Funny political pictures

[glatt]

I don't know. I've been in fast paced situations before where you have a lot to get done in a short amount of time and you just do the best you can. You wind up making some mistakes. You need a fresh pair of eyes to catch mistakes. And those eyes need enough time to actually look at stuff carefully.

I hate 24 hour news. I only see it in hotels when I'm eating my breakfast in the lobby. You can see how they put that crap together very rapidly. And even if there is nothing happening in the world, they still have to fill the air time.

There's some quote out there about not ever assuming that maliciousness is at play when mere incompetence can be used to explain the same problem. I think Fox is incompetent when they screw up their charts. I don't think they are malicious. I also think that to raise the level of quality up to the point that there are almost no mistakes, you would need to double or triple the size of their staff. You need one person to check the work of the other. I'd be surprised if they can afford that.

Fox news and CNN should both be treated as fast and sloppy and held to a lower standard than news programs that have all day to produce a half an hour.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by glatt

I don't know. I've been in fast paced situations before where you have a lot to get done in a short amount of time and you just do the best you can. You wind up making some mistakes. You need a fresh pair of eyes to catch mistakes. And those eyes need enough time to actually look at stuff carefully.

And Fox can't afford it. They're understaffed, I'm sure.

Oh my dog.

We make mistakes in any areas, consistently, we put in check and balances. We keep making the same mistakes, our ass is out of here.

I love Americans, we're so ready to settle for mediocre, unless it's something sitting in our own living room, then we want perfection.

Again, I'll ask you: if it's just the occasional mistake why is it in our faces all the time? If the other side of the 24 hr newses are having the same issue, why don't we see stuff about that out there very often?

You guys are funny. I love you guys. Really.

[Spexxvet]

If fox were truly making making mistakes, I would expect roughly half of the mistakes would be on the side benefitting democrats and roughly half would be on the side of the republicans. I do not watch fox news channel. Has anyone caught sight of a site that cites instances where fnc made a mistake that made democrats look better? Or have you had that experience yourself?

[Undertoad]

Let's do it this way IM: I will turn on Fox News right now and watch it for an hour. How many mistakes will I see? Not biased, one-sided stories meant to fire up its viewership... just mistakes?

I expect you figure I'll see one right away, because that's all FN airs?

A skeptic might entertain the idea that they do these types of things on purpose

A skeptic will use direct observation to determine truth.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A skeptic will use direct observation to determine truth.

And what direct observation tells you that fox is truly making mistakes?

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Let's do it this way IM: I will turn on Fox News right now and watch it for an hour. How many mistakes will I see? Not biased, one-sided stories meant to fire up its viewership... just mistakes?

I expect you figure I'll see one right away, because that's all FN airs?



A skeptic will use direct observation to determine truth.

Hello UT--

We've had discussions in this area before. I have LOTS of complaints about Fox's behavior, I'd like to pick on this one just now.

I contend that your very normal, regular speech used in the quote I've made above is way most folks view them; Fox *News*, a reporting of facts, "Here's the news". You used it that way in your sentence (to my ears) and in my experience, most other people see it the same way, that they're a news reporting outfit. Journalists, recording and relaying what is happening.

In the next breath you put a qualification on your remarks excluding some kinds of things that, once again, normal, regular people will experience; what you expect to experience, notably bias and one-sided stories broadcast with the intent to foment shit.

Maybe there will be mistakes, maybe not.

My point here is that they have stolen the meaning of the word "News", in the best Orwellian style, and made it into the opposite of what it really means. They are the cuckoo of television, laying this alien egg in the nest and having others expend the energy to deal with it.

They call themselves News, but there's much more attention and energy put into bias and opinionmaking than straight news. That's not a mistake. That's deliberate, and it is misleading.

Edited to add:

This is no semantic nit picking on my part. They actively, vigorously portray themselves as NEWS. Witness their taglines, so frequently repeated they're idioms in our language now:

Fair and Balanced

and

We Report, You Decide.

