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It is amazing that fox news can get away with such an amazing amount of mendacity and still function. I wonder how long a similar station broadcasting from a different point of view would last on the air waves.
Liberal Viewer catches Faux News in yet another bald faced lie.
People still cling to the idea that we have a liberal news bias in the media – Let’s look to the problem of global warming in an example from Media Lens.
“[…] Equally disturbing is the variation in media performance across the globe. A wide-ranging Reuters study on the prevalence of climate scepticism in the world’s media – Poles Apart – The international reporting of climate scepticism – focused on newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and the USA. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010 (a period that included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and ‘Climategate’). Remarkably, the study concluded that climate scepticism is ‘predominantly an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon’, found most frequently in US and British newspapers:
‘In general the UK and the US print media quoted or mentioned significantly more sceptical voices than the other four countries. Together they represented more than 80% of the times such voices were quoted across all six countries.’
The study concluded:
‘In general, the data suggests a strong correspondence between the perspective of a newspaper and the prevalence of sceptical voices within it, particularly in the opinion pages. By most measures (but not all), the more right-leaning tend to have more such voices, the left-leaning less.’
But in all ten UK newspapers studied, there was an increase ‘both in the absolute numbers of articles with sceptical voices in them and the percentage of articles with sceptical voices in them’.
And so we find that Britain and the US – the two countries responding most aggressively to alleged ‘threats’ to human security in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – are also the two countries least interested in responding to the very real threat of climate change.”
Could it be that because we are actually securing access to fossil sources that we’re not really focusing on the downside of their use?
“As the Reuters study suggests, media reporting is heavily influenced by editorial stance which, in turn, is heavily influenced by commercial interests. In October, the former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British press the truth about about the UK’s newsroom culture:
‘In approximately 900 newspaper bylines I can probably count on fingers and toes the times I felt I was genuinely telling the truth, yet only a similar number could be classed as outright lies. This is because as much as the skill of a journalist today is about finding facts, it is also, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, about knowing what facts to ignore. The job is about making the facts fit the story, because the story is almost pre-defined.
‘Laid out before you is a canon of ideologically and commercially driven narratives that must be adhered to. The newspaper appoints itself moral arbiter, and it is your job to stamp their worldview on all the journalism you do… The ideological imperative comes before the journalistic one – drugs are always bad, British justice is always soft.’
Peppiatt noted:
‘Tabloid newsrooms are often bullying and aggressive environments, in which dissent is simply not tolerated. It is difficult to stand up and walk out the door with a mortgage to pay, knowing another opportunity is unlikely to be waiting beyond.’
The issue that is not being discussed by Leveson is the extent to which these observations generalise to the ‘quality’ corporate media, and why. By contrast, in soft-pedalling the level of interference from owners and advertisers, the Guardian’s Nick Davies wrote:
‘Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.’ (Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2008, p.22)
Compare this with corporate escapee Peppiatt’s unfettered conclusion:
‘Capitalism is trampling on journalism.’
I happen to agree with this statement. The answer – I suggest more outlets like Al-Jazeera the BBC and the CBC that, although still heavily influenced by corporate and government pressure, they can occasionally still report the truth of matters.
How many ‘wtf’ moments are republican political candidates allowed before being branded too stupid to breathe? Michelle Bachmann must be getting super close to the limit by now. I’m not really sure what to do with this level of intellectual bankruptcy on her behalf. Coupled with the puerile servitude of fox news, its almost too much to stomach in one sitting. It is chilling to see that this level of incompetence is allowed anywhere near a position of political power.
Making stuff up on during a televised debate and advocating for torture are apparently okay, small bumps in the road on the campaign road I guess.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is an integral part of Canadian culture. Canada’s national broadcaster helps bring the nation together and provide a common media space for Canadians to interact and share their ideas together. Canadians are so very lucky to have a public broadcaster to provide a voice of relative sanity in the cluttered media smorgasbord being offered today. I listen to CBC radio and Radio Canada almost exclusively and I am always thankful for their commercial free broadcasts.
Congratulations CBC on 75 years of public broadcasting, lets hope that we have at least 75 more to come.
Liberal viewer does his usual exemplary job of describing the media. Faux News never fails to deliver when it comes to making sure that the interests of the people are marginalized and put forth in the worst possible light. The OWS movement has brought new life into the economic debate in the US opening new avenues of debate and discussion that were previously off-limits.
Media Lens does fantastic, if grim work, in describing the system we live in. We are insulated from other narratives other ideas, other peoples sufferings. How can a public become informed with no other sources to cross reference? You cannot triangulate with only one point. Media Lens, Al-Jazeera and other alternative news sources provide those points for those who have the resources to find out.
The Statistics of Western State Terror (click title for link to full article)
“Ten years later, the violent consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan are truly appalling. A Stop the War video, ‘What is the true cost of the Afghanistan war?’ details some of the appalling statistics:
9,300 Afghan civilians have been killed by International Security Assistance Forces, i.e. Nato.
380 British soldiers are dead.
£18 billion of UK taxpayer’s money has been spent.
The war is costing Britain £12 million per day. The same amount could employ 100,000 nurses (at £21,000 annually) and 150,000 care workers (£15,000).
A study by Brown University in the United States estimates an unimaginable combined sum of up to $4 trillion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, ‘cautious estimates’ of the total civilian death toll exceed 40,000 people, of which:
25.6% killed by ISAF forces.
15.4% killed by anti-government forces.
60% killed by poverty, disease and starvation.
In particular, the horrendous killing of Afghan children in US air strikes and night raids gets scant coverage, if any, before the Western media swiftly looks away.
There are now three million refugees from Afghanistan: 30.7% of the world’s total, exceeding the figures of 16.9% from Iraq, 7.7% from Somalia and 4.8% from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
74% of the British public want the occupation to end either ‘immediately’ or ‘soon’.
Very little of this reality made it into the largely uncritical coverage of the ten-year anniversary of the West’s aggression against Afghanistan.
In the conclusion to a new report for Stop the War, David Swanson provides a stunning example of the media’s systematic bias:
‘On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported “the deadliest day of the war” because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.
‘But compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.’
But the deaths of Afghan children, and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, are seemingly of little consequence for most Western journalists who would rather focus on the ‘progress’ and ‘achievements’ of the Nato ‘campaign’. “
Two talk shows, two very different levels of discourse.
The Late Late Show from Ireland.
Bill Mahr on HBO.
Draw your own conclusions, but one can see why one should be worried about the state of affairs on this side of the pond.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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