[KurtFF8]

By the way, there's a good PBS frontline on the media and the war buildup. Can't remember the name of it now, but when I do I'll post info about it.

[Dan]

They mention the rightist argument and the centrist one, and not the leftist one, so it's biased towards the right.

They present the leftist view but not the extreme leftist view of total pacifism. Just like they don't present, say, an extreme right nazi view of nuke all the untermenschen.

The mainstream media focuses on the center, or the center-right, or the center-left, as that is where the majority of their viewers lie. They do not focus on non-mainstream views, excepting as special interest stories or maybe an occasional here's an alternative view or an interview with an interesting person.

Those are about protests of anti-wars, not the media itself questioning the legitimacy of the war. The media never say: Now we have "blah blah" talking to us about why the US has no right to be in Iraq.

Sure it does, I've seen it a number of times. But have you ever tried searchin CNN, it's a pain the neck. There's way too many stories.

It's not just extreme left. People like social democrats believe that the US has no right to be in Iraq.

But not from a pacifist position.

The social democrats are against the war for pragmatic reasons or because it's the wrong war or they don't agree with this particular war.

Your pacifist position is the extreme left.

So only people who qualify are given a real voice?

Only those who enough people are going to take seriously are given a "real" voice. But nothing is stopping extremists from making their own media.

I want media that mentions my views.

It mentions them, but only in relation to what the viewers will care about them.

[Abood]

Research? No. I have read many articles about the guy and am very familiar with all of his little fairy tales. I am familiar enough with him to not be interested in reading incredibly in depth.

So you just read his work and think it's wrong just because you don't agree?

All of a sudden I see what is going on ... YOU haven't seen it, therefore it does not exist.

Well, if it exists, then where is it?

I am not going to do your work for you, Abood. Look up Keith Olbermann and you will know you're wrong.

It's your job for you to convince me that you're right.

I've actually researched Olbermann, and I couldn't find anything about him being anti-war.

Panel subpoenas Rice over pre-war Iraq claims

"A House committee Wednesday subpoenaed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to find out what she knew about the 2003 claim that Iraq sought uranium from the African country of Niger.

The uranium claim, which President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address, was a key element in the administration's case for the invasion of Iraq."

Basically, they're saying that the war is unjustified because the information is false. That's not the leftist position.

The mainstream media focuses on the centre, or the centre-right, or the centre-left, as that is where the majority of their viewers lie. They do not focus on non-mainstream views, excepting as special interest stories or maybe an occasional here's an alternative view or an interview with an interesting person.

So we agree.

Sure it does, I've seen it a number of times. But have you ever tried searchin CNN, it's a pain the neck. There's way too many stories.

Dan, I really don't get you. In one sentence you say that the mainstream media doesn't mention non-mainstream views except in special occasions, and in other you say that the CNN has "way too many stories" about them.

[NYYS]

So you just read his work and think it's wrong just because you don't agree?

Um, what other options are there? I think it's wrong because I agree? I think it's right because I don't agree? I thought that was how reading works, you read something and then decide if you agree or not.

Basically, they're saying that the war is unjustified because the information is false. That's not the leftist position.

No, they're seeing why the information is false. Was it a lie? Was it an intelligence failure? Was it manufactured?

The pacifist argument is ludicrous, every nation was won and is held by force. The question is was the force justifiable?

[Boondock Saint]

It's your job for you to convince me that you're right.

I've actually researched Olbermann, and I couldn't find anything about him being anti-war.

It's not my job to convince you of anything.

The very first article by Keith I found, on MSNBC ...

You didn't 'research' shit.

But, Mr. Bush, the others -- for warnings unheeded five years ago, for war unjustified four years ago, for battle unprepared three years ago -- they are not weighted with the urgency and necessity of this one.

The very second article result by Keith, after a simple google search.

As you will be remembered for Iraq, and for the lies you and your government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who have needlessly died there and who will needlessly die there tomorrow.

This president has his fictitious Iraqi WMD, and his lies - disguised as subtle hints - linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and his reason-of-the-week for keeping us there when all the evidence for at least three years has told us we need to get as many of our kids out as quickly as possible.

You couldn't find anything about Keith being anti-war and yet you researched him? Bull shit, total bullshit. There were the first two articles that a google search came up with. You researched shit, all you wanted to do was blow smoke up Chomsky's ass.

But hey, you haven't seen it so it doesn't exist. Chomsky must be correct, there is no dissent heard in teh US, Chomsky says so and Chomsky can not be wrong. Right?

