Damn, you beat me to the Dept of Interior joke :D

SI

So, uh, what do they do that's bad- other than apparently give tax advice to hookers? Yeah, that's pretty damn bad but doesn't seem to be what you're getting at. I honestly have no idea

SI

read an interesting article in time magazine (latest issue maybe?) yesterday - "Is Glenn Beck bad for America" where it talked about how much $$ Beck has made off of peddling fear (in many cases too it's not even fear that he actually believe in - I think they had one quote in there from him that talked about how he thought Obama had done a good job so far at one point and such). It's all about $$$. Limbaugh, O'Reiley, Olbermann, Beck...it's all about building a "brand" so that they can have TV shows that get good ratings, and write books, and have websites and etc. and rake in the cash. And yes, 3/4 of the people I listed there are on the "right" but it's also an undeniable truth that the those on the right have done a better job on building up those "brands" and stoking the fear (in many cases because of what the fear is, and what the levers they can play on are, as well as the target audience). They don't believe a lot of what they're selling, and all it does is drive the ordinary people further apart and ensure that special interests and big corporations continue to control government and that these commentators on both sides get rich off of promoting divisiveness.

It's entertainment masquerading as news. Unfortunately there's a very large portion of America that views it as just news and since they self-select what they watch/read, it by-and-large reinforces their uni-dimensional views. In the end, what these echo chambers do is serve to erase the ability to critically think. Arguably that's to the detriment of the country as a whole.

True, and if you replaced "entertainment masquerading as news" with "news masquerading as entertainment", I'd think you were talking about the Daily Show. Especially the part about reinforcing their uni-dimensional views and erasing the ability to critically think.

*yawn*

Have you watched the Daily Show since Obama took over? He's been pretty good at pointing out his fuck-ups. Keep carrying the cross, however.

And there's the uni-dimensional view, right on cue.

Daily Show sheep are no better than FoxNews sheep. The only difference is one prefers humor and moral superiority, and the other prefers to be angry. Different paths to the same intolerance of others.

Let's not forget how Al Franken parlayed this into a Senate seat. Both sides have their Limbaugh's...

I wasn't saying that they didn't. I made sure to point that out - while also acknowledging that one side seems to have significantly more of them who are more commercially successful

Have you watched the Daily Show since Obama took over? He's been pretty good at pointing out his fuck-ups. Keep carrying the cross, however.

edit: Incidentally molson, I do see the irony in you accusing others of uni-dimensional, non-critical thinking when you ignore the substance of a post so you an post the bullshit you want to. You used to be a good poster in here who I agreed with most of the time - when did you become so bitter?

I used to never watch the Daily Show during the first six years or so of the Bush administration, it was very bitter and cheap. Now it's become much more interesting to me because it echoes my "They're all fucking morons" belief about media and politics. But hell, I guess that is a uni-dimensional point of view.

Whether or not I agree with you about the Daily Show, the point is perfectly valid. The variety of news and quasi-news sources available to the average American these days (let's not forget websites, ala Drudge or DailyKos) means we can select the viewpoint we want, have our own views reinforced, and call it a day.

No, I don't know how we change this. Either the citizenry wants to be engaged and informed, or they don't. I'd say the evidence is pretty clear that the average American citizen does not.

:confused:

I'm not sure what led you to turn this into a partisan thing. I was quite clear in my initial post that both sides have a place in this. And flere's comment was entirely non-partisan. So I'm not sure what led you to turn around and take a general statement and turn it into a specific comment about one program.

I really wish you hadn't though, as now it is doubtless going to distract from actually discussing the idea and result in more partisan, back-and-forth sniping.

They had a 3 hour discussion on a local KC radio show on a similar topic. The question was where do you go if you just want to get the news without any political bias? I'm not sure they ever did identify a site/news organization that currently does that. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.

i'd argue that if they don't want to be engaged and informed they don't deserve to vote.

course then you'd have to set qualifications of what "engaged and informed" means and how to judge it.

maybe just a simple chart at polling stations like all of those websites have that summarizes each candidates views on all the issues (in the candidates own words) so that people had to look at that before they voted?

it's not perfect, but honestly more and more i'm starting to think this is the way to go, in some form.

And never has in 200+ years.

i agree. i think as far as looking for "news without political bias" my shorthanded way would be to watch the network newscasts (abc, nbc, cbs) - while recognizing that while "decent" they don't tend to be very in-depth or hard-hitting (just generally speaking i can't recall a major network newscast ever speaking poorly of the current administration - in this healthcare debate, after Katrina, anything involving Iraq or Afghanistan, etc.). They don't really have a lot to say, but as far as a general "what's going on" that is good for a quick fix. Note that I'm not speaking about their newsmagazines, but more about their nightly news broadcasts.

