Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

11 words from John Oliver that expose Fox News' fundamental hypocrisy

2

Comments

  • wanted to delete it... but no delete button?
  • ah, yup. you're right. just type "delete." I think that works.
  • edited April 2020
    Jan said:

    Vintage,

    Although certainly not in all cases, I find davidmoran's attitude rather typical of liberals - they simply cannot understand the fact that not everyone thinks the same as they do! Why is it so hard for them? They are the self proclaimed "intelligent" ones.

    If they can't win you over, they make it personal as in this case by reverting to name calling (soft brained). He even tells you to go away and hide. And claims offending you was never the point! Laughable.

    In case you missed the link zenbrew provided, it validates your claim that Fox, MSNBC and CNN are in the same boat. There are some fairly neutral media organizations though.

    https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

    This is comedy gold. No one is being intolerant. If someone thinks CNN is simply some inverse of Fox, when the error and deliberate fraudulence documentation are vast and historical, while anyone is entitled to say it and post it, they should be prepared to have pointed out to them that that is demonstrable crap. You better expect to be called on it, in other words, and be better able to substantiate it than by pointing to Allsides. Do you have a substantive argument here yourself?

    Allsides is risible --- a popularity contest. As you might infer from the name. Notice what they have to say about substantive policy matters. Zero. An anti-abortion and anti-death-penalty clergyman who physically protests immigrant family separation --- well, where does he or she fit in this facile and simpleminded understanding of things?
    How about a 'liberal' who strongly supports the death penalty? (I know at least one.) Where are Allsides' criteria for such other than ... voting and perception? I'll have to drill down into their site to see if they have a list of policy proposals and opinions ....

    Go read some Pew research, or indeed any worthy media site. There are many. Not this site which does pretend dressup as 'science'.

    More important, the Allsides little comedy chart might cause someone to conclude, oh, that the editorial hygiene and vetting and processes at the New Yorker and the Atlantic and WaPo are like those at the Blaze and the Daily Caller and the Federalist. I bet that even you do not believe that this is the case. Although who knows, you did just write, with a straight face, that Fox and MSNBC 'are in the same boat.'

    I would also bet that a trained and experienced bias-comm expert like DSnowball could explain these things, and does so in his class, every year.

    You evidently do not know what namecalling is, or have the reading comprehension to understand what it is I advised for VF.

    I am impressed by, even as I wonder at, your co-workers' stamina, though.
  • edited April 2020
    For example, delve this for substantive and accurate coverage, all under their nonstop 'unbiased news does not exist' weakness:

    https://www.allsides.com/topics/coronavirus/misinformation?search=covid-19 misinformation

    Just the first four or so, LCR.

    These guys are even more simpleminded than the last time I checked a few years ago. And Snopes in the C category, bwahaha. Talk about being hung up on, and then tripped and made to sprawl by, labels.

    They oughtta turn all of their immense energies to what's accurate, not how it's perceived. It is just soooo damn lazy to do it the way they do it. Lazy teachers everywhere, and posters here, can rejoice --- you can always fall back on bothesidesism.

    Which is the genuine danger today, that libs do it too, distort and destroy and lie, and Fox News is just, you know, a worthy adversary.

  • @Jan, @Vintage - do me a favor. Define a liberal and define a Conservative. Curious about how you see them.
  • Why not look at the Politifact statistics and judge for yourselves: https://politifact.com/article/2015/jan/27/msnbc-fox-cnn-move-needle-our-truth-o-meter-scorec/

    FOX
    image

    MSNBC
    image

    CNN
    image
  • edited April 2020
    ya, but polls still only show opinions. Their aim is not to arrive at TRUTH. @Davidmoran's remarks above are straight and true. Logical, even!
  • @Crash The charts I'm showing aren't polls but stories factchecked by Politifact over a period of time and how many true, false statement were made in them.
  • Ok, thanks. I stand corrected.
  • Also important to note is that this fact checking is of opinion pieces ("pundits"), not of the straight news reporting. Still, one would hope that even opinion pieces would all present the same sum for 2+2.