[NYYS]

To echo Boon's statement in a less aggressive way... this is a very one-sided argument you're presenting Abood. At this point you're basically arguing that the media does a poor job because they don't offer the extreme, extreme radical leftist, anti-American opinion. They even offer the left and far left and slight anti-American (as in "America is wrong to do this" or "America is headed down the tubes", as indicated by Boon's quick research on Olbermann). They just don't offer the extreme, radical left, which is "I hate America and what it stands for" and "war is never justified" and "capitalism is wrong" (which we do get a fair share of indirectly, actually)

[Boondock Saint]

They just don't offer the extreme, radical left, which is "I hate America and what it stands for" and "war is never justified" and "capitalism is wrong" (which we do get a fair share of indirectly, actually)

On the flip side, they don't offer the far right wing view either. The whole "The Jews are controlling D.C. and the only reason we are in Iraq is to protect the Jews in Israel, we should get rid of the Jews in D.C."

There is no reason to be less aggressive in regards to Abood, BostonBoy. He made one of the most moronic claims I've ever seen on PoFo.

Had he said 'I'm not familiar with Kieth' and then said 'I'll take a look at his work' and then come back and say 'you know, I took a quick look and couldn't find much about the war', I might have gone easy on him.

However, to claim you've research Keith and found nothing that shows him as anti-war is showing that;

a) You didn't research him, thus you lied.

b) You don't actually understand what 'research' means.

c) The entire basis of the claim "I haven't seen it and I watch the American media and in doing so, developed my opinion which you have yet to prove wrong." make look like utter shit.

The strength of his claims is what made me aggressive, that and the fact I knew his claims were bullshit off the bat.

[NYYS]

no I would have gone for the aggressive route if you hadn't. I just figured it was unnecessary since you had it pretty much covered.

The whole "The Jews are controlling D.C. and the only reason we are in Iraq is to protect the Jews in Israel, we should get rid of the Jews in D.C."

I think that's the far left as well. Actually, it's tough to keep track of who is after those dastardly j00z today. The extreme radical right argument is to nuke 'em and let God sort 'em out.

But yeah I agree they don't go for either side's extremists

[Boondock Saint]

I think that's the far left as well.

You gotta look to the right wing militias in the US, the KKK/Ayran Brotherhood types. That's about as far right wing as you can get in the US and we all knwo who they blame for the woes of the world.

It is true that some folks on the left like to point out that Jews run alot of things but the extermination of the Jew isn't a goal, it's the extermination of the things they run.

[Theodore]

It is true that some folks on the left like to point out that Jews run alot of things

These "people on the left"... do they have a preference for the colours black and brown and walk as if they've been anally raped for about a week?

[KurtFF8]

These "people on the left"... do they have a preference for the colours black and brown and walk as if they've been anally raped for about a week?

What

[Theodore]

The only people "on the left" that talk about how the jooz run everything are crypt-Nazis.

[NYYS]

Except for all the authoritarian Islamic governments in the mideast...

[Theodore]

And they are on the left since when exactly?

[KurtFF8]

I was also unaware that Nazis were considered leftists.

[Theodore]

Crypto-Nazis. You know, people like Atzmon.

[NYYS]

And they are on the left since when exactly?

oh yeah, shit. i have no idea why I said that. I guess I'm equating Abood (since he is the subject of derision in this topic and is on the left) with all the Middle East.

But anyway, leftists are generally the ones assaulting every move Israel makes and then explaining our support of them by the Jewish lobby in government and upper corporate ladders.

[HoniSoit]

I am reluctant to join the debate as I know very little about the media let along US media. Having said that, it is not difficult to look up studies easily available online, and here is an interesting one conducted by FAIR in 2003:

Starting the day after the bombing of Iraq began on March 19, the three-week study (3/20/03-4/9/03) looked at 1,617 on-camera sources appearing in stories about Iraq on the evening newscasts of six television networks and news channels. The news programs studied were ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.

...

Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.

...

As noted in earlier FAIR studies, over-reliance on official sources leaves little room for independent policy critics or grassroots voices. At a time when dissent was quite visible in U.S. society, with large anti-war demonstrations across the country and 27 percent of the public telling pollsters they opposed the war (Bulletin's Frontrunner, 4/7/03), the networks largely ignored anti-war opinion in the U.S.

The FAIR study found just 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war. With more than one in four U.S. citizens opposing the war and much higher rates of opposition in most countries where opinion was polled, none of the networks offered anything resembling proportionate coverage of anti-war voices. The anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent--one out of 205 U.S. sources--at CBS.

While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war.

Anti-war sources were treated so fleetingly that they often weren’t even quoted by name. While 80 percent of all sources appearing on the nightly news shows are identified by name, 42 percent of anti-war voices went unnamed or were labeled with such vague terms as “protester” or “anti-war activist.” Only one leader of an anti-war group appeared as a source: Leslie Cagan of United for Peace and Justice, a New York-based organizer of anti-war marches, appeared on a March 27 CNN segment in a one-sentence soundbite from an on-the-street interview.

