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| 2004/6/9-10 [Politics/Domestic/RepublicanMedia] UID:30702 Activity:insanely high |
6/9 Orson Scott Card talks about Media Bias (and admits his own)
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-05-30-1.html
\_ The only so-called 'media bias' is the fascist right wing owned
nutters who have stolen our first amendment rights and are in
cahoots with bushco to destroy the rest of our rights. Well, except
for the second amendment which is the only right you never really
had. That right is the only one reserved for States, not
individuals.
\_ Is there a right to wear a tinfoil hat?
\_ Not enumerated in the Constitution but generally speaking,
you have the right to wear a tinfoil hat so long as you are
not causing needless harm to someone else which seems
difficult to do by merely wearing a tinfoil hat. So, yes.
\_ But if you craft your tinfoil hat to focus the sun's rays
so as to be a weapon, that's not permitted, unless it's
covered by the second amendment.
\_ The Second Amendment doesn't actually cover anything.
It's the only "Right" in the Bill of Rights that
provides no rights. So no worries! Wear your laser
hat without fear of violating the SA!
\_ Your tinfoil hat violates my first amendment right
to freely practice my religion of worshiping your
giant bald skull.
\_ It's still bald. It just has a tinfoil hat on
it, the second amendment still provides no rights
and your first amendment rights are in full effect
so we're doing ok.
\_ The founders thought to grant rights to 'states'?
\_ No, they thought to grant specific powers to the Fed, the
rest of the powers to the states and all of that is over-
ridden by the bill of rights which is for the people, except
for the second amendment which doesn't grant any rights to
anyone at all.
\_ Come on. Even George Will and William Safire understand that Fox
News is a right-wing propaganda machine. You hear all the time
about researchers being fired from Fox for not toeing the Murdoch
line. You don't hear about this crap at the so-called liberal
media outlets. Given the supposed saturation of the market by the
liberal media, you'd think someone would step forward.
\_ Personally, I'm not as enamored with Fox News as he is, but
can you argue that that articles he details are not
examples of media bias?
\_ they are *individual* examples of biased *articles*. He makes
no attempt to generalize them to "the media", other than to
say things like "on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get
television reportage that gives us at least two sides of
every important issue." This statement alone is reason to
discount the entire article. -tom
\_ Can you disprove his statement? I doubt it. Unlike you,
I watch Fox, CNN, and a few other 3 letter news stations
so I have a basic upon which to comment. Unlike you. Fox
does a fair amount of rah-rah USA! but it gives the bad as
well. Watching the other stations you'd think this was
Stalinist Russia and the end of the world was near.
\_ Did you read the end of the article?
\_ you mean where he follows up that statement with one
about how fanatics are convinced they're in sole
possession of virtue and truth? Yes, I thought it was
quite amusing. -tom
\_ could someone remind me why anyone cares about what I
have to say about anything? -tom
\_ CFR (Call For References) on this. Where have George Will and
William Safire stated that Fox News is a "right-wing propaganda
machine"? -emarkp
\_ could someone remind me why anyone cares about what Orson Scott Card
\_ You won't get a reference because they never said any such
thing.
\_ could someone remind me why anyone cares about what Holbub
has to say about anything? -tom
\_ I think he says interesting things. I don't always agree,
but he's usually interesting and he expresses himself well.
Also, his articles usually result in more interesting things
on the motd, so I post them.
\_ and you blow away edits while doing that. good job. -tom
\_ Wasn't me, dummy. I use motdedit. A bunch of posts
were erased, and I replaced mine, because I keep what
I post around in case someone erases it. You get a
twink point.
\_ Anyone who counts tweak points needs to grow up.
\_ Fox News prime time: ~ 1.3 million
CNN prime time: ~ 0.9 million
broadcast news prime ime: 30 million
Extremely well documented (liberal) media bias on guns:
http://www.johnlott.org
He was on cspan a week ago but unfortunately segment not available
online.
\_ bias against guns isn't liberal, it's intelligent.
\_ that's biased! Besides, guns aren't the problem, they're
perfectly safe until people get involved. We should be
banning people, not guns!
\_ Ban evil! -- ilyas
\_ John Lott has been caught making up data on many occasions.