You could also read foreign newspapers online - bbc or english-language japanese papers and stuff, but the coverage you get there will tend to be even more spotty. But that takes a lot of work.

Would you just look at the worms all over this floor? Who the hell opened that can??????

:D

me!

see - my views are complicated...i don't fit easily into a box.

i also think that we shouldn't have bilingual classrooms or bilingual schools. at all.

and i'm strongly in favor of "path to citizenship" being the maximum concession to make to all existing illegal immigrants (make them show up somewhere to register or get documents), and deportation for all undocumented illegal immigrants after a specified date.

If you required people to be informed and engaged to vote, then I wonder what % of the voting public would come anywhere close to qualifying.

Democracy is messy as hell.

well fuck em. if they can't make the effort to be informed and engaged then they shouldn't get to vote.

kudos. everything you said...spot on.

This is a probably going to be a controversial thought, but I've often wondered (cue JiMGa) if we wouldn't be better off with an authoritarian system. China, for instance, can accomplish so much without all the political bullshit that stops stuff from happening here in the States.

Of course, I can recognize the downsides of such a system, and that they probably would outweigh the pros, but it's still something I've thought about occasionally.

edit: The main thing would be that in the US politicians will very rarely do anything that is politically unpopular, but often politically unpopular things are the best thing for the country.

Yeah, check out the Oklahoma HS students' results after being given an immigration test.

September 2009 Volume 16 Number 9 - Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

Dola,

What I find to be extremely odd is that more students know what the Bill of Rights are than who our first President was? Not that an overwhelming amount knew the Bill of Rights...but still...how do they NOT KNOW the first Pres?

It blogs the mind that anyone in this country could not know who the first president is. I just cannot understand that.

Democracy is only a recent invention in this country. Keep that in mind. There used to be rules about who could and could not vote.

There are still rules.

It wasn't so long ago that we had such a system, essentially, in teh original days of the country. People would vote for their local state legislatures. Those legislatures would vote for the senators. The electoral college elected the president, and often the Congress would be the final arbitrator of that. The culture was such that for the most part the "educated and informed" made all the decisions for the rest. The things you talk about are the things the founding fathers were concerned about, and made a system designed to avoid having the mass of people run things.

It blogs my mind too. Who hasn't heard of Benjamin Franklin? Sheesh.

Hey that sounds pretty good. Now is there a way we can do this without using any of the current Congresspeople? ;)

Why do you think better informed would equal better outcomes?

Have you been to China? It's got it's good points, but I sure as hell would rather live here than there.

Yes, you must be 18 and a citizen. Am I missing any? Not a felon maybe?

As pointed out above though it used to be a far smaller percentage of the populace that could vote.

Daily Show isn't a news show. It's a comedy show. It would be like calling The Onion a newspaper. The show is on the same channel as South Park.

Cable news networks give the image that they are trusted news sources. Watch the commercials that play during O'Reilly and Olbermann. "Most Trusted Name in News", "Fair and Balanced". The Daily Show is satire and makes no effort to look like a legitimate news agency. These pundits act as journalists and treat their shows as respected news outlets.

It's akin to comparing National Review or The Nation to The Onion.

I think Bloomberg is probably the best for it, although most would find it boring and it's not in a ton of homes.

I know that's the line, but I don't buy it, and yes I've seen the show.

It's a humorous news commentary show. They do what the do well, and they're successful. And no matter what you want to call them, it is a huge source of news for people in their 20s, and it indoctrinate them into a specific way of thinking, by selling the drug of moral superiority. And the show, individually, isn't as powerful as say, Rush Limbaugh, but its just reflective of that kind of young liberal youth culture in the U.S. right now. We're smart, you're a moron. We're wonderful and moral, you're evil. We want to help the world, you want to destroy it (and we need to save it from you). It's just an example of the mindset that just drives me crazy and that I really didn't see a lot of until I moved to a super-liberal city. That kind of poisoned me, and now I see that smugness everywhere, and I just hate how nobody respects anyone's opinion anymore - the goal, taught by these types of shows, isn't to disagree, it's to invalidate their opinion and the actual people on the other side as unworthy. That's the strategy - don't make it about the issue, make it about their underlying flaws as people that make their opinion not worthy. They're racists, they want to control your lives, they're backwards, they're uneducated, whatever. Obviously, those people are out there. And it's not enough to just say, "well, I'm not talking about everyone", because the entire spirt of those validity attacks are to invalidate the OPINION, whether or that a given person has reached that conclusion reasonably.

