Fox News doesn't support propoganda!

[dross]

As a journalism major, a couple of classes I took spent a week or two on 'framing' a story or narrative (propaganda). I'd wager the pundits and journalists who bless our airwaves are at least as well versed or moreso than I am, and certainly get paid big bucks to do it.
I wish the pundit worship in this country would just stop. Nearly all (left or right) serve as Judas Goats for the status quo (which is killing us).
We need objective REAL journalism without the biased blather. I don't need my personal biases reinforced by pundits, just the straight story, please. Just because someone's opinion piece tickles my ear, that doesn't make it true or 'balanced' or anything of the sort. Modern 'journalism' is ratings based, so now there's a station for the Archie Bunkers as well as the Meatheads. It does not serve us well. In fact it divides and weakens us as a nation. It's just a game of good cop/bad cop really.

I really miss the old deadpan Walter Cronkite days, although I'm sure that was all filtered through somebody's buttcrack too.

Cronkite is a great example of the most insidious kind of bias. He did deliver deadpan, but he also covered stories as a way to advance his beliefs. He was responsible for reporting the Tet Offensive - a huge American victory - as a defeat, which many believe hastened our leaving Vietnam.

 

[A5guy]

Cronkite is a great example of the most insidious kind of bias. He did deliver deadpan, but he also covered stories as a way to advance his beliefs. He was responsible for reporting the Tet Offensive - a huge American victory - as a defeat, which many believe hastened our leaving Vietnam.

I agree he shouldn't have done that. Editorial asides like that were pretty much unheard of at that time, and he sadly broke the mold of professional broadcast journalism right there. He became a 'pundit' in doing that, rather than a journalist.

 

[IncendiaryGunner]

I think you would be hard pressed to find a single day in the last year when either side did not throw bias into a newscast.

I think it is nearly impossible to report news without any bias... but every station with obvious political alignments claiming they do not put political spin on their newscasts is laughable.

Fox news broadcasts how many hours of news a day?

MSNBC and the likes are no better though...

 

[A5guy]

I think you would be hard pressed to find a single day in the last year when either side did not throw bias into a newscast.

I think it is nearly impossible to report news without any bias... but every station with obvious political alignments claiming they do not put political spin on their newscasts is laughable.

Fox news broadcasts how many hours of news a day?

MSNBC and the likes are no better though...

The bias SHOULD be removed from the actual hard news. Used to be you'd get up on Sunday morning to watch Meet the Press or Face the Nation and that would be about the only place you'd get the editorial stuff, rather than intertwined with the hard news.
Even in the early 80's when I wrote for our goober school newspaper the teachers were clear- "Look- nobody gives a RIP what your opinion of the story is, it's the 5 W's (who, what, where, when, and why), and that's it. Everything else is relegated to the editorial page or get's edited out."

 

[dross]

The bias SHOULD be removed from the actual hard news. Used to be you'd get up on Sunday morning to watch Meet the Press or Face the Nation and that would be about the only place you'd get the editorial stuff, rather than intertwined with the hard news.
Even in the early 80's when I wrote for our goober school newspaper the teachers were clear- "Look- nobody gives a RIP what your opinion of the story is, it's the 5 W's (who, what, where, when, and why), and that's it. Everything else is relegated to the editorial page or get's edited out."

A good friend of mine who is now a teacher was a journalism major. She wrote for the Kansas City Star, and then for a paper in Washington State. I used to read her stuff online and I loved the way she wrote. I could rarely find bias in her writing except occasionally you could tell she wrote some things because they were accepted in her world that she didn't even know weren't things everyone believes.

Anyway, she got out of the business. Her editors didn't ever tell her to put her opinion in her stories, but they always wanted her to "liven it up" and "make it come alive." This violated her journalistic principles because the way that showed up in other people's writing was as bias.

And it's not so much that journalists are purely out to advance an agenda (though unfortunately, you can tell from reading some of the best writers carefully they ARE doing that quite consciously) it's that the average journalist doesn't run in circles with people who have guns, and who have a different point of view. They really truly think they're in the middle.

As Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker famously said: "Nixon won!? How? I don't know a single person who voted for him!"

 

[IncendiaryGunner]

I think it would be fair to say that it is impossible to remove all bias from a story - and that some journalists do not realize they are adding bias.

The difference, is when the bulk of a newscast puts a strong political slant on every story they do, and strong political opinions are used to emphasize key points of stories when they are not needed to report them. Sometimes, it almost seems like the big players go even farther than that, and specifically pick stories to run (or ignore others) to put slant on.

I do not need news sources cherry picking stories to tell my why a piece of legislation is so important... or deciding when protests are worthy and when others are not. I would like them to show up, and tell me what happened.