http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issues/?page=lott |
| www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-05-30-1.html Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card May 30, 2004 The Fanatics Who Tell Us the News When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN. And if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future. Now, about a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows -- remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing? Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. Scott Collins, author of Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, thinks he has the answer. It's not what Fox claims -- that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage). I'm painting Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish Crazy Like a Fox and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which is deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news -- they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "We report, you decide" and "fair and balanced" -- they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News. So when Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by -- and blame the messenger. Testing for Bias This morning -- the Sunday before Memorial Day -- I picked up the Asheville Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the press service wires. In a story on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror." Bulldog Journalism Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point. The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it. This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies -- at least politically. Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton (Dem. NY), making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs." Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media. The American Flag The only difference between Fox News and all the other news media is they admit that on some issues they take sides and they allow the conservative side to be heard -- without contempt. Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Come on, prior to 9/11 -- and even after it -- they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. When a nation is at war -- which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are -- we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes -- and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness. In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word "terrorist." Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story). Suspected Islamic militants -- this pussy-footing appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But, presumably, they are only suspected of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or -- who knows? That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust: Why in the world is there any need for the newswriters to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on? This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing: Fox News makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us" -- in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us. Political Correctness Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In today's Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news." In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which AP writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. After summarizing Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Obviously, it was Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Cosby was "news" again -- ... |
| www.johnlott.org Now, in his stunning new book, The Bias against Guns, Lott shows how liberals bury pro-gun facts out of sheer bias against the truth. With irrefutable evidence, Lott shoots gun critics down and gives you the information you need to win arguments with those who want to ban guns. Praise for The Bias against Guns "If you want the truth the anti-gunners don't want you to know... In this follow-on book, The Bias Against Guns, Lott continues the struggle, and responds to his critics, motivated by his strong conviction that analysis and evidence must, finally, win the day." "--Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics "As a gun-toting rock 'n' roll star all my life, I have lived firsthand the outrageous media and Hollywood bias against good guys with guns forever. marshals unimpeachable evidence on how the anti-gun crusade, driven by sins of omission and commission, might actually be costing many more lives than it saves. That gun ownership might bring social benefits as well as costs is a story we do not often see in the press, and Lott here explores why. The reason for using this is that the county level data involves a much larger set of control variables than can readily be handled by other statistical packages. |
| www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issues/?page=lott Special Reports CONCEALED HANDGUN FRAUD: EXPOSING JOHN LOTT The NRA has long used John Lott's work, "More Guns, Less Crime" to push for enactment of concealed handgun laws (CCW) that force police to let almost anyone carry a concealed handgun in public. But as more scholarly researchers examine Lott's work, serious questions about Lott's findings, and even his personal credibility, are emerging. Exhaustive New Study Directly Refutes Lott's "Research" Professor John Donohue of Stanford has recently completed an exhaustive new study that examined crime data across the country - updating the research that John Lott claimed showed concealed handgun laws reduce crime. Professor Donohue's study, published by the Brookings Institute, directly refutes Lott's findings and demonstrates that the concealed handgun laws (CCW) pushed by Lott and the NRA most likely caused more crime rather than the reduction in crime claimed by Lott. While John Lott's study covered only a short period of time, during which urban crime was already rising, Professor Donohue studied the longer impact of CCW laws. Professor Donohue joins a long list of respected scholars who have debunked Lott's study as flawed and misleading. pdf Lott Co-Author Admits to Gaping Flaws in Study Professor David Mustard, the co-author of Lott's study, has conceded that there were serious flaws in their study - flaws that seriously undermine the conclusions. Mustard was deposed under oath in the Ohio concealed handgun case Klein v Leis. Mustard admitted that: 1) the study "omitted variables" which could explain that changes in the crime rate are due to reasons other than changes in CCW laws, and 2) the study did not account for many of the major factors that Mustard believes affect crime including crack cocaine, wealth, drugs and alcohol use, and police practices such as community policing. These serious flaws completely undermine Lott's findings. Lott Claims Computer Ate His Controversial CCW Survey In his published research analysis, John Lott has claimed that a 1997 survey he conducted found that concealed handguns deterred crime without being fired an astoundingly high 98% of the time. That claim allowed Lott to explain away the fact that extremely few self-defense uses of handguns are ever reported. But when scholars began questioning his survey results, Lott began a series of evasions that culminated in the claim that his computer had crashed and he had "lost" all the data. The University of Chicago, where Lott claims he conducted the study, has no record of it being conducted so Lott began claiming that he funded it himself (and kept no records) and that he used students to make the survey calls (though no students have been identified who participated). Lott is now facing serious questions about whether he fabricated the entire survey - raising serious questions about his ethics and credibility. html Lott Caught Posing as a Student to Praise Himself and His Work Lott has recently confessed that to counter growing skepticism from researchers examining his data, he repeatedly posed as a fictitious former student of himself named "Mary Rosh" to praise and defend himself in online forums and debates with researchers. Lott has been doing this since 1999 but was caught when an internet sleuth was curious about "Mary's" extreme defense of Lott and traced the "Mary Rosh" identity back to John Lott's own computer. It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well. He explains things in an understandable commonsense way. I have loaned out my copy a dozen times and while it may have taken some effort to get people started on the book, once they read it no one was disappointed. If you want an emotional book, this is not the book for you. book that will explain the facts in a straightforward and clear way, this is the book to get. This is by far the largest most comprehensive study on crime, let alone on gun control." Mary Rosh Experts Challenge Lott's Research Numerous experts have published peer-reviewed articles exposing flaws in Lott's research. Professors at John Hopkins School of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Emory, Carnegie-Mellon University, Northwestern, Stanford and Yale have written articles challenging Lott's research and conclusions. deserves failing marks for pressing policy makers to use his results despite the substantial questions that have been raised about his research. Lott's results do not provide credible evidence one way or the other." laws are increasing crime, rather than decreasing crime" said Professor John Donohue of Stanford who described Lott's work as "deeply flawed" and "misguided." While we have great respect for the nation's teachers, the inevitable consequence of Lott's proposal would be terrifying instances of lost or stolen guns circulating in our schools. Imagine a new "prank" in school, "lets steal the teacher's gun." Adding Minorities and Women to Police Causes Crime to Increase Lott claims that violent crime goes up when police departments increase diversity by adding women and African American men to the police force. Lott claims violent crime increases by seven percent for every one percent increase in African American police officers. Ironically, Lott believes crime goes down by seven percent if untrained private citizens, mostly white men, walk around with hidden handguns due to weak CCW laws. "allowing wealthy people to do what on first glance may seem like 'subverting' the legal system can be efficient." |