Go Ahead ! Tell me I'm wrong if you think so, but have the courage to stand by your beliefs. If you believe something it shouldn't matter that I believe something else. Make your point.
Okay, I really want to try this. In my opinion, discussion and debate are essential to keep the USA free and informed. It's what makes us who we are, the ability to disagree and present opposing viewpoints. I want to see if we can get everyone to respond to these questions WITHOUT any of the typical crap we hear day in and day out through media sources. Just your (hopefully informed) opinions. Maybe we can air it out since I'm getting more and more angry and think maybe if I talk to people about the issues, without all the idiotic stuff I have to dig through on most sites, I'll understand what the other side sees, a perspective I'm missing completely at the moment. Oh, and if you want to add questions we can add anything you want to talk about.
The Rules:
1. You are not allowed to use "candidate speak" (ie. maverick, devisive, distraction, ginning up, caribou barbie, etc.)
2. NO RHETORIC! Use your words not theirs and if you give info back it up, don't just say the candidate said so because they have both lied and been caught and while one claims he isn't a politician, they both are.
3. NO NAME CALLING!! Of candidates or each other, and most of all not of me.
4. Answer based on the PRES candidate, unless/until one of them dies we're stuck with these two.
5. I'm right !!! Just kidding, well ... mostly kidding.
11 comments:
I don't think the media has been fair or unbiased at all. Anything "negative" that has come up about obama seems to always be brushed off. His association with the Rev. Wright and Ayers, people he had relationships with for years and now they are just people he has met in passing. Give me a break. The fact that he lied about being as close to these people as he was makes me think about what else is he lying about and what lies are still to come. He just seems to weasel out of everything.
Of course it hasn't been fair. Look at the way Sarah Palin has been treated, utterly ridiculous. John Mccain was on the view and they asked him tough questions and then ignored what he had to say and was totally rude. Obabma was on and they went on and on about how nice looking he was. How about a few questions for him, too. Obama has a lot in his closest but it is pretty much ignored by most of the media. It will come back to bite him befoe it is over with
OK... well POW Ken and Caribou Barbie don't know what the hell they are talking about and I know that's true because it's what I heard them say on the unbiased news channels. I think they are all a bunch of pansies.....
Oh shit... how many rules did I break?
Rev Wright was 24/7! Ayers is McCains entire campaign! For crying out loud if Obama is tainted by Ayers then so is every other politician in Chicago of both parties! They sat on a board together! I hate false equivalencies.
We have heard very little about McCain's involvement in the savings and loan scandal which is very pertinent to what is happening today.
The person he chose to head up his transition team was a lobbyist for Saddam Hussein to try to get congress to reduce sanctions on Iraq.
How much have we heard about McCain's relationship with John Hagee or Palin's church where people speak in tongues and believe the end of days is upon us.
Or Palin and her husband's involvement with the Alaska Independence Party that wants to succeed from the country or the African Reverend who drove a "witch" out of his town and then prayed to protect Palin from witchcraft.
Sarah palin isn't allowed to do press conferences for fear of what she might say. Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had said some of the things that she said she'd have been torn to shreds.
We've had very little about McCain's character and his past. Did you know that he's a big time gambler? No?
McCain used to call the press his "base" because they liked him so much and were so deferential to him.
My point was more that for some reason its just accepted for obama to brush off his associations with these people and everyone just accepts that. He was more involved with both of them then what he has said. Obviously many politicians and just everybody in general has had people around them that are not always good people to be around, but at least other people admit it.
Speaking in tongues isn't anti-american crap like Wright's views, or at least we can't KNOW that it is because we have no clue what they are supposedly saying.
Personally, I don't care if they drive witches out of muslims who belong to Alaska's independence party while playing craps. People all have views, associations, etc.
Palin's husband's views aren't my concern unless you want me to start listing Michelle Obama's. Cindy McCain isn't fair game either unless you want to accept that Obama's associations really do matter and should be reported.
