CanadianGuy

Wow you are no doubt the biggest "Dumb A$$" I have ever accidently come across. Itiot

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I'm from good old Alberta a completly blue province Oh and P.S. blue is conservative up here in Canada
CanadianGuy's Political Profile:
Overall: 70% Conservative, 30% Liberal
Social Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal
Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

cnredd

You haven't read anything by 26 X World Champs or Billo Really yet...

CanadianGuy

Actually I was so pissed off I didn't read anything else. Why?

PopeyeAtheist

I can't help it, I just gotta ask. Is there not one Liberal person in Alberta? I hear it is beautiful there. I am a so called liberal, I'm moving there so you have at least one of us. LOL

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What Would Jesus Bomb?
What Would Gandhi Bomb?
What Would Buddha Bomb?
What Would George W Bomb? Anything He Wants To!

argexpat

RightatNYU

Hmm...OK, first, this is your arbitrary definition, not the definition, right? Or have you liberal media conspiracy theorists gotten together and decided on this as the official definition? (I prefer this definition.) But lets look at your definition: It's still predicated on arbitrary assumptions. What defines an average voter? A Democrat won the 1992, 1996 and 2000 popular votes (if not the election). A Democrat got 49 percent of the vote in 2004. Republicans may control both houses of Congress, but as a percentage of the population, Democrats still represent a majority of Americans. So, it seems to me an "average voter" could just as easily be a liberal as a conservative. And how exactly do you determine that something is "left of" this ambiguous, undefined group of voters? What criteria determine leftness? And are these criteria definitive, or like the rest of your assertion, arbitrary? The fact is you can’t really define what you mean by liberal, except “that which you arbitrarily decide is liberal,” which is a tautology and simply proves my point that the claim of a liberal media bias is specious and not able to be proved.


In other words, an entire universe of outlets spanning every conceivable medium. And this vast array of corporate media somehow has a liberal bias? But let’s look at each one:

Print

How do you prove a liberal bias in print? I live in downtown Seattle, the bluest part of a very blue state. My neighborhood bookstore (one of several corporate chains) carries every major conservative author: Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, O’Reilly, Bennet, Safire, the Swift Boat numbskulls, books trashing the Clintons, etc., and probably a bunch I’ve never even heard of. There are books praising Christianity, the military, the Founding Fathers, American history, and on and on. Not to mention I can pick up the latest issue of National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, Guns & Ammo, and several other conservative periodicals. A conservative journalist has a regular column in the Seattle Weekly, our decidedly liberal alternative newspaper (who also recently got a cover story about being conservative in a liberal city). I suppose you could go through and count up all the conservative authors versus the liberal ones, and you’d probably find more liberal books, which is exactly what you’d do if you want to sell books in a liberal city.

There are dozens of publishers who cater to conservative tastes. Are there more liberal publishers than conservative ones? You should try to find out. But again, we’d be back to the question of what defines a liberal versus a conservative publisher or author, or newspaper or anything for that matter, which, as I argued above, you can’t do.

Radio

Dominated by right-wing blowhards. This is the one medium that unarguably has a conservative bias. Limbaugh gets beamed in free of charge to the liberals in Seattle five days a week, week after week, year after year, but to get Michael Moore I have to actually go purchase a ticket to his movie.

Internet

Please.

That leaves TV

This is really what you liberal media conspiracy theorists mean when you say “the media.” And you can’t possibly mean all of TV. From what I can gather from the anecdotal evidence that’s always presented by you lib-bi-med-cons, it’s TV news, specifically CBS and CNN, that gets your hackles up. Let’s forget for a moment that TV is the absolutely worst place to get your news (unless you want to see footage of that missing pretty white prom queen du jour’s parents pleading to the cameras on an endless loop, which you can now get on the Internet anyway). Why anyone watches TV news is beyond me. If you were to boil down an average TV newscast into print, it wouldn’t fill up the front page of your daily newspaper, which is why it’s so succeptible to charges of bias from the left and the right. It’s hard to be balanced in two paragraphs.

But I digress. Here again, to prove bias of any kind you’d have to employ yet another arbitrary, rickety standard (like what adjectives Dan Rather uses). As for the rest of TV, on Sundays, my cable, that I pay good money for, carries several channels of Christian broadcasting, including the insufferably pompous crackpot jackass Pat Robertson, as well as a slew of other Christian flim-flam artists. The History Channel is basically the Glorification of War channel, A&E is the Pentagon Home Shopping Network. I get Fox News. I flip around and there are conservative commentators all over my TV; Carlson, Scarborough, Robertson, Novak, Brooks and the Wall Street Journal editorial board (on PBS!) But do I rant about a conservative bias on my cable? I could, but I don’t. Because I wouldn’t be able to prove it either.