In shows itself in this message board all the time, that mindset.

The reason this discussion is even happening is because you and DaddyTorgo will make the global statements like "Cable news networks give the image..." which are all-encompassing, and then pick your examples from the conservative groups. If he had called out Franken as one of his examples, and you had included CNN, we'd all be agreeing on the same points and be fine.

And don't even try to argue CNN as a true news source. They are selling T-Shirts of their headlines on their main web site, which helps give their headline writers an incentive to be witty and funny instead of accurate.

Except he just pointed out that the Daily Show has been pointing out Obama's mistakes as well. You just flew by that and ignored it, perhaps because it wasn't convenient for the response you wanted to give? If you want to insult people and call them sheep then maybe you should bother to read their posts and respond to what they actually say.

Of course bias has always existed in news media from the days of the first newspaper (or before), but I'd argue that there have been cycles when the major outlets at least tried to aspire to a certain level of objectivity.

Having said that, we're clearly on the down side of a cycle away from objectivity, largely because objectivity doesn't drive ratings/issues sold/page impressions.

I question how much it matters, though. I mean, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Did the appetite for echo chambers masquerading as news media create said echo chambers, or did exposure to echo chambers fuel an appetite for more from an intellectually lazy populace? It probably matters little because the information from which one can make objective judgments exists more readily today than ever before, thanks largely to the Internet. You can read 100 different takes on a subject, understand the bias/angle of each, and come to a judgment based on that composite, after all. But how many people can be bothered?

I always end up hating this discussion because I invariably agree with Jon that the people shouldn't be allowed to rule themselves. However, rule by "elites" hasn't been so hot, either. For instance, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson are probably smart guys, but they still let the financial system blow up. There are plenty of other examples, of course.

So we're increasingly left with an imperfect democracy, with any aspect of moderation under assault by diametrically-opposed camps who will do anything to get their way. At least we can say it will be interesting to see how long the tolerance for this kind of political theater can exist and whether or not there's a return to (some sort of ) moderation in politics in the future.

I hate to point out the obvious but.... isn't that the nature of politics when it is played to the lowest common denominator on both sides?

Hell, not even the lowest common denominator.

This is pretty much why I keep coming back to the Terminator/Matrix hybrid future which has computers make all judgments and eliminates all bias only to then turn on "us humans" and judge that we, ourselves, are inherently too flawed to be occupying the planet and subsequently kills us all or enslaves us for eternity.

I prefer the I, Robot version which eliminates the negative second part of your future. They just benignly sit behind the scenes and make sure things run okay.

And of course I mean the book version, not the movie version which was closer to your plot above.

hey - i included Olbermann in my examples. i'm frankly not familiar at all enough with the work of Franken to include him, so I didn't.

and i would certainly included CNN in a list of "cable news networks" (in fact when talking about them earlier i think i did).

so you can go ahead and agree with me then.

Maybe they learned from THE TRUEST HISTORY BOOK EVER WRITTEN and answered John Hanson.

=

I think the general fragmenting of the television audience has a lot to do with it. Good ratings today, especially for cable news, would have been disastrous rating thirty or forty years ago. News had a broader audience, but also needed to appeal to a broader audience. As the level for good rating has declined, most television news organizations have worked to solidify a core audience, wither through politics or sensationalism.

IMO it's much the same as Congressional redistricting where the need to reach a broad audience has diminished and in some sense is counterproductive.

I agree!

The key problem here is that I don't know much about Olbermann and didn't realise he was on "the other side", so I missed that one. I've tuned most of these folks for the last several years, so my knowledge of the talking heads goes mostly to Limbaugh / O'Reilly / Franken from like 8 years ago.

Geez! Go with what gstelmack said- check out Asimov's "I, Robot". That's much more what you're describing and came over 50 years ago ;)

Handy: Even now, he sulks in his tree house like Achilles in his tent!
Everyone else: {blank stares}
Handy: ...Achilles?... The Iliad?... It's Homer?... READ A BOOK!

SI

That's true, and flere (I think) supported your opinion, and I agreed with his opinion, adding that IMO, the Daily Show was a major example of this, though the deception of entertainment/news is reversed from the more conservative examples.

Yet of the three opinions expressed - mine, I guess because it mentioned only a liberal show, was attacked as somehow not being as valid as the 1st two opinions. Rainmaker at least expresssed disagreement with the point, which I appreciated, but whereas you and ronnie just went after the underlying validity, even though in that post, I specifically agreed with what flere said about the conservative shows.

I think so.

I just think the Daily Show is a big example of that. There's certainly enough voices here to remind us all the conservative shows are guilty of this, which I agree with.