Will Bush get reelected?

[blugh]

Originally posted by corfy
And blugh, you make it sound as if the US is the only country in the world where this occurs. Show me one news source, any news source anywhere, that reports all of the news all around the world all the time. It doesn't exist, unless you lump "the Internet" into one giagantic news source. You have to choose what you report on. At my newspaper, we subscribe to the Associated Press Wire. We get hundreds of stories a day, but we can only print a small number of those in our paper, so we decide what goes and what stays. That isn't censorship. Today, for example, in our world section, we ran stories about SARS, the latest updates from Iraq, the Asia Bird Flu that is infecting humans, and the first Starbucks in France. From the choices we had, those are the ones we decided to run. We just didn't have room for the Israel/Palestine story, Singapore Death Penalty, Libya WMD policy, the Vietnam MIA remains, or any of the dozens of other stories we received. If we had more room, we probably would have run more stories. Maybe we will run some of these stories tomorrow. Granted, the AP wire is the only one we subscribe to, but we can't afford any of the others. It would be great to have Knight-Ridder, Ruetgers, and the others, but we have to draw the line somewhere.

But what happens when you systematically choose not to put a topic in your paper. Say, you've got all those stories on AP but you or someone higher up decides not to cover the Singapore Death Penalty ever. Then people who only use your paper as a source for news will never find out and its been censored. I wouldn't expect everything to be in the paper every day, even every week or month, but if you repeatedly choose to not show something then you, or whoever decides not to show it, is censoring. Look at how little criticism of the war was on the TV... I'd look up the stats, but I don't have my stuff with me at the moment... I'll post it later.

[enkydu]

You're right, blugh. That's always been a problem in the print and broadcast media. Whenever there is a limited amount of space and/or airtime, decisions need to be made and the viewer has no way of knowing what was left out. Hopefully, the Internet will change things. Since sites can tailor news to their visitors, many stories that would otherwise be left uncovered can now at least be written. Whether or not the mainstream press picks up those stories will probably be dependant on how much the public wants to hear stories like that.

On Iraq, the media was very pro-war during the period of major combat. Once Bush declared major combat over (and said there was still a long way to go) the media did an about face and started revealing its natural left-leaning tendencies.

The best example I can give of this comes from last October when David Kay released his preliminary report on Iraq's military capabilities. His report cited over two dozen ways that Saddam's military violated UN sanctions. The US media, however, universally decided to headline their coverage with "No weapons of mass destruction found." Most stories even failed to mention that the report PROVED that Saddam was in material breach of the UN sanctions, instead informing readers, rather, that inspector had yet to find the weapons of mass destruction.

My favorite recent example of the liberal media can be found here. This story compares apples to oranges but makes the reader think that they are comparing apples to apples. The writer compares compares the rate of suicide for the 150k troops in Iraq in 2003 to the rate of suicide for the 1.1 million US troops in peacetime. If s/he wanted to show us a meaningful statistic why doesn't s/he tell us what the rate of suicide was for the entire military in 2003--I expect it's because the rate would be lower or comparable to recent peacetime rates, though since it's not reported I have no way of knowing whether my guess is true. What is reported makes for good news. Suicide is a horrible thing. Every loss should be mourned. But the media has no buisiness reporting these statistics this way. It's misleading and therefore irresponsible.

[corfy]

First off, if they are using our newspaper as their only news source for international news, they are in trouble. Our focus is news in the county. We have a circulation of 12,000, and typically we have 20 pages in our paper. Usually, we have 2 or 3 pages devoted to world news, 2 or 3 for national news, 3 or 4 to sports (local, national, and international), 3 for classified ads, and the rest for local and state news. If you are really interested in international or national news, you should never limit yourself to just one news source. Go with several. The more viewpoints you get, the more you will learn about the situation. Case in point, we receive Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Shelbyville News, and the Greenfield Daily Reporter at home. If I could afford more, I would probably get more.

