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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (18439)	12/4/2003 10:17:37 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793927

Steven, I'm curious, I seem to remember you saying quite a few times you don't watch television. So how can you make a judgement regarding which networks are biased, and which are not? TV news is like air pollution: you can do your best to avoid it, but there will always be occasional contact. I don’t watch it at home, but inevitably I find myself in places where other people are watching it. The first and most consistent impression I get on these occasions is not of bias, but of stupidity. The quality of reportage is generally horrible, and the commentary is dumbed down to the point where whatever bias is there is submerged in the general inadequacy of it all. The whole bias debate often seems to me to be another reflection of overall polarization and the loss of any concept of a political center. If a group of us sat down and assembled a hypothetical news show conceived with the purpose of being exactly at the center, it would immediately be denounced by the right as having a liberal bias, and by the left as having a conservative bias. The same media that are routinely denounced by the right as “liberal” are also routinely denounced by the left as being “corporate”, and therefore by definition conservative. In both cases, the objection is simply that the broadcast does not match the views of the particular ideologue doing the viewing. As long as people insist on defining their own views, however extreme, as “centrist”, you’re going to have these rants about media bias. Part of the problem, of course, is a lack of any consensus definition of what is radical, what is liberal, what is conservative, what is reactionary. It’s hard to define where people fall on the scale if nobody can agree on what the scale is. I tend to have some sympathy, not on an entirely rational level, for any entity that is routinely bashed by extremists from both left and right. I even defend the IMF these days; a lonely position if ever there was one....