Loopz said:
The media are more like a pack of ambulance-chasing lawyers.
It's all about ratings, ratings, ratings.
What about the entire weeklong Ronald Reagan lovefest?
What about the free ride given to George W. during the 2000 campaign?
What about the incredibly soft-ass coverage of the entire Iraq war?
You cannot deny the effect that corporate consolidation of the media has had.
There isn't objectivity or fairness for either sides...it's simply muckraking.
The sex and sleaze get the coverage, the issues of real public importance gets the shaft. OJ and the Lewinsky affair changed this forever. People don't want real news.
The media puts it's collective finger in the air, tries to determine which way the public winds blow, and then stilts it's coverage in that direction. You can paint the evidence in a way that supports paranoid bias theory for EITHER side. It's all selective memory.
Fox News is the main exception, simply because they CLAIM to be 'Fair And Balanced', when their staff is loaded to the gills with former and current GOP folk.
Say what you will about Fox, but at least their employees and on-air talent isn't working for the Bush campaign or raising funds. This is in stark contrast to CNN which employs both Begala and Carville, both of whom are now advisors to Kerry.
Plus check out the second link, it's a CBS news employee tipping off the Kerry campaign to contact their source for the story to get what they thought to be damaging documents to the Bush campaign.
No red flags popping up?
Regan Love-Fest? A president died, he was an immensely popular president. Landslide victory in '86, won the cold war, left office with incredible approval. That and in general when a President dies, there is a big outpour of media coverage on them. Even Nixon got quite a bit of nice play when he died, and the press
hates Nixon.
Of course none of them shed tears on air like Cronkite did when JFK was killed.
Free ride to GWB in 2000? Like all the stories they drudged up about him being a coke head, an alcoholic, or the initial AWOL charges they tried to bring up back then? They went away because they were easily refuted, just as they are now.
Then there was the proverbial new one he got ripped for saying his favorite person from history was Christ? That set TONS of pieces about how bad he was for office.
Soft-Ass coverage of the war?
Wasn't it ABC Nightline that had an entire hour show where all they just read the names of the soldiers who died in Iraq? Puh-lease on the soft ass coverage angle, we hear nothing of the areas in Iraq that are doing well, having schools and hospitals built, the economy booming, all the great things in the country we're doing, not one of em makes the news. Nope it's just the bad stuff that comes out, none of the good.
I agree the media is far more slanted towards sensationalist headlines, it's what sells papers and increases viewership.
But come on, check out the bias trends here: CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, NY Times, LA Times, and the Washington Post are all heavily biased towards the left.
This would really be in contrast to what?
Fox News, NY Post, conservative talk radio, and The Wall Street Journal. Those are the only major players that have any kind of a national influence, and all of which are no where near as big as the others except really for the Journal and somewhat on Fox.
Hell why do you think Fox is so friggin successful? Their actual "news" reporting is pretty much fair and balanced, but yes when it comes to commentary they have far stronger Conservatives on there than they do lefties. Which is of course the opposite of CNN or MSNBC.
The liberal bias is there, it's just been so entrenched for so many friggin years that now that it's being challenged it's starting to fall.