Like sycphantically reporting verbatim the Bush administrations now discredited justifications for war? Or the fake balance employed by the press in which they would match an egregious Bush/Cheney lie with a relatively minor Kerry/Edwards exaggeration, rather than exposing the Bush/Cheney lie, which is what they’re supposed to do. If this is a liberal media, this is the worst liberal media ever!

Still, I’d pay money to see someone try to quantify bias under this definition.

The truth is that “the media” is so broad and varied, encompassing hundreds of media corporations, and whose content is determined by so many different factors, that to claim it has a liberal bias is not just specious and unfounded, but belies either ignorance or sophistry.

First, if true, this is circumstantial evidence and doesn’t prove bias. But again, left leaning by whose standard? Talk to actual liberals and they’ll rant you a blue streak about how reporters are lazy, sycophantic stenographers to power who are loathe to p!ss off their establishment sources and corporate bosses. They don’t see a liberal media, they see a corporate media biased toward corporate interests.

Maybe a relatively low-paying, high-stress journalism career just doesn’t appeal to Republicans. Or maybe journalism attracts people with a distrust of the establishment. Or maybe being educated and curious and uncovering the truth makes you a liberal. Again, this doesn’t prove anything.



Hmm, last I checked, George Soros was a successful investor and philanthropist (who has spent millions of his own money supporting democratic causes in Russia and Eastern Europe), not a media mogul.

But I ask you again. Why would the capitalist plutocrats who own the media hire all these liberals to begin with, who would seem to be antagonistic toward corporate interests. Are they just stupid? Wouldn’t they be better served by hiring Republicans to promote a corporate friendly ideology? But more importantly, why don’t Republicans and right-wing culture warriors admit that it’s the corporate media that has a liberal bias and is corrupting our youth and leading to the downfall of western civilization and blah blah blah?



I actually did, and the ones I saw were all predicated on an arbitrary definition of liberal and media, which just proves my point.

But Limbaugh is nakedly biased because he claims he’s just counteracting the secret liberal conspiracy in the media, which pretends to be objective, which as I’ve shown above, is a bunch of claptrap. “Ditto” all his imitators and Fox News.

Conservatives decry a phantom liberal media; liberals rant about the corporate media. At least the liberal rant is based in documented fact.

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Mikkel

I have to throw in my two cents here; It was mentioned a while back that the reporters who write the stories are 9 to 1 left-leaning. But I would have to say that since almost all media is now corporately owned, the majority of owners are right-leaning.

If you have read Timothy E Cook's book, "Governing with the News," he discusses the role of the media in the political process. He speculates that, by today's standards the media is essentially it's own branch of government. He says that the real power of the media is to set the national agenda. Think about it- Clinton scandal, Rove-gate, WMD's in Iraq, etc. If these things didn't get the media's full attention, they may have simply gone away with the rest of the wash (the jury's still out on Rove-Gate. That actually might go away because of the Rogers nomination. A perfect example for you).

Anyway, the point being this. Ultimately the power in the media comes from what they report on, not how they report on it. Regardless of which reporters write the stories, the bottom line comes down to the fact that the corporate owners decide what stories to run.

To sum up:
-the media's real power comes from which stories it chooses to cover
-the coverage of certain stories is decided by corporate owners
-corporate owners are (by and large) more conservative than, say, journalists
-Journalists may be slightly liberal, but how they write the stories has little relevance to the matter at hand.
Conclusion: Journalists have little to no real power when it comes to the influence of the media, therefore their political views have little to no relevance over what bias the media may have.

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In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
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CanadianGuy

lol well there are plenty don't worry all of my friends but 3 and my uncle and aunt are liberal but all the ridings in Alberta, except one this year stupid Edmonton, are won by the conservatives.

cnredd

Nice logic...My turn to try it...

Using only your genius analysis, I will now prove that
because my dad was an alcoholic, Hillary Clinton is a man...

My dad used to drink.
My dad would beat the dickens out of me.
Charles Dickens wrote "David Copperfield"
David Copperfield is a magician that makes people disappear.
The Bermuda Triangle makes people disappear.
People put their business addresses in Bermuda to save taxes.
Taxes are one of the facts of life.
"The Facts of Life" starred George Clooney.
George Clooney is a man with short hair.
Hillary Clinton has short hair.

Conclusion:Hillary Clinton is a man.

CanadianGuy

lol that was awesome

cnredd

Thank you...sometimes it just comes to me...