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

To: LindyBill who wrote (66383)	9/2/2004 5:22:48 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

HOW DOES SPIN PLAY OUT IN PRACTICE? September 01, 2004 rantingprofs You know, as I do, that it is <font color=blue>"conventional wisdom"<font color=black> that Fox News always spins to the right. The question is, how does that play out on a day to day way in practice? Fox News has always said that they don't spin right of center, but rather spin to the right of the mainstream outlets which spin left of center, and therefore provide a corrective. Who's right? and is one right more often than the other? Here's an example from tonight's news (and note, this isn't perfectly verbatim, but is from my notes, but is close enough to get to the point.) NBC Nightly News (still doing Iraq Watch, and I can't decide if that's more offensive now that they don't have the excuse of the Olympics or less) says this: <font color=blue> "9 civilians including 3 children" were killed in a US air attack on Fallujah according to hospital officials there. <font color=black> Note what's missing: any comment from US officials on whether they agree that civilians were killed, and any contextualizing comment on what may or may not have been accomplished in that air strike. That's a staggering comment. It presumes that <font color=blue>"hospital officials"<font color=black> are perfectly neutral. Why? From everything we've heard Fallujah is a damn cesspool of terrorists, Islamists, and their supporters. Even if a particular <font color=blue>"hospital official"<font color=black> were neutral or even pro-American, why wouldn't we believe that, like the guys writing press releases on civilian casualties for the Taliban, they were doing so with guns to their heads? To air this statement without getting and airing a comment from the US military is really quite outrageous. CBS News: <font color=blue>"hospital reports quote 17 civilains killed."<font color=black> Interesting that the numbers wouldn't match, which right off the bat tells you something's up, but, again, I've really never heard anything like this. How is this, even without a story, even just these one sentence statements, close to fair? Fox News: repeats what the hospital officials said (I didn't get down which numbers they got). <font color=green>"US military reports no civilians killed and the strike was designed to take out a top terrorist. Two specific buildings"<font color=black> which were surrounded by fields, meaning there's no way civilians could have been hit. Also, while the situation went forward in Najaf, operations in Fallujah continued, and the airstrikes are believed to have degraded Zarqawi's network's effectiveness. Now, you can say that additional context <font color=blue>"spins"<font color=black> to the right by providing the military's side of the story. Or you can say that without that additional context there's no way to fully understand the entire story and decide how to weigh the information and decide what to think about it. You can say that without providing the military's side of the story the traditional broadcast networks have decided for us that their answer isn't credible enough to listen to. And I would prefer to make that decision for myself. Now, isn't that a kind of spin, too? rantingprofs.typepad.com