    On the flip side (viewers), here's a study on how well people make the distinction between statements of opinion (e.g. X is the greatest whatever) and of fact (e.g. X charges the most for a given service).

    Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News (Pew Research, 2018)
    The differentiation between factual and opinion statements used in this study – the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence – is commonly used by others as well, but may vary somewhat from how “facts” are sometimes discussed in debates – as statements that are true.

    Overall, Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.
  • Overall, Republicans and Democrats humans were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.
  • Very true @OJ. I have neighbors who are firmly convinced President Obama took suitcases full of money to Iran even though he never went there during his 8-yr administration. I just can't anymore.
  • I'm not sure why anyone would take the website AllSides as some absolute. They're simply aggregating multiple "news" sources in one place. The bias ratings are subjective.

    "These are subjective judgements made by people across the country. Here is our rough approximation for what the media bias ratings mean:

    Left - Lean Left - Center - Lean Right - Right.

    Note that "Center" does not always mean unbiased, neutral or reasonable, just as "far Left" and "far Right" do not always mean "extreme" or "unreasonable." Learn more about what a Center media bias rating means here. Think of our bias ratings as points of view, each providing pieces of the puzzle, to help you gain a more holistic view."

    https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-methods

    There's even a place where you can agree or disagree with their ratings.

    They also try to separate out news from opinion sources and rate them separately.

    No one says that we have to read every article from all sides.

    I think that AllSides uses "fact check" on some of the articles presented rather loosely. It's hard to sort out whether the "fact check" is in relation to the headline of the article or to the content of the article (which aren't always the same). I would tend to use Politifact or Snopes or better yet, original sources to determine fact or fiction. But even then, there is a lot of part truths/fiction depending on context not necessarily the facts.

    Opinions are like noses (or a__holes), we all have them and they all smell.
  • Well, most points taken, though they are not remotely an aggregator of news sources, just a beauty contest in other guise.

    And still lazy and dangerously simpleminded --- 'think of our bias ratings as points of view' is not only useless but pernicious, worse than useless, letting people post on forums about 'See, see, it's all the same, a balanced spectrum, a continuum of equivalence ....'

    As for the 'we all have opinions and they all etc.', that too is harmful --- as msf implied, opinions about 2+2 may be judged and ranked and taken as influential according to ... guess what? Whether they are accurate and logical.
  • A pay to view article via The Irish Times but shared via a friend:

    April 25, 2020 By Fintan O’Toole

    THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME. WE PITY IT

    Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

    However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

    Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

    As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

    It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

    The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

    (Sorry, the article is about 4X longer and I don't feel justified in copy/pasting the rest of it but I trust you get the gist.)
  • Wow. Talk about right-on.
  • truth.
  • getting your information from a comedian, you have to be kidding me. You can't be that dumb.
  • edited April 2020
    Many comedians speak truer words than any politician. That's what makes for comedy. Choose your poison.
  • @realityspeaks Which comedian are you speaking about? The talented one on HBO or the clown in the oval office?
  • getting your information from a comedian, you have to be kidding me. You can't be that dumb.

    sure we can

    what alternative sources do you favor?
  • Mark said:

    @Jan, @Vintage - do me a favor. Define a liberal and define a Conservative. Curious about how you see them.

    You are missing the point. This is BS media as created. Don't label people because you don't agree with their point of view. When people do that the stop listening to each other. THIS is the freakin' world we live in today. Don't ask me to define those terms, stop using / perverting them.
  • >> stop using / perverting them

    Right, that makes anyone want to listen to you.
  • @VF - see, I'm not missing the point at all. You and maybe the media are the ones throwing these labels around. I've never used them to define someone because the implied definitions don't apply. But you go right ahead.
  • Howdy folks,

    Having to define people by liberal or conservative or red or blue is a death spiral as it separates the world into Us vs. Them.

    We're all passengers on Spaceship Earth and unless we start acting like it we're ALL going to die regardless of the click you must identify with. While You can discriminate but the virus doesn't.

    And so it goes

    Peace and Flatten the Curve

    Rono
  • @BrianW Just because something's popular doesn't make it good:
    image
Sign In or Register to comment.