…

Therefore, our advice is for you to buy an up-to-date cable descrambler from your cable TV company….

I’m not debating that some people in the news are biased, what I am debating is that journalists can report fairly on issues while maintaining a political opinion like everyone else in the country.

Nonfactor on June 22, 2007 at 12:32 AM

Sure, in theory. Support your open-minded view of the objectivity and talent of journalists by citing all of the 90+% conservative-staffed news sources that you regularly go to for information which you then receive with little skepticism.

An MSNBC study found that journalists’ political donations are 9 to 1 to Democrats and liberals. Journalists responded by vowing……

I’m not touching this conspiracy theory with a 10 foot pole, but I will agree that news is being selected–as it always has been, but consider the editors position. Reporting on genocide is millions of times more important than reporting on whatever slight progress is happening in southern Sudan, and you couldn’t possibly know the editors ulterior motives (unless you have proof of that too).

Nonfactor on June 22, 2007 at 12:32 AM

So, why wasn’t 10 years of Northern Agression against the South reported in the MSM? When the Northerner’s were fought to a draw, they focussed their attention to Darfur.
How would I know that reporters sitting on a barge on the Nile River accompanying women and children being resettled in their traditional areas, following Africa’s biggest cattle drive in history, happen to answer to a direct question that their editors don’t print stories unless they are Darfur? Hmm? I either made it up from whole cloth or got it straight from someone who was there and heard it. Which is the more likely answer if I am going to have the cheek to print that statement on a national blog? Which, if I am not being truthful, could come back to haunt me later? If the reporters who are selling these stories are saying the editors buy only Darfur, what’s going on here? Selection of the news. If the editors were so all fired up about genocide, they would have been just as attentive to Southern Sudan’s millions being killed, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam …OH! Christians!
Are you aware that the Government of Sudan just threatened to cut off the world’s major supply of gum arabica, an essential ingrediant in the formulation of Coca-Cola and soft drinks? Khartoum is threating disrupting the world’s supply of Coke.
Are you also aware that the Southern Sudanese countered this threat immediately with the promise to insure that America would continue to be provided with what they smoothly renamed, gum AFRICA?

If you know nothing about a subject, have the grace to acknowledge you don’t know instead of insinuating the person is making it up. I don’t comment on the current state of Costa Rican high tech investment,and ten million other subjects I don’t know anything about, but if someone comes on the board and says they are familiar with it, I’ll consider fairly what they say, EVEN if it upsets my pre-conceived views. You learn a lot more that way. It’s called “open-minded.”

The J schools openly promote “change the world.”

Really? I assume you can back this statement up, and then somehow relate it to the donations of a particular person affecting their reporting of certain issues. I’m not debating that some people in the news are biased, what I am debating is that journalists can report fairly on issues while maintaining a political opinion like everyone else in the country.

News is being selected – Darfur is only being used as a lever to pry US troops out of Iraq, Southern Sudan, which also suffered horrendous years of ethinic cleansing and genocide, is not perceived as useful to that purpose, hence no coverage.

naliaka on June 21, 2007 at 9:00 PM

I’m not touching this conspiracy theory with a 10 foot pole, but I will agree that news is being selected–as it always has been, but consider the editors position. Reporting on genocide is millions of times more important than reporting on whatever slight progress is happening in southern Sudan, and you couldn’t possibly know the editors ulterior motives (unless you have proof of that too).

Thinking that those guys are even “news” when they are obviously “commentary”, is an even larger mistake.