Fox News
AllUrHiveRblong2us
By Your Powers Combined... Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11244Members
By Your Powers Combined... Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11244Members
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">first new topic, I think</div> I think fox news is the funniest station on the planet. It's just so amazing how much spin they put on teh news. For example, did ya ever watch it in teh mornings? It's all just women in short skirts with cameras a **** level.
On particularly amusing story I remember from watching early morning Fox News, they were talking about how Iraq had put out a release saying that we had cluster bombed a civilian area. The people on Fox dismissed this as an obvious lie because we don't HAVE cluster bombs. Not 5 minutes later however, one of the same people stated that in our latest bombing raids, we were useing cluster bombs. No one seemed to notice that they were contradicting themselves, because then one of them made an anti-French remark, and they all laughed.
Any thoughts?
On particularly amusing story I remember from watching early morning Fox News, they were talking about how Iraq had put out a release saying that we had cluster bombed a civilian area. The people on Fox dismissed this as an obvious lie because we don't HAVE cluster bombs. Not 5 minutes later however, one of the same people stated that in our latest bombing raids, we were useing cluster bombs. No one seemed to notice that they were contradicting themselves, because then one of them made an anti-French remark, and they all laughed.
Any thoughts?
Comments
...Fox isn't the only one that puts a spin on the news. EVERY news source does -- at least those that get money from things such as advertising.
If a news station posts news in such a way that it gains more viewers, <i>regardless</i> of how the news is presented or the degree of truth to their take on it, it means more profits through advertising. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any commercial news sources who don't like profits.
My personal solutions:
1. Get news from sources who concentrate more on it. Your local news station that makes statements on current international relations between countries, then talks about the recent robbery/shooting/house fire/clubbed baby seal that happened within your region of the state is <i>not</i> the best possible place to get your news on international affairs.
(exception: if that local news is significant enough that multiple other reputable news sources across the continent also speak a good deal on it, maybe that one story isn't enough to discount the credibility of your local station)
2. Get news from multiple nations, in multiple continents. True, European, North American, and Middle Eastern news sources are often the ones you think of first, but don't put it out of your mind to look at news from as far away as South America, Australia, or darn well near anywhere else. (Except Antarctica. Everything's so black-and-white to those darned penguins <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo--> )
2a. To expand on 2, if you happen to know a 2nd or 3rd language fluently, get a news source in that language, <i>not</i> translated to your native language. Any form of literature tends to lose meanings, connotations, or both when translated to a different language centered around a different culture.
3. Get it as directly as possible. Let's say you see a newspaper/news on TV quoting polls from a source like Reuters: do what you can to find that same poll <i>direct</i> from Reuters, and check whether it was a scientific poll, done online, what the +/- error % allowance is, etc. If you see a news source saying stuff and crediting the Associated Press (AP) for the info, do what you can to get that exact same info from the Associated Press.
4. Don't ignore sources that look at international affairs from different angles. Some news sources like to put reporters on the front lines, claiming that they have exclusive news for their headlines. Others may ignore violence to some degree, instead focusing on other effects: for example, news sources that look at wars purely for their cause-and-effect relation to national or international economy. These different perspectives are just as vulnerable to being biased as any other, but sometimes different perspectives may open your mind up even further.
5. Don't pass too quick a judgement. Some people take a strong liking to "independent" news sources with claims such as "they aren't commercial, so they aren't as biased as <insert larger-scale news source here>." That may be true, but it's also just as possible that the one in particular that you like does have an agenda after all.
That's all I can think of for now. Getting news in this fashion may be time-consuming, but if you want "the truth," you have to work a little to earn it.
I know Fox can be full of **** sometimes but they are the first really pro american news network I have seen.
If you want your news with no bull **** and no base towards anyone watch CNN as I do when im more awake. Now onto what I really wanted to bring up Fox's number 1 show Bill O Reily, the spin stops here my ****, but I tend to agree with him alot on most things, he is defenitly fun to watch.
