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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (46277)	7/21/1999 6:37:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Given the choice between liberal and conservative, he'd prefer liberal, right? No, no. You don't understand his game. If the newspapers are really liberal, but he can persuade people to believe that they are really conservative, or even centrist, he can redefine liberal as being conservative or centrist, and then his radical views become either centrist or liberal, which makes them more acceptable and offers a chance of persuading more people to believe that he is somewhere close to the mainstream instead of out on the radical left wing. Basically, he's trying to shift the bell curve leftward to move the center more toward his position. EDIT: Actually, on 2nd thought, he's leaving the Bell Curve where it is but trying to shift the definition of the x-axis so that the center of the Bell Curve seems to be much further left than it actually is.

To: Ilaine who wrote (46277)	7/21/1999 11:45:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Blue, just because someone is a Marxist (which I doubt Herman is, btw), does not mean that one should automatically discount everything he says. I don't think you are doing that, but I get the feeling Christopher is coming awfully close to it. It reminds me of the Marxists I knew in my early, early youth. In any debate, their ultimate argument was always to say: "Well, you are just expressing a bourgeois point of view." Translation: since I was a bourgeoise, anything I might say was automatically suspect, or rather, downright wrong. For the record, Herman does hold a PhD from Berkeley, but since he is Professor Emeritus of Finance at Wharton, I doubt whether he studied at Berkeley during its radical years. He has written very widely on the media, most recently (1997) co-authoring a book entitled "Global Media." A collection of his essays -- The Myth of the Liberal Media -- is due out this year. And unlike Christopher, I do not think Herman is at all interested in making himself look more "mainstream." He knows he isn't mainstream, and he doesn't want to be. He strikes me as an adherent of that good old American radical adage: "the only good cause is a lost cause." Although I find general world-view a little too Chomskyite-paranoid for my personal taste, I think the concrete information he relays in his article about folks like Robert Murdoch is probably pretty accurate. You might also check out some of his references, especially the one to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. fair.org That "media watchdog group" may be "left wing," but it is every bit as scathing about the mainstream media as any right-wing media watchdog group could be, including the one Michael (Cummings) likes to cite: mediaresearch.org Take a look, for example, at FAIR's denunciations of the Clinton Administration's policy in the Kosovo conflict, and of media coverage of the conflict there: fair.org And take a look at this article in particular (blasting media's failure to cover the Albanian separatists' attacks on Serbs that led Milosevich to suspend the region's autonomy in the first place): fair.org Joan