The first one is an outright lie. The second one is more subtle, but just as pernicious, they may well report, but the decisions will be based from a limited pool of information.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by BigV

My point here is that they have stolen the meaning of the word "News", in the best Orwellian style, and made it into the opposite of what it really means. They are the cuckoo of television, laying this alien egg in the nest and having others expend the energy to deal with it.

Brilliant.

The Murdoch machine laid a similar egg in Britain's print media. They couldn't do it quite the same way with television news as the tv news is waaaay more heavily regulated than print media.

Unfortunately the end result isnt just that everyone else expends energy dealing with the cuckoo.

What actually happens is a race to the bottom. At least, that's certainly what happened in the British tabloids. Murdoch's papers changed the way tabloids worked. Eventually they all ended up scraping the barrell.

[Undertoad]

I'll ask you: if it's just the occasional mistake why is it in our faces all the time?

Two reasons... combined

1) It is in your face all the time, because of the streams that you have chosen to watch. Your Dwellars, your FB Friends, and whatever other sources you have, are a biased group chosen by you. They impart to you biases that you are not even aware of. (Again, not just you, but everyone is subject to this very big problem.)

2) http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51949.html

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”

In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.

There are equally brazen groups on the right attempting to "wage war" through selective editing and sound-biting, but none that I know of who focus so thoroughly on one source, as MMfA does to Fox.

[Undertoad]

The hour is up. The last hour of FN had these numbers of different graphics.

1 statistics
4 biographical detail on commentator
1 quote
2 poll results

None had any obvious mistakes.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The hour is up. The last hour of FN had these numbers of different graphics.

1 statistics
4 biographical detail on commentator
1 quote
2 poll results

None had any obvious mistakes.

Your first step in determining the Poisonn distribution

[infinite monkey]

Many of my FB friends, and family, are quite conservative, actually.

Now, I think that this extrapolates to either 1) the 'other' side (which is only to say those who might be laughing at similar posts about CNN) from me would never mention such mistakes (which we know isn't true) or those mistakes don't exist in numbers big enough for it to be so noticed.

There are plenty of people who would jump on the 'point and laugh at CNN' wagon if such mistakes were so prolific for them. (I keep saying CNN but I have no idea what the 'liberal' 24 hour news is.

There are plenty of folks here on the Cellar, Dwellars, who would LOVE it.

My face isn't thatt selective, I can't decide what's being thrown in it all the time.

War on Fox my big fat ass.

[infinite monkey]

It's eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevilllllllllllllllllll, is what it is. :devilsmilie:

[Undertoad]

If fox were truly making making mistakes, I would expect roughly half of the mistakes would be on the side benefitting democrats and roughly half would be on the side of the republicans.

I would expect it to be 75-25 on the R side.

It's a biased organization, and the nature of mistakes is such that bias will be shown in its mistakes.

Take the bad graph showing unemployment trends. If one is biased to expect unemployment didn't decline in the last report, one is less likely to notice the mistake that the graph failed to show the decline.

[Undertoad]

Biggie, I swear to you on my life and my love of it, that after a year of being a relentless news hound following all channels 12 hours a day and soaking it in...

what you describe is ALL THE CHANNELS

every single source of any type of information at all has a BIAS because all PEOPLE have a BIAS

the nature of bias is that they may not even be aware of it, just as you and all of us are unaware of our biases; or more likely, they will think of their bias as being naturally correct, and therefore think they cannot be biased.

but to make a larger point of it
who will we get news from?
the biggest story of 2008
John Edwards
was having an affair while his wife was dying of cancer
with a woman he put on his campaign payroll
who was a bimbo of the tallest order
and eventually this led to a baby
whom Edwards could not have supported if President
or nominated D Candidate for President
without a paper trail documenting a scandal
so bad it could have taken down his party in short order

...and this was exclusively reported by the National Enquirer.

Trust the National Enquirer? Of course not!

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

snip--

what you describe is ALL THE CHANNELS

--snip

Here's what I have to say about THAT!