Let's try another example. Would you try to get your early morning news from say, Good Morning America on ABC? Or maybe The Today Show on NBC? I sure hope not. They are programs targeted for a specific audience.
By the time I get to work in the morning, I've probly watched parts of 3 different morning television shows, heard 2-3 different news/talk radio stations and maybe flipped through a USA Today. Generally you're going to get the same information. You just have to understand the source and be able to read between the lines.
As for O'Reily, I've read his first book and watched his show a bit. I'd say if you asked someone on the street about him, good or bad, he'd pretty much fit the description. I guess I'm more of a Brit Hume/Tony Snow kind of guy.
And another thing, what's the point of watching news that just says what you want to hear? It's not news then, it's shoddy feel-good tripe. Jingoistic spins have no place in a world as complex as the one we live in. Seek truth, not affirmation of your own opinions (which probably came from the idiot box to begin with anyway). If everyone did that, our enemies included, instead of letting themselves be coralled like bleating sheep to the slaughter, maybe we wouldn't be in the shitstorm we're in now.
The eagle part is what upsets me. The people who made this banner are glorifying the use of F-14s, which, no matter which way you look at it, is designed to kill people. I dislike Fox's entertaining take on the war; it's almost like people aren't dying over there. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers may have been killed; while I'm not, for the most part, protesting their deaths (most of them chose to fight, and brainwashing soldiers is an unescapable reality), I find it sad that Fox throws impressive force and gusto into preparing solemn splash-screens to display the names of soldiers killed in combat, with nary a glance to enemy casulaties.
The O'Reilly factor is something that's been bugging me very badly as well. O'Reilly claims to "stop the spin," but his program has turned from a spin-stopper (it was, a long time ago) into an outlet for his own opinions, which are in my view reactionary, isolationist, jingoistic, and almost brutal. Joseph McCarthy was an expert at using the media to his own advantage; so is O'Reilly. I fear that O'Reilly is simply becoming the next McCarthy. Where McCarthy accused people of being card-carrying Communists, O'Reilly accuses them of being anti-American. The results? Pretty much blacklisting. Peter Arnett, fired. That Muslim university professor, fired. Working on getting the Columbia professor fired. Etc, etc, etc. O'Reilly is forgetting that anti-Americanism is not a crime; he deals it out like a crime; and if we're not careful it will <b>become</b> a crime.
That said, I'd also like to point out another interesting thing I saw on Hannity and Colmes. First of all, the one liberal that they have on their primetime news analysis (Colmes) is for the war. Well, he says he was against it before, but for it now; that's kind of like how I am, but I don't call myself a liberal. (Not that I'm conservative... no no.)
They were discussing this Columbia professor who wished for "a million Mogadishus" for the troops in Iraq. Well, understandably, the whole crew of Fox was up in arms about this. So they got a student in his class (who was offended and plans to join the Marines) to talk about what she thought about the situation. When Hannity (the conservative) popped the question: Do you think he should be fired? the student replied "No." I saw the look of incredulity flash on Hannity's face. It struck me then that the people in those programs have programmed themselves to look at things two dimensionally. This student, obviously open-minded, was offended by the professor's comment but did not support him being fired, because she believed he had academic rights to say such things, and he hadn't directly said it in class. In a way, she split her opinion, but this showed that she looked at things in real terms, not right/wrong, left/right, or good/bad. Hannity could not think this way; his attitude transcends practicality. The professor committed no offense, he merely acted in a way morally unacceptable to Hannity. For this reason, he wished his firing. This attitude pretty much sums up the entire mindset of Fox News -- a person's actions are to be evaluated and to directly effect his future.
By the way, I can't get BBC news even though I have Satellite. I get stupid "BBC America," which, when it's showing the news instead of housekeeping shows, probably shows it edited and watered-down (it's got a Washington office -- go figure).
Lehrer has a good show. The reports are typically slanted (to either side) but he seems to shuffle them up a bit.
CNN on the other hand is an Environmentalist Nut-job's wet dream! They could sit in front of their TV all day and just nod their head. And what's the alternative? Tom Brokaw? Peter Jennings? Dan Rather? please.
