Is it good when the media loves the president?

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And some people, like me, only keep finding more and more reasons to desire to destroy the planet of humans. Such as: humans.

But its still a heavy-handed assertion; when people are trying to talk to you and getting a sense of how your world view shapes up you don't really pick and chose what they pay attention to for them, especially if its incredibly salient to where they're coming from on everything else they say. If I were for example to say that I was absolutely positive that Saddam buried his WMDs in Syria and that that Collin Powell was trying to groom himself for a position somewhere else but tacked on the caveat "Well, but that's not important" - I wouldn't expect someone to just ignore that, it would have a hell of an impact on what I thought about the Iraq war and if we were talking about the Iraq war it would be a heck of a gorilla in the room for someone I was debating to just ignore.

Lol, existential nihilism is a hell of a drug.

Nah, it's just humorous to me to think in such terms. Although with how most humans behave and speak I would often rather not be one.

I don't know about that, maybe your average 20 year old, but I have seen plenty of 20-25 year old individuals here who are much better informed than people older than them. Having lived through a political era is certainly useful but in some ways you can learn more as time goes on and more research has been done, and the long-term repercussions of political decisions become more apparent.



There was minimal history education in my secondary school though I focus on history in my post-secondary education (one day I intend to have a doctorate...) But I've been eating up history for most of my life, on my own, and I actually have my own large, personal library (unfortunately, kept at my parents home as mine is far too small..), in addition to access to online university databases that are quite useful. A lot of people do have very naive notions about what has happened in the past, and I very much enjoy picking these apart, not to be an as*hole, but because it is my field, and I am strongly attached to accurate history, not revisionism as espoused by many right wingers ("America was supposed to be a Christian theocratic nation" or "The CSA has nothing to apologize for" etc)

It is troubling at how biased some in the media can be for candidates anymore. Media commentator, Bernie Goldberg had an example yesterday that was outright comical of a question a CNN reporter asked President Obama. Overall, simply it's not healthy for the nation. We seem to be slowing moving toward a split, personalization of where we get our news.

"The Dumbest Media Question I’ve Ever Heard"

http://www.bernardgoldberg.com/the-dumb ... ver-heard/

except from his article:

You know the expression, “You can’t make this stuff up”? Well, over the weekend CNN gave us just such a moment — an example of bias so blatant and so unprofessional that when I first heard it I thought I was watching a Saturday Night Live comedy routine.

It happened at a news conference in Honolulu, at the end of the APEC summit. CNN White House correspondent Dan Lothian brought up the weekend GOP debate and told the president that several candidates said in their view waterboarding is not torture. “I’m wondering,” Lothian asked the president, “if you think they’re uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible.”

(I suspect many of you reading this will think I made that up. Click here and see it for yourself.)

I actually laughed when I heard the question. Bias is usually much more subtle, and not nearly as funny. The president just stood there, silent, for a few seconds. Even he seemed stunned at the unvarnished bias of the question. I got the impression he wanted to say, “Come on, man. I know you guys love me – and for good reason – but this is downright embarrassing.” Instead, he smiled and asked if it was a multiple- choice question – then said he thought the Republicans were wrong, that waterboarding is torture. Fine.

My sources tell me that these are a few more questions Dan Lothian may ask the president as the campaign heats up:

“Mr. President, Dan Lothian here from CNN. First I want you to know that we all love you at CNN and think Republicans are Nazis. Now to my question: Do you agree that they’re Nazis or do you think they’re simply morons?..."

The way that question was put was very loaded and Obama gave a good answer. It is a legitimate question, but that method of asking it is unprofessional

Right, and I think you agree - when you look at most people who's interests are elswhere its a different story.


And that's commendable.


I think this is why its kind of a shame that politics in America have become so polarized that it's about taking an either communist or fascist strawman and hanging it around people's neck to put them in neat little stacks. On one hand we did a lot of f'd up and nasty things in our history, we weren't the first, only, or even in the minority in that sense but yes, we did them. At the same time though the other side of me says that I worry when we focus more on dwelling on past evils to feel them in the now rather than seeing if there's current damage that proliferated out from that and trying to right the course from what's ultimately real which is this moment.

It was a heavy-handed statement of opinion, and I have a right to it. Furthermore, it was clearly not a central or concrete part of my argument.