Second, when you ask about "someone higher up," are you referring to our paper, our corporation, or the AP? We have no control over what the AP covers. The person who sets up the pages tries to get a variety of news stories in the paper because we know we can't cover everything. We also try to get stories that might be of interest to people in the county. With the war on, Iraq is taking precedence in our international pages. Before that it was Afghanistan. Before that it was the Israel/Palestine conflict. Before that, I don't remember. I can say, though, that the person or people who lay out the page have no instructions on what not to use from anyone. They may be told "We need a story about such-n-such," but they will not be told, "Do not publish the story about This-n-That because we don't want that in our paper." You are right, we may never have a story about the death penalty in Singapore. But then, we may never get another story about the death penalty in Singapore. We have too much current news to put in the paper without having to go back several days looking for stories that we may have missed.

As for criticism of the war, what channel are you watching? Every day there are people on TV/radio/newspaper complaining about the war. They were complaining before we went in, they were complaining when we went in, they were complaining when we started fighting, they were complaining when most of the fighting stopped, they were complaining when WMD was not found, they are complaining because we aren't out yet. Granted, most of those people were portrayed with counter-points supporting the war. That is the point of fair news reporting... show both sides, not just your own. People have a tendency to see the other side being favored, though, no matter what side you are on.

We see that all the time locally. We have 4 high schools in the county that our paper covers. Greenfield-Central complains that Southern Hancock has too much coverage and there isn't enough Greenfield-Central coverage. Southern Hancock complains that Greenfield-Central and Mt. Vernon have too much coverage and there isn't enough Southern Hancock coverage. Mt. Vernon complains that Eastern Hancock and Southern Hancock have too much coverage, and Mt. Vernon isn't covered enough. Eastern Hancock think they don't get any coverage at all, and we just focus on the rest of the three schools. They can't all be right, and yet people from all four schools can call and complain about the same day's coverage.

If you are in favor of a stance, you are going to see the opposition more than you are the stuff supporting your position, because it is the opposition you remember.

[Jake]

All I can tell you is that I read the New York Times, and watch CNN and BBC, there is no way you can say I don't have all the info I can get

[blugh]

I'm not disputing you try to get all the info you can. Where my concern is, is what you're getting all the info?

Anyway, in the first three weeks of the war, you were 25 times less likely to see an anti-war message than a pro-war one,

Of 840 sources in the US military, 4 were anti-war,

No newscast featured a full sit-down interview with people who opposed the war.

Now tell me that the corporations who stand to benefit from the reconstruction contracts aren't having their media divisions play the government's tune.

http://www.fair.org/extra/0305/warstudy.html

As for who's higher up, it's either corporate or AP... possibly both. The people who actually report the news aren't doing a bad job, they're just working with limited information from their superiors.

[Jake]

Yes, I agree but I personally avoid sources that take sides, if you take the NY Times, one of the most respected newspapers in the world, you will see that all articles are fact based and opinions are found in a separate section.

The fact that you were hearing more pro-war messages is because that was the initial public reaction to the issue, it's just a trend in society. This works just the same as right now you're more likely to hear anti-war messages.

[Borgtex]

I remember some NY Times articles and Editorials when the Pinochet Affair, praising his contribution to Chile and worried for the extradition process, leaving conveniently out the implication of USA in the Chile dictatorship and violation of human rights.

That makes me think that, in fact, USA is the godfather of some of the worst dictadures around the world. It's a know fact that in some way or other, it helped, in addition to Pinochet:

Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela
Batista in Cuba
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic
Duvalier in Haiti
Somoza in Nicaragua
Ríos Montt in Guatemala
Stroessner in Paraguay
Videla in Argentina

Seems that they even armed and financed Saddam and Osama Bin Laden... Let's hope that in the future, USA will stop creating monsters and then destroying them, killing innocent people in the process.

Hummm... sorry, I finally moved away a bit from the current theme about the censorship and manipulation of the media in the USA.

[Matt]

Here's a very apt Dirty Harry line, that Bush might say about the War On Iraq:
"It's alright to shoot people, as long as the bullets hit the right people."