farson135 said:
Flac00 said:
Actually, I'm sorry to say this but they are not as legitimate as any other source. MSNBC, maybe is on an equal level. But CNN, PBS, CBS, and such all are more legitimate than fox news. Why? Because they report the news without major bias. Yes, their editorial and commentary might be biased, but that is separate from their news reporting. Fox does not have this clear separation. Instead it is all opinion, all the time. Do you want true, real, reporting with barely any bias? Go onto the radio and listen to NPR (or at least look up WBUR online).
Sorry to say (not really) but I have to call bullshit. People get an impression of fox because of its opinion commentators (O?Reilly, Hannity, etc) but that does not mean that everyone is the same. Besides if fox is completely bias then why are there people from both the left and right invited onto their shows? Why are there so many round tables with different people and commentators? There is no such thing as news without major bias and yes that includes NPR. How about this, prove to me that fox is so much more bias than everyone else that it makes their average news stories less legitimate CNN.
Well, yes and no.
You can have news without major bias, but right now news organizations have gotten tied heavily into politics. A lot of the current crop of people involved in media got involved because they wanted to make a differance rather than to simply provide information. Hence the dissolution of things like the "equal time" standards of the past for cases when it was difficult to cover certain issues with complete neutrality.
It can also be said that news networks want to try and appeal to a viewership, as opposed to just convey information and let people make up their own desicians. By taking a set, moral stance, it creates a sort of rapport with the viewers even if it lessens the credibility of the reports in an absolute sense.
To put things into perspective, let's say that in Iraq we have a firefight between Marines and Terrorists. In the firefight the Marines kick butt, kill 12 insurgents, but a baby gets killed by a richochet that puts a bullet through a window accross the street. You report that and it's pretty dry.
To make it more interesting a network like CNN that has a "peace at any price" liberal agenda, meaning they want to stop the fighting, no matter the reasons, or what methods they use, including spin and sometimes outright disinformation. They take this story and figure the death of a baby will strike emotional chords, everyone can hate that, and it can be blamed on the US military. In a bloc of general reporting intended to lead people to think we should stop fighting and pull the military out, they will run a story that's basically "US Troops kill baby" they might mention the insurgents, but will make that the entire focus of what they go off about, and talk about how inexcusable it is, the fact that it was a richochet and the baby was nowhere near the battle, or known to be present is going to be entirely irrelevent, as will anything that might have been achieved. This story would then be followed by a piece showing the plight of the people in wartorn Iraq....
Conversely Fox News is a bit more likely to report on the same story, but focus on how US troops won a signifigant victory against these insurgents, and perhaps give names on the guys that were killed and why that's a good thing. Probably a big implication that the US military are heroes, and the war is going well. If they mention the baby at all it would probably be a brief comment about "minimal collateral damage" (since only one baby was killed... which is minor compared to say leveling 12 buildings full of people in an ongoing block to block firefight or whatever, but the point is it glosses over the details).
In both cases they are telling the same story, they are just focusing on differant aspects of it to try and form a rapport with their viewership.
As a result the guys who listen to say CNN, will call the guys who listen to Fox morons be because of the way Fox is covering up for "baby murderers", that reporting and their political preconceptions making that the most important aspect of the incident. Conversely the guys listening to Fox are liable to focus mostly on the military aspects and not really give much of a crap about the baby, if they even knew about it.
I personally tend to agree more with Fox's focus, but ultimatly I feel news can, and should be reported devoid of any of this spin. A report that says the Marines killed 12 insurgents and a baby got killed by accident in a crossfire, without any blame being nessicarly put on them or the war itself (just raw information... it happened) might be emotionless and devoid of color, but it is accurate.
I'll also say that one trick both sides use is in the way they provide their alleged "balance". See the guys controlling the network get to choose who represents
the other side of a given arguement... who they invite to be present. The slant of a network is obvious in how capable the person they pick is despite the hype. In general Fox tends to pick weak and crazy liberal representitives (and constantly get nailed for it) while networks like CNN pick the weakest and most insane representitives to represent the right wing side. Thus on CNN you might have the opposing view of something like Gay Rights represented by "Reverend Fire N. Brimstone" who has a congregation of 50,000 in the bible belt as his major qualification but little in the way of televised speech experience giving you the impression that everyone in the right wing, and anyone who doesn't support say gay marriage, is a religious nutjob because of what CNN chooses to show. On the other side Fox does the same thing by picking the most absurd and unprepared people to say speak in defense of pulling our troops out of Iraq.
There is no solution to it, unless the goverment decides to pass laws limiting what people can do with private informational plaforms... but allowing the goverment to directly regulate things like the news is liable to result in even worse problems.
Ideally I think what we need is emotionless newsbots, with raw information gathered by the field reporters, but the end result we hear being pure information put into context by a computer using it's databases and complete volume of information obtained up until that point. Sure, it probably wouldn't be a lot fun to watch the news, but it would solve a lot of arguements if there was enough security to prevent it from being tampered with.