My argument was, in its entirety, that it wasn't Bush's critics in the media who created so much hatred toward him, but it was his support in the media, which did more to embarrass him in the long run than to help him, and the attitude conservatives in general had toward liberals that brought him down.

I think it's a much better explanation, in any event, than these demented and demonstrably false claims I keep hearing about some liberal conspiracy in the media.

If you realize its not objectively grounded and you're fine with that then we can leave it there.


Calling criticism of the war unpatriotic may have been very myopic, at the same time it depends whether it was criticism by those who said "We're there now, we're stuck, but we're running this like crap" vs. those who were acting a bit like the OWSers were now and trying to block rations to our troops. There was of course very type of sentiment and disagreement inbetween those extremes and shorthand literary barriers like calling something 'unpatriotic' can be highly damaging because no one gets to hear why their criticism is correct, incorrect, and the topic gets batted down out of hand.

At this point it's much more likely just a conspiracy of physics, ie. certain people identify with it a certain way and thus certain personality types go into one profession, others go to another. Initially though you did, particularly in the 1920's and on, have a lot of the elite who were highly leftist and had very active ideas on what they wanted to do - including take over education, take over the media, etc. and much like the mafia had its hand in the way unions look today it seems that the early and mid 20th century leftists did make a pretty big mark because they were quite deliberate and organized in what they wanted and getting what they wanted. Conservatives I think after a while started realizing that they made a big mistake by not being nearly as devoted, dedicated, or aggressive in such endeavors. If there was an uncontestedly strong liberal media though it was more likely the 50's through 80's, once you have Fox enter, you had the other stations pick a few token talking heads for an hour or so, and it stopped being quite as much of the ideological monopoly that it once was.

I'm not sure. The reason I'm not going to weigh in there is that what constitutes "corruption" is not especially clear-cut in the first place. It will vary depending on your philosophy and your position in society. Therefore, to say that such a statement of opinion is non-objective is arguably a non-sequitur because it by nature inherently could not be a perfectly objective assessment.

And the media would have been geared toward the people who were watching television at the time, which were mostly people who were young and from relatively educated backgrounds (during the early-to-mid-20th Century).

But I also like the explanation, "reality has a liberal bias."

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 15 Nov 2011, 1:54 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I'm well informed and certainly no right-winger. I have tired of humanity a long time ago. So why keep being a gadfly? Well you see doing the right thing either has two outcomes. One: I overcome all odds, the world become better and I get to live a better life because everyone else is and thus people have less reason to screew up each other's lives.
Two: People try and screw me over, but due to the natural moral fact that underlies all sapience eventually I am vindicated, even pusthumously.

Well, as to your being "well informed" I would question your sources of information, but I'm not really interested in doing that. I am ever more thoroughly convinced though that there is no human who is righteous, there is no one who does good, everyone is evil, born evil and destined to die for their evil. More and more you convince me of this, and it saddens me more than anything else anymore. So much there is to put up with, but why should that be so? Why should there be anything to put up with? Why must humans go out of their way to commit heinous acts against each other? Why be so reprehensible and then even defend it with so many contrivances? Why not just stop doing what is wrong rather than going about pretending that there is nothing wrong?

People who can justify to themselves feelings of contempt or hatred toward their fellow man are ultimately the only people who can truly act with evil intentions toward their fellow man. The kinds of people who might rob my house would justify themselves by imagining my belongings to be somehow ill-gotten, and they would see their crime as justice for crimes they imagine I have committed against themselves or others.

If you want to be a truly good person, learn to forgive your fellow man for the evil they do. If you realize that your neighbor still deserves to be treated with respect, having wronged or slighted you occasionally, you cannot help but behave with compassion and respect toward your neighbor. Nothing can bring you closer to a person than to prove to yourself that you can forgive that person.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 15 Nov 2011, 2:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I wouldn't say its a nonobjective term, just that its fringy in that on one hand you can count legal battles and allegations of fraud, theft, embezzlement, obstruction, etc. and call the amount that actually hits the media or becomes part of public awareness as measurable corruption in some sense (and I think most of us have a certain inherent Benthamite calculator - we wouldn't worry much about fairness otherwise), however people can always claim that there's miles upon miles still yet to be discovered; I think that's where it becomes more a matter of opinion or intuition.

And what of people who can justify to themselves treating other people horribly? You think that I don't try to forgive? You're WRONG. But after so much persistent abuse there is a point at which forgiveness becomes just about impossible. You care to try to understand THAT?