What's funny is MSNBC is starting to twist it's broadcast to compete with Fox. They've taken a harder hit than CNN in the ratings and they know why.
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This bothered me to.....It would almost seem like Fox is turning into the hollywood for real wars
It's quite nice to have a source of information that's at least not dependent advertisement or Murdoch.
Left and right are both relative terms. The left in this country has been so drastically weakened over the past several decades that "Moderate" has shifted many steps to the right. The right's perception of many, what I'd define as "moderate" networks as being left-leaning is skewed by the ever-increasing reactionary element in this country. As a self-described leftist, I find all the networks you mentioned to be building off a foundation that is itself, if you pardon my use of french *gasp*, fundamentally bourgeois. I find the corporate media to be pacifying, bland, and far more interested in maintaining the status quo than enlivening the population for journalistic debate. The right's perception of a liberal media may itself simply be a sort of red-shift, a perception of the media's inability to adapt as quickly as the nation has to a conservative outlook.
very true, but thats why we have the discussion forums
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The major news networks are ALL running a business. They move around incredible amounts of money and resources- that means that the people who pay for it all have them by the balls. Imagine having an entire building in downtown Manhattan, full of state of the art broadcasting equipment, computers, lighting techs, gaffers, make-up artists, on-staff computer animators and copy editors, etc etc etc. Every day these people come to work, they all get paid, they all get their 401(k)s and medical, and the whole thing is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Now imagine that they don't charge money for this.
This juggernaut is ONLY kept going by the advertisers, which means, in effect, the biggest advertisers have the power of an emperor. What if one of the biggest advertisers contributes 15% of the network's income? Do you think that everyone in Rockefeller Center is going to calmly look at each other and say, "Well, if we report this bad thing about our sponsor, they'll drop us, we'll go bankrupt, and we'll all get canned and miss our mortgage payments and trash our credit records, but hey, let's do it for the sake of journalistic integrity."
Yeah right.
Having established that they listen to their sponsors closely, think about some of the things the sponsors might have to say. For instance, advertisers tend to think (correctly so) that if you insult your customers, they'll turn away, if you massage their egos, they'll stick around. So, if a news network starts REALLY cutting into American foreign policy, and criticizing aspects of American culture, like consumerism, etc, the advertisers are going to go ape for a variety of reasons. They're going to say, "You're insulting the customer base, driving them away, and questioning whether they should spend money. How are you fulfilling your contract to advertise and sell our products?" And the networks will listen to the largest sponsors, because if just one of them pulls out, they're going to start bleeding money profusely immediately.
A lot of people think the news has a duty to educate people about what is important, and if that means bad news, so be it. Unfortunately this is in direct conflict with the business model of almost all current news providers. If it can be shown that your viewers aren't having fun, then it can be shown that you have less of them, and thus, aren't advertising as effectively.
I don't know what the solution is. People that try to do reporting without a profit motive face enormous challenges. The major broadcasting bandwidths are held by large companies for staggering amounts of money. An individual can't afford to fly around very much, and most people find that they have to work at least 40 hours a week just to have shelter and food. How the hell are you going to find time to travel all over the world if you're not charging money? Even if you split the work up to different people all over, you still are going to have a mountain of work to do in terms of editing, organizing, making sense of it all. Over the long term it seems impossible without outside funding. Independent news organizations are well-meaning, but from what I've seen they tend to botch the data frequently. Not intentionally, but from the lack of a sophisticated hiearchry to sort it all out, which is expensive.
So, in the U.S., we end up with a war in which cool toys make big explosions, and yet no pictures of dead people come out. (It's a WAR, and there are no dead people?!) And over on Al Jazeera, they get a war in which the blood flows like a river from countless dead people, killed by gung-ho crusaders firing from the waist as they INVADE, COLONIALIZE, and generally carry out the agenda of the JEWS.
The biggest truth to be learned from both is not the specifics of what they report, but what their style says about their viewership.