The news is Legally allowed to Lie. - by Volitions Advocate
gunsmoke on 29/6/2009 at 19:03
lol. You don't think you're immune to massive leftist slant on NPR, do you?
Starrfall on 29/6/2009 at 20:07
Quote Posted by gunsmoke
lol. You don't think you're immune to massive leftist slant on NPR, do you?
Maybe the prior episodes of dumb in this thread are just making me cranky, but just so you know making unequivocal statements without even acknowledging the existing arguments to the contrary only makes you look stupid and uninformed.
DDL on 29/6/2009 at 20:34
Quote Posted by Pyrian
@DDL: It's not that those of us who believe in freedom of the press are
for news stations lying, it's that we're
against the
government determining what does and does not count as "fact", because at the end of the day the government will lie, too.
Sorry, if that's the case I guess I understand your position (though I don't quite understand how the government could
enforce that, since the key thing about facts is that lying about them does not make them untrue: government lies are still
lies, no matter how legal, or true, they want you to think they are), but I was thinking more along lines of "if a news agency is caught out in a blatant lie, this should be treated as a VERY BAD THING", perhaps like it is in science?
I.e. everyone trusts you to tell the truth, and thus doesn't rigorously fact check everything you say, but if you do lie, and do get caught, your reputation is pretty much utterly fucked, and nobody takes anything you say in future, or in fact anything you have EVER said, at face value any more.
gunsmoke on 29/6/2009 at 20:42
Quote Posted by Starrfall
Maybe the prior episodes of dumb in this thread are just making me cranky, but just so you know making unequivocal statements without even acknowledging the existing arguments to the contrary only makes you look stupid and uninformed.
I can live with that.
I love your use of unequivocal, though. It was opinion, after all.
Starrfall on 29/6/2009 at 21:08
If you want it to be an opinion then don't state it as a fact!
Pyrian on 29/6/2009 at 21:24
Quote Posted by DDL
I.e. everyone trusts you to tell the truth, and thus doesn't rigorously fact check everything you say, but if you do lie, and do get caught, your reputation is pretty much utterly fucked, and nobody takes anything you say in future, or in fact anything you have EVER said, at face value any more.
I totally agree with that, and IMO Fox News in particular has long since jumped over that line. The fact that they continue to be successful as a "news organization" is indeed troubling.
On the subject of NPR, their refusal to use the word "torture" where definitively warranted, and instead substituting mealy-mouthed - nevermind flatly incorrect - euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques", IMO qualifies them as having a
right wing bias.
Namdrol on 29/6/2009 at 21:26
I have lived in/around a community for 11 years which often has articles/films etc made about. Not once, and I mean not once have these various bits of media fodder been 100% accurate; to a greater or lesser extent (generally greater). There is always some distortion.
I was a cynical fuck before but now..
Oh and Queue, the BBC is far from perfect but I suppose it's better than some. Sort of.
AR Master on 29/6/2009 at 21:29
Quote Posted by Pyrian
I totally agree with that, and IMO Fox News in particular has long since jumped over that line. The fact that they continue to be successful as a "news organization" is indeed troubling.
On the subject of NPR, their refusal to use the word "torture" where definitively warranted, and instead substituting mealy-mouthed - nevermind flatly incorrect - euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques", IMO qualifies them as having a
right wing bias.
npr having a "right wing bias"
we're through the looking glass here people
heywood on 30/6/2009 at 05:12
Pointing out that news is biased is not edgy. There is simply no such thing as unbiased news, period. It never existed and never will. At their best, news organizations are information filters, but the filtering is always subjective and subject to bias.
News organizations like NPR that strive to avoid political bias typically end up covering 2 different angles of a multi-faceted issue which could be viewed in any number of ways, and thus have a "mainstream" two-party bias. And even the reporters working for the wire services, whose only job is to report facts, bias their reporting by the facts they chose to report, which is biased by what information is available from their sources. And the sources themselves are biased and try to play the reporters to get their preferred message out.
Worst of all is the boob toob. TV news truly is 'worldview infotainment' because it's so oriented around ratings. Always has been, I think. Newspapers have been better, but they still make mistakes in their reporting and are biased.
And the government hasn't stamped anything "A-OK". The FCC doesn't license Fox News or endorse their content. Nor do they license newspapers, or wire services, or other sources of news. And for good reason. If the government regulates the reporting, it's not a free press. Do you want to live in Russia (or even Italy) where mainstream news sources only tell you what the government wants you to know? If you want a free press that can report independently and without government control & interference, then you can't rely on the government to police it.
Thirith on 30/6/2009 at 11:42
So the price for a free press is that it's free to spread lies? Do I understand that correctly? If not, who can regulate the news in terms of the veracity of its claims (or, at the very least, in terms of making a clear distinction between opinion pieces and the reporting of facts)?
