• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!
  • Welcome to our archives. No new posts are allowed here.

MSM & Blogs bias

Welcome to the forum Tor. :D We have some new features you might enjoy. Check out News/Doc and vBChat room.
That link is a bit long for most posters, so I didn't read the whole thing. Perhaps you could copy and paste some of the key points for us? What would the question or problem be to debate?
Have Fun and Happy Posting !
 
Last edited:
:mrgreen: You need to show your humor more, Pac Man -- you're funny! :mrgreen:
 
Sorry it took so long to reply, but I'm 66 and these computer sites are difficult to do, remembering passwords and all. here was the part that was relevant, I thought:

1st piece:

Startlingly, this has been trumpeted by Right Wingers and pro-warriors, especially on political talk shows and in the blogosphere- usually by middle aged, middle class, middle brow white men- far more aggressively than the power elite. In response to this the term White Man’s Burden is somewhat outdated, and I have termed this neo-WMB the Couch Potato’s Burden. I first came up with the term arguing with pro-war poliblogger and apologist Dean Esmay. Esmay is merely one of many bloggers I’ve argued with in the last half year. He is a classic Right Wing, pro-war, don’t question the Pentagon sort, who voted for Bush, and devotes much of his blog to relentlessly sunny reports of a school being rebuilt, or the recent election, while skimming over the increasing American death toll, not to mention the innocent Iraqi dead. Nay, do not dare bring that up! He and his ilk are mirror images of Left Wing bloggers who downplay Saddam Hussein’s evil and opposed the war from the get-go, simply because they hated Bush. Both sides are Lowest Common Denominator propagandists, and their credibility suffers for it.
Yet, this is what discourse in this nation has come to- not arguing over the interpretation of facts, but arguing over different sets of facts. The Left and Right live in their own echoic star chambers, where anyone who disagrees is a traitor or slimeball, yet both are equally out of touch with the great masses in the middle. Need proof? I give you Easongate and Gannongate. What? The chances are whether you are reading this piece shortly after its appearance, or decades from now, these two ‘scandals’ will mean little to you, and the names vaguely conjure up ex-pro quarterbacks. But, in the blogosphere, the Right and Left wingnuts are making hay with these tales, and the men they’re named after, Jordan Eason and Jeff Gannon, as if they were as important as the Rosenbergs or Roy Cohn. Eason was the news chief of CNN, who stupidly recently claimed American soldiers were aiming to kill American journalists, wholly without proof, who recently cowardly resigned, and Jeff Gannon was the pseudonym of James Guckert, a Right Wing White House journalist shill implicated in a bizarre gay prostitute online sex scandal.
But, unless you are a blogging addict, these names and their ‘scandals’ are meaningless. Both sides of the blogosphere have demonized these two incidents far out of proportion, as they do most things. Recently, I posted reactions to these two scandals on both Right Wing and Left Wing blogs. I used the exact same phrasings posted into each side’s comments- calling both tales tabloid journalism only bloggers who are out of touch with reality care about. People have been known to have loose lips- Eason didn’t have guts to make a real accusation, nor stand by his comments, while Gannon was merely the latest in a long line of Presidential shills in the media. The blogosphere, to its rare credit, makes it harder to keep such things quiet. Left Wingers railed I missed the point Gannon was a severe threat to the integrity of the media, and evidence of Right Wing perversion of freedom of the press. Right Wingers railed I did not see the liberal bias of Eason perverts the integrity of the media. They made my points about each other and themselves, and the only relevance either story may have is Gannon, and disgraced black conservative journalist shill Armstrong Williams, among others, may bolster Leftist claims many pro-war bloggers in America and Iraq are on the White House and/or CIA payroll.
The Left, emboldened by lack of WMDs, and increasing likelihood their outlook at the start of the war will be proven true, seem almost to gloat when a body count comes in. Not all, but many. By doing so they risk alienating moderates who are sickened by the war, but don’t want to be seen as part of ‘that crowd’. The Right, increasingly desperate and frustrated their initial assumptions and further claims keep missing their targets, have gone even further, with an anger their power is even questioned. Note the terms I have used- Left and Right (with capitals), not liberal and conservative, because they are two different things. The true liberal and conservative opinion on the Iraq war is the same- to never have engaged, albeit for different reasons. The liberal opposes military force against a nation that did not attack us, and the attendant miseries sprung from it, while the conservative agrees with that, and also opposes interfering in other nations’ internal affairs, as well as the financial cost of the war.
Yet, these arguments are pooh-poohed by the pro-war Right, as they have co-opted the fascistic newspeak of the PC Elite Left, and shoved it back down their, and the rest of our, collective craws. In the insulated Right Wing blogosphere, for example, it is ‘inhumane and racist’ to NOT support the war. Yes, that is correct. The illogic unfurls thusly: Saddam Hussein, in thirty-plus years in power murdered and tortured several hundred thousand of his innocent citizens, so we were being humanitarian to topple him, and in less than two years, kill and torture upwards of a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens- the vast majority innocent. If you point out the logical folly of this humanitarian Big Stick leading us through endless wars, and ask why Iraq and not dozens of other equally bad, or worse, regimes, you are scoffed at as isolationist, left behind by history. And do not dare mention o-i-l. As for being racist to NOT support the war- the argument is you don’t believe brown-skinned Arabs deserve or can support democracy, even as it is far more plausible to see racism as the Right’s denial of Arabs as ethical agents, free to choose democracy if they wish. With Saddam gone, our stated mission of regime change done, and elections, why won’t Bush do what LBJ was urged to do by Vermont Senator George Aiken (R), in regard to Vietnam- just declare victory and leave? Well, the US has an ‘obligation’ to help this poor country. They cannot possibly deal with democracy’s vagaries by themselves. Thus the Couch Potato’s Burden rings clarion through the blogosphere! History repeats itself as the original WMB and Vietnam have no lessons to teach the Right. Ironically, the Right often accuses the Left of not learning from the past- usually in regards to communism, but equally applicable to the disasters colonial imperialism wrought. To impugn racism and inhumanity on those who oppose an unjust, factually unsupportable war, and the indiscriminate killing of people in their nation’s name, is to pervert not only dictionary definitions, but all sense of decency and fair play.