You are always welcome to read the whole report which has a lot of interesting findings.

While you could always pick individuals who hold anti-war views to show opposition exists - the question is not whether they exist - of course they do - rather we should examine more objectively and ask the questions - are the media reflecting the concerns of the public by hearing their opinions, and are these different points of view being proportionately presented?

Here is a more recent study of the NewsHour by FAIR in 2006:

Iraq

The Iraq War was the most frequently featured subject on the NewsHour, with 81 segments and 276 sources. Despite the wide-ranging and international implications of the war, the discussion on the NewsHour was quite circumscribed. White men from the United States dominated the debate with 66 percent of all sources; Iraqi sources accounted for only 15 percent, and voices from other countries barely registered, at 3 percent. Among U.S. sources, 88 percent were white and 90 percent were men.

Current and former U.S. government and military officials constituted 57 percent of all sources, and journalists made up 15 percent. In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq. The sole public interest voice was from the Washington Kurdish Institute (10/14/05); Rend al-Rahim Francke also appeared on the NewsHour (1/20/06) as head of the Iraq Foundation, but her service as Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. under Iraq’s first interim government classified her as a former foreign official.

Of the government officials, Republicans dramatically outnumbered Democrats, 72 percent to 28 percent. The imbalance was virtually the same when only live segment guests were considered (70 percent to 30 percent).

At the beginning of the Iraq War, a FAIR study (Extra!, 5–6/03) of six national news shows including the NewsHour found that they featured war supporters almost 24 times as often as war critics: 71 percent of sources took an explicit pro-war stance, vs. 3 percent expressing opposition. Despite PBS’s mandate to offer an alternative to commercial media, the NewsHour in that study fell closely in line with its commercial competition, with 66 percent pro-war sources vs. 3 percent antiwar.

The current study found the NewsHour to have a continued aversion to antiwar voices. During the period studied, polls found a large proportion of the U.S. public to be in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops; according to the CBS News poll (10/3–5/05, 1/5–8/06, 1/20–25/06), those in favor of having “U.S. troops leave Iraq as soon as possible” ranged from 59 percent to 44 percent, while those who supported keeping troops there “as long as it takes” fluctuated between 50 percent and 36 percent.

But watching the NewsHour, viewers might think there was almost no debate on the issue, let alone a sizable constituency favoring withdrawal. Of the 276 NewsHour sources who discussed Iraq, only 53 expressed an opinion on the subject of U.S. troop withdrawal, and only eight of those sources argued in favor of a timetable for withdrawal. (None argued for immediate withdrawal.) Rep. John Murtha (D.-Penn.) accounted for five of those pro-withdrawal sources, meaning only three different voices were heard on the NewsHour advocating withdrawal. Those arguing against withdrawal (41 sources) outnumbered the pro-withdrawal sources by more than 5-to-1, while four sources took a middle position critical of the Bush “stay the course” strategy without advocating a timetable. Among live guests, the imbalance grew to more than 10-to-1, with 22 sources arguing against withdrawal, two in favor, and two taking a middle position.

Eighty-five percent of the sources who discussed withdrawal were current or former U.S. government or military officials; 92 percent were white and 92 percent were male. The sole Iraqi voice on withdrawal was Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi whose fantastical WMD stories made him a darling of the Bush administration and the media and garnered him the presidency of the Iraqi interim governing council after the U.S. invasion. In his NewsHour appearance, Chalabi expressed his support (11/15/05) for a watered-down Republican Senate resolution that thwarted a Democrat-sponsored timetable resolution by calling for gradual troop reductions with no timetable—this at a time when 70 percent of Iraqis favored withdrawal of U.S. troops (PIPA, 1/06).

Republicans outnumbered Democrats on the subject of withdrawal nearly 2-to-1 (27 to 14). Because of the Democrats’ own split on the issue, however, even those figures understate the imbalance of opinion on the NewsHour. Murtha, a Vietnam vet, publicly announced his support for withdrawal during the period studied (11/17/05), and four of his five appearances occurred November 17–21. The only other Democrat to argue for withdrawal was Sen. Jack Reed (D.-R.I.). The other two pro-withdrawal sources were Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute and Ronald Reagan’s National Security Agency director, and Morris White, a World War II veteran interviewed in a segment looking at attitudes toward the war in the town of Dwight, Nebraska.

[Dan]

So we agree.

No, because you said it was right-biased. I'm arguing it is centrist biased.

Dan, I really don't get you. In one sentence you say that the mainstream media doesn't mention non-mainstream views except in special occasions, and in other you say that the CNN has "way too many stories" about them.

There are too many stories to search in total to find one that has non-mainstream views.

[Shannonnn]

When non-mainstream views are showcased, it's so major channels and media outlets can reach their 'fair and balanced' quotas for the month.