Debate, and discuss, just dont Bore me.
Should We Be Surprised?
Published on April 6, 2010 By Dr Guy In The Media

One of the recurring themes I have noticed is the hypocrasy of the Mainstream Media.  Their insistance on calling themselves unbiased, when in fact they are anything but.  The fact they are biased should not be taken as some sort of evil omen.  It is human nature after all.  The fact they deny it should be taken as an indication of their credibility.  In otherwords, the fact they cannot even tell the truth when the truth is so nakedly obvious indicates they are not truthful about anything.

And so the latest shows again not only their bias, their hypocrasy, but their dishonesty as well.  For anyone who has listened to Rush Limbaugh lately, they will have noticed he has ratcheted up his rhetoric on the Obama Administration.  That there is no love lost between Obama and Limbaugh is a given, and given their respective political ideologies, not unexpected.  So lately, Limbaugh has taken to calling the Obama Administration a "Regime".  With all of its totalitarian overtones.  That may seem a bit extreme to some, but hardly (again) surprising as Limbaugh has never pretended to be anything but biased.

Well, his use of the word Regime has caught the attention of the MSM.  So much so that they are going out of their way to lie about it!  Chris Matthews, he of the tingling leg fame, outright lied when he yelled at Limbaugh that:

I've never seen language like this in the American press referring to an elected representative of the government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election, we'll have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years, fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country, and this guy, this walrus, underwater, makes fun of this administration, calling it a regime.  We know that word "regime."  It was used by recent presidential -- by George Bush, regime change.  You go to war with regimes.  Regimes are tyrannies.  They're juntas, they're military coups.  The use of the word regime in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus to stop using it.

"Never seen"?  I guess to a weasler of words that would be true since speech is heard and not seen.  However, Matthews is a liar.  Pure and simple.  For it was HE that first used the term "regime" to describe the administration!  What?  He called the Obama Administration a "regime"?  No, he called the Bush 43 Administration that back in 2002 when asking Al Sharpton a question: "What do you think this says of the Bush regime?"

Politics is mostly a heated argument about points of view.  It is doubtful that anyone is going to be swayed by cool logic as it rarely exists in the arena of politics.  But it does you no good to outright lie about your position or your opponents position in this day and age of the Interenet and Google and Bing.  All it does is make sure you are no longer a source for anything debatable in the political arena.

But if you are a "journalist" in the Mainstream Media, it also means you are no longer a journalist, but either a paid of unpaid shill for a cause.  In this case, while it could be debated that Matthews was some kind of biased journalist in the past, clearly now he has stepped over the line and become a Gibbs-lite for the Obama administration.  That his current employer sees no problem with that indicates they are on the payroll as well, and cannot be taken as any type of serious journalistic enterprise.

Should the Obama Administration attempt to ostracize them as they did with the "biased" news coverage of Fox News?  That is for the Obama administration to decide (but do not hold your breath).  Clearly we see that the Obama administration cares nothing for journalism, but they sure do love sycophants.


Comments
on Apr 06, 2010

I agree that it is very hard to find an unbiased factual news source.  That being said I don't think Chris Matthews has ever pretended to be unbiased.  Chris Matthews is a talk show pundit.  He expresses his opinions the same way Rush Limbaugh expresses his.  Chris Matthews is not an anchor man who is reporting straight news.  

on Apr 06, 2010

Chris Matthews is not an anchor man who is reporting straight news.

he pretends to be (and actually was at one time).  Regardless, bias is a fact of life.  Lies do not have to be, yet appear to be normal for them.

on Apr 07, 2010

It was long ago when the reporters shifted from reporting the news to creating and being part of the news.  Hard to find the truth sometimes, eh?

on Apr 07, 2010

Hard to find the truth sometimes, eh?

That is the irony of the paradigm today.  It is not hard to find the truth. 20 years ago, when Dan Rather or Peter Jennings reported something, it was taken as gospel.  But the Internet has changed that and stupid statements made in the past are easily searchable.  So I am unsure why they continue to do it.  Rather was caught in 2004. And daily the rest of the MSM are caught up in their own lies.  Yet they continue to do it.

I will state again, that I do not want to see any federal control over the press as that gets into areas that has no end until we are just another Pravda reading populace.  But at the very least, I would expect the News Organizations themselves to audit and punish such stupid behavior because these lies reflect on their integrity as well as the person doing the lying.  But it seems that as long as the lie conforms to their bias, they just do not care.

