The majority of our media has a low batting average of being factually correct.

[Deleted-Sitemonitor]

moondancer @ 4:

Disney owns ABC, ABCnews is now what, part of Fantasyland??
Get the tinfoil out, its time to start making hats.

I've got sugar, who has the Kool Aid mix?

I can't believe that it has taken this long to figure out that the news is not news.

Definition: Propaganda

I have only been saying it since 2000.

Ron @ 7:

I can't believe that it has taken this long to figure out that the news is not news.

Definition: Propaganda

I have only been saying it since 2000.

Thank you Ron! I was going to write, "Well at least somebody but myself has figured this out!"

I've long suspected the neo-con cabal of having some sort of operation mockingbird in the works, except run through DOD channels instead of the CIA to get around the rule passed (by George HW Bush in '76) after the Church Committee investigations that "the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station."

And actually, having an overseas mole pumping out propaganda into the foreign media (Rendon Group or Lincoln Group, anyone?) that would knowingly wind up back in the US would run right around that rule.

Does Operation Mockingbird live on overseas?

break up the monopolies. Reinstate the fairness doctrine and repeal the telecommunications act of 1996

pet peeve- I hate it when people make claims without a link to back it up, yet I just did it myself.

Ross broke the Foley story, and had a few big breaks in the domestic wiretapping/datamining story, so much so they were tapping Ross’ phones.

I stick with the BBC and sometimes the The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Sure there are no spinning globes or $1000 graphics or catchy jingles, but its the content that matters. I've given up on ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR a long time ago.

This reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff joke:

In Soviet Russia there were only two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

Patriot Scholar @ 16:

If you want to visit the white house, all you have to do is say things that Bush wants to hear. It's the oldest con in the world, and it works on Bush.

That, and you have to make sure the timing is right. If you really want to make it to the White House, make sure you recite some of his favorite slogans at a time when he or one of his buddies are in trouble. Bin Laden is a good example; his tapes seem to appear at very opportune times.

Oh come on!! Faux Noise talking dittohead Sean Hannity says the media is Liberal. So does Billie O. They must be right! They are on Faux Noise!

Just because there are conspiracy theories, doesn't necessarily mean there isn't conspircies!!

John Stossel was on a "special" last night about healthcare in America. Of course, it was little more than right wing corporatist propaganda saying the current system is fine by default because the alternatives just won't generate enough EPS for the current shareholders. Shocking, huh? I'll never watch ABC again. What a bunch of syncophant hacks.

I saw that ABC healthcare "special" too. They spread the typical right-wing lies about universal healthcare. They also had no counter to Michaek Moore; they would only pretend they countered him by giving a voiceover after everything he said, giving Moore no chance to retaliate. Sadly, the people watching will probably believe that he was successfully defeated. Sad for Moore to go on a show run by ABC. He should have known that they would do something like this.

I also reject ABC. Good riddance to them. What news channels do we have left to watch now, though?

"I hope that for those of you just getting your news from the Internet you are getting it from on-line sources of magazines like the Economist and not the on-line news start-ups run out of someone’s mother’s basement."

While it's not always true, I can show you dozens of case examples of on-line news start-ups doing better investigative reporting, better fact-checking, asking better questions, and doing better journalism than establishment sources. The start-ups are lean and hungry, they have something to prove and an audience to win over. The establishment can assume their audience will accept whatever they are told and show up dutifully every day for more. The Economist was very, very late to the Enron story compared to online liberal journalists, for one example.

"When Clinton was in office the media was spot on? "

It's rather well-documented that the media went after Clinton with pitchforks and torches the first week he was in the White House, and I have read books by moderate, establishment journalists that admit to this. You will see this again in January of 2009, a series of negative articles blasting the new Democrat president's performance within the first week of their presidency. Unless it's a Republican, in which case there will be a call for a "honeymoon" period of "national unity" to let him get his bearings.

"So the left thinks the media is controlled by the right and the right thinks that media is controlled by the left. "

The right has been waging a vociferous, organized campaign against "liberal bias in the media" for decades now, pushing corporate media (which is inherently fiscally conservative in its biases anyway) even further to the right. The liberals weren't fighting back nearly enough. The result has been a media that is disproportionately representative of conservatives. You already know that radio is 99% conservative, but collectively MSNBC/CNN/FOX/ABC/CBS are about 70% conservative. Surveys of newspapers show you they also are very right-leaning. The press in the US is to the right of public opinion in the US, as well as to the right of the press corps in every other industrial democracy on Earth.

"Personally, I wish the media were controlled by the middle."

But the facts themselves do actually have a rather strong anti-conservative bias. Most of their arguments and beliefs are based on statistical perfidy, sloganeering, and historical revisionism. Thus a press corps that is truly objective, balanced, and insisting only on cold, hard fact in its reporting will have the appearance of being biased on behalf of liberals. This is the problem that you guys aren't really addressing here.