Not Without Some Tredipation

Click To Open - NSFW, 
and not for everybody

UpChuck Todd Rides Again

This one's making the rounds big time, so why not pile on a little?



Todd's main "point" is that if he barks at the politicians who make statements that are obviously untrue, then those politicians won't come on the show again.  As long as he doesn't call 'em on their bullshit, he'll always have a steady stream of "News Makers" on the show in order to attract lotsa viewers who'll absorb some of the enlightening messages from all those ads about Lockheed's F35 and Raytheon's new E-Surveilance Software and the killer drones from General Atomics (yes, that's a real company).

That's what makes sense now.  That's what passes for reasoning.  Chuck Todd doesn't want people who don't tell the truth to stop coming on his TV show.

I'm not big on arguing from a strictly binary position, but this one's kinda hard to avoid: Chuck Todd wants people to lie to us, on his show.

What exactly would be the harm in keeping liars off your show, UpChuck?

Stating The Obvious

Because sometimes, ya just gotta say it straight out.

From No More Mister Nice Blog:

This study has been conducted five times since 1971. The percentage of reporters identifying as Democrats has dropped, too, though not as much, while the number calling themselves independents has increased. Yes, the right thinks this proves the existence of media bias.

You know what could really turn this around? Imagine if right-wing kids could watch conservative journalists practice in real time. What if they could actually see journalistic conservatism modeled for them that way? How different everything would be if -- I know this sounds crazy -- a conservative channel were the highest-rated news source on American television. Yeah, I know -- crazy, right?

The existence of Fox News, and the fact that it's extremely successful in the ratings, should be an inspiration to right-wing wannabe journalists eveywhere. It isn't, though, for two reasons:

First, nobody at Fox News actually practices journalism. Nobody digs out stories, finds scoops, offers depth and perspective and background on what's happening in America and the world. It's all advocacy. There's no reporting.

Second, the Fox party line is that journalism is evil, even though, ostensibly, Fox is in the business of journalism. If the central news source in the right-wing universe tells its audience every day that the news business is in league with the devil, well, you can't be surprised when righty kids don't want to turn Satanic.

And my first reaction is, "well duh".  But if it's really all that obvious, then more people would be completely hip to the scam of Wingnut Media, and we wouldn't have anywhere near the problems with Deliberate Ignorance that we have in this joint right now, and we'd also have something that more closely resembles a Functioning Government.

About That Liberal Press Thing

Couldn't remember if I'd posted the graphic when it came out, so just in case I missed it, here it is.

And BTW, this isn't some kind of outlier.  The basics that lead to these results don't ever change more than a few percentage points.

I remember Pew doing the same thing after the 2000 election, when the heat was really on - seemed like the nutters couldn't stop howling about how the press was constantly trying to put Gore in the White House.  Well, guess what, boys and girls?  Pew's research in 2001 showed a bias in favor of Bush positives and Gore negatives in every major newspaper - it all worked out to be something like 7-5 against Gore.  And of course it got practically no play outside of Academe.

Guess what else?  The effect this slanted coverage has on our thinking actually has a name: "Media Priming", and while it's news to me, it's been around for a very long time.

Here's a fun little appetizer from Melissa Dahl at msnbc.com:

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

And from a guy named Scott London, a good breakdown of "Framing":

In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems.

Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a 'context of no context.'"

--more--

In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."

There are no accidents when it comes to what goes on in our politics.  It's being carefully scripted for us, and we have to find ways to countervail it.

Shocker In Ohio

From a local NPR affiliate:



Listening to this, I got the feeling that I was hearing the famous Left-Leaning Bias that 'conservatives' are always carping about.  But when I listen to the national shows on NPR (eg: All Things Considered), there's nothing even approaching this.  The Repubs have done such a thorough job of brow-beating CPB, nobody has the balls to say anything bold on the air. All we ever get is the notion that every side of every issue is perfectly valid, and oh yeah - "both sides do it".

Am I to understand that some random 3rd string nobody on public radio in Ohio is actually The Liberal Media?  And how long before the anti-media harpies swoop in to pluck out his eyes?