I think the gay marriage marches in DC mentioned earlier, contrasting the Tea Party protests are a good example... Tea Party protests were shown in a good light on Fox news, while many of the MSNBC broadcasts focused on only the negatives (when they were not ignoring them). When people protested in DC over gay marriage, Fox for some reason was not present... hrm.. Thousands of people... politically motivated march on DC... Not newsworthy... hrmm....

 

[Garb]

I think the gay marriage marches in DC mentioned earlier, contrasting the Tea Party protests are a good example... Tea Party protests were shown in a good light on Fox news, while many of the MSNBC broadcasts focused on only the negatives (when they were not ignoring them). When people protested in DC over gay marriage, Fox for some reason was not present... hrm.. Thousands of people... politically motivated march on DC... Not newsworthy... hrmm....

I didn't even know there was a gay marriage march in DC. I still live at home (college student, not a bum ) and my parents pretty much only watch Fox, and very rarely, CNN. I'll watch other stuff when I'm at my fiance's apartment, at least until she starts complaining about it lol... but anyways, this just proves my point. Fox news watchers might not see that there is just as big and passionate of a group in the gay rights movement as there is in the Tea Party. One thing I have learned. There are A LOT more gay people hanging around this country then I thought.

 

[rambone]

Fox News really lost me. They speak of the constitution and small government, but don't apply those principles across the board. They have their sacred government cows to protect. They appear to speak the truth to win people's trust, then at pivotal moments, inject pro-government tripe into their viewers. This confusing and contradictory belief system is passed along to observers as "conservatism."

Sure, they talk of non-intrusive government. Yet it is imperative to keep the Government from "allowing" gay couples to marry and share the same privileges as other couples. They have no problem telling certain groups that they can't build a mosque on their own private property. I've seen that windbag Bill O'RLY cover a story about a 60-year-old woman giving birth, and his commentary was that the Federal Government should impose age restrictions on getting pregnant. Keep your authoritarian utopia, Bill.

Sure, they speak of fiscal responsibility. Yet they somehow adamantly support the War on Drugs, which costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It imprisons millions of nonviolent people, stomps on ALL of our privacy and rights, encourages oppressive law enforcement techniques, gets innocent citizens/police killed in paramilitary SWAT raids, has all the flaws of alcohol prohibition, enables drug cartels.... What is conservative about that??? The answer is either "nothing" or "everything," depending on your definition of conservatism.

Sure, they fight socialized medicine. Where were they when Bush was expanding government run medicine? Medicare Part D, anyone? Where was the outcry? Way to stand up for your principles, hypocrites. Way to rally conservatives to stop an expansion of government. Ditto on No Child Left Behind.

Sure, they don't like "RINOs." What about GWB? You'd be hard pressed to find them give Bush a hard time about much of anything. When asked, Sean Hannity emphatically said that the country was BETTER OFF after 8 years of Bush. Give me a break. Record spending levels, brand new agencies.... FOX NEWS HERO.

Sure, they preach about "small government." Do they mean it? When is the last time you've heard them call for abolishing an entire agency? It was a mainstream "conservative" tenet 50 years ago to call for abolishing the Federal Reserve. They could be popularizing the idea of ending the Fed, the TSA, the DOE, and any number or other agencies. Have some guts!!

Fox News does everything in their power to keep people in this baloney mindset of "Left versus Right." You are supposed to pick a side and then defend them even when they betray the constitution themselves. The Left-Right paradigm is a lie and a hoax. If either of the two sides got 100% of what they wanted, our liberty would be destroyed. I don't want the socialized services of "the Left", and I don't want the invasive social controls of "the Right." I don't want a Welfare State and I don't want a Police State. I don't want the Democrat's War on Poverty and I don't want the Republican's War on Terror.

Fox News jumps at every chance to keep people wound up and paranoid about "certain cultures." In effect it keeps their viewers scared little sheep who can justify giving away their freedom to the police & TSA. Its going to be a lot harder to justify their Statist agenda if people aren't scared for their safety. Keep em scared, and they'll go along with x-rays, DNA-harvesting, bag searches, wiretaps, spying on citizens, checkpoints, and every other aspect of their totalitarian wet dream. Fox openly supports the ******* PATRIOT ACT, for crying out loud.

Fox News disparages libertarian thinkers at every possible opportunity. Libertarians as a group are lumped in with "birthers," "truthers," "conspiracy theorists," and every other unpopular viewpoint. The majority of Fox News watchers usually don't even know what a libertarian is, aside from associating the word with a third party that they definitely should never ever consider voting for.

Lets talk about Ron Paul. Fox News HATES Ron Paul, a guy who actually walks the walk about the constitution and small government. They keep him hidden from view as much as possible. A non-stop Fox News watcher during the 2008 election would have never even heard his name mentioned as a potential candidate. When they do mention him, they laugh him off as not serious or not credible. When he won the CPAC poll this year, they doctored the clip and spliced in video of a previous convention to make it look as if Ron Paul was being booed. Give me a break.

