Captain Seafort wrote:
So, now that you've finished complaining about the source are you now going to refer to the actual evidence of CNN favouring the Republicans over the Democrats in the examples I gave?
First you wanted evidence, which was then a game on my part when provided. You responded by
explicitly playing your own game, and you want me to reply to that seriously but without replying to mine which preceded it?
I started out fairly friendly, though you didn't take it well. I'll be less friendly for a moment here by pointing out that your approach to this debate of yours is rather dizzying in its illogic. It's all tactics and bluster and demand for evidence and trying to make things personal and so on, but you seem to bolt from the field of fact.
However, lest I give you the opportunity to cry that I have employed your methodology by pointing out your tactical silliness without addressing the facts, let's have at them:
1. "Whitewashing administration cock-ups" . . . or "CNN report ignored Bush administration's alleged responsibility for bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in 2001"
(What part of "alleged" did you not understand?)
A. "The documentary included a clip of Berntsen, the now-retired CIA officer who headed the unit, explaining how he had sent "a message back to Washington" in early December 2001 requesting more U.S. troops, but never received them."
i. By December 2001 Osama bin Laden was already out of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.
He left circa Nov. 29 or 30, on foot for the few-mile hike to Pakistan, where our allies who were already in place did not catch him. Therefore there was little point in repeating the MediaMatters claim that the White House failed to supply troops when requested. We only got good and started in Tora Bora in December.
(Considering that we took a country within weeks instead of our usual slooooow buildup to overwhelming numbers before invasion, there were logical limits to how many boots could be on the ground where and when. Just because some CIA guy called in late . . . by which point OBL had already left at the end of November (at which point Cheney was just reporting getting reports that he was in Tora Bora) . . . doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme. Once we heard OBL was there we beat the shit out of it from the air and tried to get it surrounded until we could get boots on the ground, like the 10th Mtn Div and others. We still thought he was there on Dec. 10, when his voice might've been heard on a radio, but we were apparently unaware then that he was already gone.)
ii. I like how MediaMatters.org . . . and you, apparently . . . seem to like to confuse all governmental authorities for "the Bush administration", such as your link title of "administration cock-ups". For instance, anchor Sanchez claimed that the CIA guy on the ground asked "the White House" for help "but didn't get it". (And really, that guy Sanchez sounds like he's proselytizing for the Democrats. I thought he was an anchor in the "CNN Newsroom", per the link, and not an op-ed dude. Thanks for linking to something that proves my point.)
The reason this confusion of authorities is amusing is because also in your own link we hear of the CIA failing to communicate requests to the military. This, of course, was the CIA under liberal George Tenet, holdover from the Clinton administration and one of Bush's biggest mistakes (as the recent CIA report made scathingly clear).
2. "Right-about-turn, and not a peep from CNN" . . . or, "CNN's King failed to challenge Thompson on his apparent abortion flip-flop"
[link=
http://www.google.com/search?client=ope ... 8&oe=utf-8]CNN has been mentioning it since July at least[/url].
Indeed,
here's the CNN video.
So at best, you've demonstrated that Larry King isn't well-informed. Or, that he's well-informed enough to know (in the mid-August interview) that the issue's already been brought up to death.
You've also demonstrated that Media Matters seems to ignore such things in its effort to petulantly assert that the media isn't liberal
enough.
Shall I go on?
BTW,
add this one on my earlier pile.
"MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."
Yes, this demonstrates that many news professionals are acting unprofessionally. We're discussing your allegations of liberal bias in the US media, not the personal leanings of individual employees.
1. Didn't you just pick on Larry King and Lou Dobbs? Hell, Lou Dobbs is known to be somewhat conservative. That's like picking on Headline Prime having the Glenn Beck show. Throwing scraps like that is how CNN stays "fair and balanced", to coin a phrase . . . Glenn Beck, by the way, shares his TV crew with Paula Zahn, who is most assuredly not conservative.
2. Do you honestly believe that the 87% of journalists who gave enough money to liberal-party candidates to show up on federal filings that MSNBC located are all going to be 'fair and balanced' in their reporting? I figure they're just putting their money where their mouth is. But, even if they are self-conscious enough to not directly boo the President in their stories, don't you think their liberal ideas and ideals are going to color their stories? It's just going to be their natural brain info-filter.
Yes I know news is a business, and it's a business that by necessity must sensationalize things and pander to the audience to some extent.
I'm not suggesting some vast left-wing conspiracy here . . . I'm simply pointing out that most journalists are liberals, and that . . . with the exception of those who are openly liberal instead of hiding behind a veneer of professionalism . . . said liberal journalists are going to report things a certain way.
I do - the Beeb. Lots of quotes about us handing over to the Iraqis later this year, lots about how your surge is working, nothing about how the casualty rate since the surge has been
the worst since the war.
The surge is working, which is why we're hearing less about Iraq in the news. They've hardly ever covered our successes . . . just American bodycounts.
So, I point out the Beeb's bias towards mentioning successes and not bodycounts, and you respond by saying that they cover bodycounts and not successes. Did you even read my post?
Did you read mine? July 2007 featured some of the lowest casualty counts in months. Which is why it wasn't discussed, except on "conservative" media, and an AP report or two which then spun it as a headline of 2007 being the worst year ever.