and then later:

Plus, Bush’s acolytes in the blogosphere encourage this psychotic break- actively wanting to be lied to, and engaging the fantasy. Look at how uncritically so many accept anything remotely positive, yet reject any mention of the piling negatives, much less the negatives. While the Left is guilty of this in reverse, it is not nearly to the degree as on the Right, because there is far more fracture and diversity in the anti-war position than the relative monolith of the pro-warriors. Why? Because a blog seemingly gives Joe Average, the Couch Potato, a platform that lifts him out of daily drudgery- marriage, mortgage, car loans, job, etc. Their life is rote, dull, with the realization they are frighteningly average, and inadequate to their dreams. Then, along comes a Holy Cause- told they are part of Big Times, doing Big Things, and if they cheerlead they can claim a part in history. Plus, there are many other Couch Potatoes who will pat him on the back, accept him in into the fraternity of the self-important and out of touch blogosphere- the vanguard of American cultural psychosis, The Boys In The Bubble, or the lumpenmenschen, as my dad would have called them.
Interestingly, Right Wing bloggers are surprisingly hypersensitive, as they ape their ill-chosen enemies on the Left. There are constant assertions of offense taken, even as it is manifest taking offense is always a willful act. Too many bloggers invest their self-worth into opinions, so when a disagreement arises it is taken as an attack on the self, rather than a faulty position. The result is endless ad hominem, distortion, and caricaturization of opinions so one argues not against specifics a reasonable moderate like me will ply, but distorted demonic generalizations that must accompany slimy liberal or evil conservative (again, me, both times). This shatters the notion the blogosphere, unlike MSM, is self-correcting. It is self-delimiting, because each ‘issue’ provides opportunity for a blogger to further bud off, like baby universes, with his cult, unassailable ‘truths’, and shrinkingly exigent delusions, into echoic Lowest Common Denominator star chambers utterly divorced from real world concerns- witness l’affaires Eason and Gannon, and their ‘success’s’ leading to greater rancor, while stories like the Custer Battles atrocities are marginalized- until, some day soon, an Eason or Gannon will strike back, sue big blogs for libel, and a Big Chill will set in.


Ciao for now. Tor
 
You made some good points Tor, but I wouldn't look for anything to change any time soon. Our country has prospered and grown because we can disagree and take sides. The press has come a long way from the 3 major networks that we were victims of for 30 years. People are becoming more informed every day -- I trust them to make the right decisions. We have to come to a concensus, before we can force our legislators to work for the benefit of the country and not the party. We still have a long way to go.
(makes note -- the spell check is still not up to par)
 
Squawker said:
(makes note -- the spell check is still not up to par)

*The almighty Admin may have to change to another spellchecker to solve the problem. But he is working on it.*
 
Frankly, I'm too old and jaded to trust the masses. Then, that's me. I do agree with what he states about Madison Ave tho- no one ever went broke on underestimating American stupidity! Tor
 
Back
Top Bottom