total piece of left-wing crap.

(11-26-2020, 01:22 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   So what is the fault of such reporting? If you can do your own
>   thinking, you can do your own analysis.

I think the mainstream media censorship is a disaster.  You're
delighted and thrilled by it, of course, since the censorship is far
left, but I can assure you that one day you'll regret it.  These
things always turn out very badly.

All media select stories. All media decide at some point whether sources are reliable or otherwise. (As an example, news sources from authoritarian regimes such as China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea are suspect). All media have filler, and if the filler is stories of violent crime, such tends to prepare people for an authoritarian slant on a story.

Quote:First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

by Martin Niemöller

First the German media excluded Jews at the behest of Hitler while the egregious Der Stürmer accused Jews of horrible crimes, including the absurd, impossible, and discredited (such as the infamous Blood Libel, debunked centuries ago by the Roman Catholic Church) before their means of escape are no more. Nothing good could be said of Jews, and any slander of them would be beyond challenge. Its editor Julius Streicher eventually called for the extermination of Jews in his vile rag during the war... Silence people, take away their opportunities, isolate them, and vilify them at every turn... and then a tyrannical regime can do what it wants. We all know the modus operandi of the Third Reich.