August rates do seem to be above July, so expect news reporters to play that up and repeat it frequently in advance of the September report.
The UN is still in Kosovo last time I checked.
So? Kosovans aren't killing dozens of coalition soldiers every week.
Yes, but as I noted in the bit you snipped, the pull-out crowd is going to claim a lack of political progress as a reason to leave, even though such things take a great deal of time even in better environments and with the so-called pros at it.
Hell, the Yahoo AP wire responded to Bush's comments about pulling out of Iraq being akin to pulling out of Viet Nam (and the lovely humanitarian crisis and purge of enemies of the state that resulted) by quoting the Vietnamese government earlier today saying it was good that we left (of course it was! . . . though intriguingly that story can't be found on the site now), replacing it later in the day with a story about a single GOP senator calling for troop withdrawals, "likely to ratchet up pressure on President Bush substantially and lend momentum to Democratic efforts to end U.S. combat."
Let's analyse Bush's claims shall we.
Don't change the subject. I'll answer your charge, but you ought to first explain why you think it's appropriate for a news organization to attempt to refute the words of a sitting president by surveying everyone who disagrees with him.
I'm not suggesting that they treat him with papal infallibility, but really . . . asking Vietnam?
For starters the Vietnam war was all but won when US combat forces pulled out
Uhh . . . no, it wasn't. Remember Tet?
We pulled out, thanks to the American left, when the ARVN was not ready, and cut funding to them when the VC still had all the communist funding they could handle. And, as our troop drawdowns commenced, the VC pressed their attacks with assorted offensives. Our bombs in response won more leftist complaints.
After our withdrawal, it was exceptionally easy for the communists to take the rest of the country.
Mentions of piles of skulls and killing fields refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - a regime that came to power when US air strikes on the Ho Chi Minh trail severely compromised the ability of the Cambodian army to combat them.
Yeah, it's hard to win a war when you're not allowed to kill the badguys, and are reducing troops significantly.
Some of the overall problem with Viet Nam was overabundant US caution regarding escalation. But a whole big chunk of the problem was politics. The anti-war crowd and their media counterparts were against any action that would win the war.
The Khmer Rouge was ultimately expelled in early 1979 by Vietnamese Communist forces.
You say that as if Vietnam did something good and humanitarian. In fact they simply took Phnom Phen after the Khmer Rouge invaded Vietnam.
Nice spin, though.
That was quite cute of you, using a quote of mine regarding folks trying to use collective opinion to determine objective fact.
It was also wrong, of course.
I was agreeing with your point that the fact that something is widely believed does not necessarily mean that it is accurate (nor does it automatically mean that it is false). Do you now believe that popular opinion is the sole means of measuring when something is true or false?
Did you even read my post? Your attempt to take my words out of the context of objective fact (e.g. 2+2=4) and to use them in regards to a spectrum of opinion (e.g. hippies dress funny) was invalid.
Also invalid is your maneuver above wherein you ignore my statement and also try to accuse me of inconsistency.
Last I checked, there was no objective measure of liberal versus conservative, ergo "truth" will be a somewhat subjective measure, best determined by (gasp!) majority opinion. I'm sure even our conservative news sources like Fox News would seem rather liberal to US folks of earlier decades.
And in Europe, for instance, I'm sure almost all US media and even US liberal politicians come off as rather to the right. By comparison to local standards, that's true. (Poor Sarkozy!)
I note how you seem to consider the US to be the default, and anything left of the US on the political scale to be extremely liberal.
I thought we were discussing American ChuckyB's comment on a leftist news media? Would that not make the United States the context?
And incidentally, have you actually responded to anything I've said yet? It seems as if you're always evading and changing subject even when quoting my words, pressing your point in some other way besides addressing what I've said.
Have you ever considered that the rest of the world, which outnumbers the US population by about 20 to 1, might be a better median?
Europe's to the left. Other countries are to the right. What of it?
If you'd like to conduct some sort of survey of the politics of world nations you're more than welcome to do so, but given that my greatest familiarity is with the US and its history, that's where I'll be coming from. And I can tell you that in the past few decades, while most of the western countries have ventured left overall, the US hasn't gone as far as Europe. Does that make the European standard superior, to you?
Meanwhile, in the US, media like the BBC has come off as rather liberal for some time, to many in the US. Recent admissions on that point were quite unsurprising.
"Recent admissions"? I'd like a source for that please.
Here's something of note from a former BBC editor.
Here is the late '06 admission of the BBC of its anti-American, anti-GWoT bias.
And here is the BBC's own words on the matter, noting that a liberal consensus was within the organization.
Are we done?
It isn't liberal. I've given numerous examples of CNN (as an example) following the Republican party line and painting the Democrats in a bad light.
CNN probably never follows the Republican party line, and certainly didn't do so in the Media Matters links you provided. The only thing those links prove is that, according to leftists, CNN sometimes failed to be left
enough, meaning they didn't always follow the proper Democrat talking points.
Given that even the Dems would be a moderately centre-right party in the UK, and significantly further right relative speaking in other European countries, this bias puts CNN to the right.
But that's now how it is for the rest of us.
See above about your tendency to regard the US as the default position.
Praytell, if the US as the default position is bad, why should Europe be the default position? How is that better?
