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

To: Sully- who wrote (43193)	5/10/2004 3:32:25 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793731

And by your remarks prior to & since then, it's obvious you want to cling to a POV that can't be factually or credibly substantiated. There are two problems in discussing this subject. One is that we don't have an even base of comparison. All of your major newspapers are quite cosmopolitan in their POV. They are big city newspapers and big city people are cosmopolitan. "Cosmopolitan" comes across as "liberal" to social conservatives. Those newspapers may be moderate to conservative in their editorial positions. The Post, my hometown paper, certainly is. But they will still look liberal to social conservatives because of the cosmopolitan bent. The other part of the perceived bias is more valid, I think. As has been pointed out the majority of reporters for those papers are politically liberal and they look at news with that eye. Unless the editors are rigorous about separating news from opinion, some of there stories will have a liberal bias. You may be surprised, but I do notice when that happens. Regardless of what you may think, that liberal stuff is jarring to my ear, too. Like I said, I think that problem is best dealt with by separating news and opinion, but the ombudsmen don't seem to be focused on that. The rest of the liberal bias, IMO, is in the eye of the beholder. Absolutism is a part of the rightie psyche. Maybe it's the religion thing. I don't know. But absolutists seem to think that anything that doesn't agree with them is wrong. I don't have a clue what can be done about that. But I digress... If we are to compare the bias of these newspapers against the equivalent from the right, to what would we compare it. There aren't any major newspapers without this POV. Yes, there's the WSJ, but the WSJ has a different mission. It's not a full-service newspaper like the other papers, which makes comparison hard. The news voice of the right is Fox News, the internet news sites, and blogs. It's too hard to compare TV news channels because of the format so we can forget that. So that leaves us comparing the Post against worldnetdaily and its ilk and blogs. Are blogs news or are they commentary? I think mostly commentary, so that leaves them out. So we're left with comparing the NYT against worldnetdaily. That's like comparing, say, Karl Malone with someone in the D League--not a fair fight. So that's the problem with trying to do an objective comparison--no real basis for comparison. The other problem with my undertaking what you propose is that you have not indicated the remotest receptivity to the possibility that there is bias on your side, too. You continue to label your POV "reality" and your opinions, facts. I am not sufficiently masochistic to talk to walls. And Conservative media has not been exposed for horrific examples of intentional lies & fabricated hard news stories that liberal media has been publicly exposed for doing on a regular basis. That's because there's a double standard. "People" expect less from the D League so it doesn't get the same scrutiny or the same outrage. Sort of like the US abusing prisoners gets a different standard. You're right about David and Goliath. The upstart is naturally pugilistic and audacious, thus we have a different expectations from what we would expect from the old pro. Plus a lot of the crap from the right just doesn't get noticed because, as you say, they don't have the reach, or because it gets dismissed along with the alien abductees. I only see it because I read this thread. The NYT could never get away with a smidgeon of the crap that comes from the right. That doesn't make the flaws of the major papers acceptable. It just means that the people who produce the news and the people who complain about it are both applying a double standard. In summary, finally, I don't see the utility. I don't know which sorts of material from the right would be appropriate for me to pick apart for comparison. And I don't have much hope that you would listen to what I offered.