And they wonder why Fox is the most watched news channel, and that the audience for the Nightly News of the big 3 has nose dived in the last 10 years (falling 14% in the last year alone).

p.s. For Stardock.  Searchable is not a word in your dictionary.   But I do love the spell checker!

on Apr 07, 2010

Doc you touched on a big part of the problem, the MSM is unwilling to fact check their own words and when someone does it for them, it's a distortion. One of the things I like about FOX, and they do it a lot, is they let the person making the news report for themselves, through their past and present video clips. If a figure, political or otherwise, wishes to refute their own words, that's on them. This seems to drive liberals crazy, to the point of demonizing FOX. Maybe they should direct their anger at their politicians for making such statements. 

on Apr 07, 2010

The problem, as I see it anyway, is that journalism has gone the way of the Dodo and has been replaced by "opinion reporting". I get to listen to pretty much all of the news outlets via radio as I drive and frankly, the only one I hear these days that actually engages in journalism is NPR. I hear far more actual factual reporting and complete stories from them (as opposed to just spouting opinions) than any other news source.

The sad thing is, they are just giving "the people" what they really want. People these days don't want the facts, they want to be entertained. Like children.

on Apr 08, 2010

Nitro Cruiser
Doc you touched on a big part of the problem, the MSM is unwilling to fact check their own words and when someone does it for them, it's a distortion. One of the things I like about FOX, and they do it a lot, is they let the person making the news report for themselves, through their past and present video clips. If a figure, political or otherwise, wishes to refute their own words, that's on them. This seems to drive liberals crazy, to the point of demonizing FOX. Maybe they should direct their anger at their politicians for making such statements. 

I know I will never convince or educate a liberal on the difference between news and commentary, but then there is always the circle Flies.  In the case of Fox News and the average Joe, they hear the ramblings of Obama and his bots about how bad Fox is, but they see real news without distortion (I love the latest CNN clip on the Military running amok in Iraq - edited as it is and how CNN is now trying to weasel out of it). 

Fox takes great pains with its news.  And when it gets it wrong, it is fast with a mea culpa.  That is not to say it is always right, but it does carry more news news than the other outlets, and it tries to present the news in an objective way.  None of the others even attempt that these days.

But while I have no use for MSNBC (they really are bad all the way around), I do catch CNN as well because I know to look at it as if the Obama administration was reporting the news.  And that helps to understand it.  They are biased as hell, and pretend they are not.  But they do catch some news that Fox misses on occasion.

on Apr 08, 2010

MasonM
The problem, as I see it anyway, is that journalism has gone the way of the Dodo and has been replaced by "opinion reporting". I get to listen to pretty much all of the news outlets via radio as I drive and frankly, the only one I hear these days that actually engages in journalism is NPR. I hear far more actual factual reporting and complete stories from them (as opposed to just spouting opinions) than any other news source.

The sad thing is, they are just giving "the people" what they really want. People these days don't want the facts, they want to be entertained. Like children.

No, I think the ratings show that people want the news, not opinion-tainment.  That is why CNN and MSNBC combined do not have the audience Fox does.  And why the networks are down huge numbers in the past 10 years, (30 actually) and 14% in the past year alone.  In 1980 (when the USA population was a mere 200m), they were getting mid 50 million viewers.  Today (with over 300m people) they are getting barely 25m (last I saw it was bout 22m).

One reason is of course the Internet.  But during the past 20 years, Fox news viewership has steadily risen.  Which means people who want to watch the news still look for news, and not opinion.

on Apr 09, 2010

As good as it is, Fox is still an entertainment network, not a news network.  Every morning I hear a tease for an interesting sounding story "coming up".  Then I have to sit through re-hashing of the main stories for fifty minutes before coming to the teased story.  "Breaking News" turns out to be the same droning that has been going on for hours.  I am not objecting to the "blonde brigade", I like blonds, but apparently so does Fox's HR department.  Many of the interviewers on Fox are incompetent:  interrupting interviewees (NOT referring to the Obama interview...they all do it all the time), poor grammar, poor vocabulary, uninformed, and other infractions.  Having said that, I still prefer Fox to the rest of them.  I can't  watch any of the other networks.  They don't even pretend anymore...they are all the propaganda arm of the the regime.

on Apr 09, 2010

Big Fat Daddy
As good as it is, Fox is still an entertainment network, not a news network.  Every morning I hear a tease for an interesting sounding story "coming up".

I agree.  But then it is hard to keep it interesting 24x7, which they are trying to do.  But during breaking news, and major stories, that is where people turn to.

Personally, I do not even check the local news for weather any longer.  It is easier to just check the web.

Many of the interviewers on Fox are incompetent: interrupting interviewees (NOT referring to the Obama interview...they all do it all the time), poor grammar, poor vocabulary, uninformed, and other infractions.

Having grown up with Huntley and Brinkley, Cronkite, and Howard K. Smith, I do remember when at least the anchors had tele-presence.  And could ennunciate and read their papers correctly.  Perhaps it is just the number of anchors we have now that thins the talent.

But the biggest turn off is again the pontification of their opinions.  It is like we should believe as they do because they get paid big bucks!  That condescending is just too much to take, especially when you can get the news from 10 different sources on the web (with Youtube for any video you need).

As for those "coming ups", in the past I would sit through ti to see why the latest health scare was going to kill you.  But now?  If it is really that big, I have already read about it on the web.