Fox News may be an alternative to MSNBC and CNN, but it is still exists in order to keep people wrapped up in the cozy arms of the Government. I shut off my brain-washing box a few years ago.

 

[Garb]

Well... that settles that lol.

 

[turnandshoot4]

Fox News jumps at every chance to keep people wound up and paranoid about "certain cultures."

Found this a little funny. Mandatory vaccine right there. Every one of your stories is a "chance to keep people wound up" about something.

I enjoyed your jeep thread. ALOT.

BTW, good post above I just found this part funny.

 

[rambone]

Found this a little funny. Mandatory vaccine right there. Every one of your stories is a "chance to keep people wound up" about something.

I think the assertion that the graphic was making, was that Fox News presented vaccines in a way that made people think that they were necessary and even required. The Swine Flu season was when my sister had her seizure and I really got up to speed on the vaccine debate. During that time, Fox News never missed a chance to talk about the deadly pandemic that was coming or to emphasize that the shots were in high demand and short supply. In typical fashion, they also conveniently leave out the fact that medical/religious/other exemptions are available for school children (for now...).

If they cared about our rights they would tell us when they are being assaulted and destroyed (see here). Instead of giving people real information, they spin up the on-air ad campaign on behalf of their corporate sponsors, and help them sell drugs to the frenzied public, worried about some hyped-up flu.

Do I want people to get wound up about their rights? Do bears ***t in the woods??

 

[turnandshoot4]

I was drawing a comparison of the two. THEY want people to get worried about some hyped-up flu, YOU want people to get worried about some hyped up vaccine.

They might have two different messages but they are delivered in the same manner.

Did I mention I liked your jeep thread?

 

[Blue Tile Spook]

I read news written by journalists in the US, UK and Israel. I can read a news story encompassing one single event and read three different slants on it.

I don't get my news from a sole source. I read everything I can get my hands on and then form my opinions after some critical thinking.

 

[windellmc]

The whole myth of unbiased news sources came about as a way for the progressives to push their agenda. It was an attempt to push a certain bias and agenda by convincing people that point of view was actually center.

Prior to "unbiased" news media the individual papers clearly stated their bias up front. That is why there are still a few newspapers around with the name Democrat or Republican in the the newspaper name.

I think Fox represents a true moderate viewpoint to somewhat left of moderate. Do not underestimate the desire of Rupert Murdoch to make money and Fox's position is one that will drive the most viewership. Most everything else ranges from solidly on the left (ABC) all the way to the crazy left (MSNBC).

At this point the Democratic party is mix of communists and fascists (not much difference in these two groups). The Republican is a mix of fascists, libertarians, and constitutionalists. Unfortunately there are not enough libertarians and constitutionalists in the Republican party.

Before anyone gets too excited about my claim one party consists of supposedly diametrically opposed viewpoints remember that fascists want gov't control of privately owned industry and communists want gov't control of gov't owned industry. Both want to control individual rights and exert totalitarian control of the people. There is little difference other than the fact that fascism results in a healthier economy due to the illusion of business freedom. This is essentially what China has become and the US is very far down this path as well.

 

[Garb]

The whole myth of unbiased news sources came about as a way for the progressives to push their agenda. It was an attempt to push a certain bias and agenda by convincing people that point of view was actually center.

Prior to "unbiased" news media the individual papers clearly stated their bias up front. That is why there are still a few newspapers around with the name Democrat or Republican in the the newspaper name.

I think Fox represents a true moderate viewpoint to somewhat left of moderate. Do not underestimate the desire of Rupert Murdoch to make money and Fox's position is one that will drive the most viewership. Most everything else ranges from solidly on the left (ABC) all the way to the crazy left (MSNBC).



At this point the Democratic party is mix of communists and fascists (not much difference in these two groups). The Republican is a mix of fascists, libertarians, and constitutionalists. Unfortunately there are not enough libertarians and constitutionalists in the Republican party.

Before anyone gets too excited about my claim one party consists of supposedly diametrically opposed viewpoints remember that fascists want gov't control of privately owned industry and communists want gov't control of gov't owned industry. Both want to control individual rights and exert totalitarian control of the people. There is little difference other than the fact that fascism results in a healthier economy due to the illusion of business freedom. This is essentially what China has become and the US is very far down this path as well.

I definitely agree about the whole "non-biased" crap. People actually think the government is unbiased. Holy crap, could it be that the government has a pro-government bias?

I also very much agree with the part about fascism vs. communism. I love it when people tell me the "free market" has failed. They think I'm nuts when I ask them "What free market are you talking about?"