Biden regularly says more outrageous things than Palin and nobody cares or reports on major stations or papers.
Dem's have been pushing for high risk lending for years so the idea that Rep's are soley responsible is fairy tales and MSM put the blame squarely on Bush, which is laughable. The man doesn't pass bills, congress does which has been Dem majority for 2 years.
Whose transistion team? Transistion to or from where and why does that matter? People who lobby and strategize do so for many ideas that may or may not be their own. They get paid for it. They're like actors with an agenda, but hired for the job unlike those nutjobs who keep spouting their opinions without being asked for them.
We actually didn't hear about all Obama's associations Gary, and Obama outright lied about his with ACORN. Foulkes (can check the spelling), an ACORN leader in Chicago and nationally, wrote about it in a Cambridge journal in 2004 but nobody cares in the MSM because it's not a story unless it's helping into the white house.
The press is most certainly biased. If Palin had said McCain was going to be tested and would need help in the crisis it would have been the headline in EVERY newspaper in America. Biden's comments barely made a blip on the radar. Even the MSNBC crews were asking today why that is. When Andrea Mitchell starts questioning it you know there's something there cause she's so far up Obama's .... (cough) ... I mean, she's definitely got an agenda and it isn't conservative.
Attacking Cindy McCain in the NYT? Really? That's news? Gimmee a break. I can at least see both sides even if we don't agree on the issues I see the issues. Personal attacks on anyone who doesn't fall into the liberal trance has become acceptable by MSM to the point that British journalists have pointed it out. It's ridiculous to say there's no bias. It's biased to say there's no bias.
And you're right the press used to like McCain, until they decided that to get their candidate they had to start attacking him. All I want is to actually hear facts on news, rather than opinions. My gawd, one more simpering newsgirl sighs and gets a silly grin on her face when talking about Obama and I'm sure I'll need a barf bag. Same girls actually sneer when saying the name Sarah Palin. That's not journalism. If it's not an editorial it's supposed to be fact not gushing love fests. I don't mind hearing McCain called out on issues, it just pisses me off to no end that there's ONE news station (and it hurts to admit it) that gives both sides. FOX. (choking, can't breathe)
It's true some newspeople are biased, but not all and not all in Obama's favor. I listen to numerous news and talk show etc and I don't believe everything I hear. I also listen to the many debates and interviews by candidates and form my own opinions. I'm not fond of McCain but I am not radically against im either. You all say Obama's supporters are all radical and I don't agree; there are just as many on the other side of the ticket.
I watch news, read the internet, watch interviews, watch debates, read things written by candidates, check their voting records and bills they've attached their names to, etc.
I didn't say ALL Obama's supporters are insane lunatics but there's certainly a majority. When someone asks a question about policy and is IMMEDIATELY attacked and called racist there's a problem. When some schmo from Ohio asks a question and is then vetted by the news media faster and better than they do candidates, and then LITERALLY maligned and viciously poked fun at, there's a problem. What happened to freedom of speech? You only get that if you support Obama?
When women's rights supporters (give me a minute while I laugh) attack a woman who has broken barriers and proven that women CAN be equal because she has personal views that don't match theirs I want to scream. Women's issues aren't supposed to mean you have to be a cookie cutter liberal. I don't agree with all her views but give the woman credit. What's with all the vicious crap and attacking her family? Let me see if I get this right. The liberals (I'll never lump myself in with that load of dung again) believe we should all be allowed to be individuals, with our own beliefs and live and let live UNLESS you are different than THEY think you should be. What a load of total bullshit. Feminists my ass. Liberal my ass. They are as bigoted as the far right who are at least honest about being bigoted. I've been shoved toward the right by the fact that they are at least trying. A woman candidate who SUPPORTED rights for gay partners, DIDN'T push her own abortion agenda in Alaska, TURNED DOWN perks that politicians in Washington (dems and reps) would never take a pass on, and she knows who she is which is worth more than anything. With her you really do know what you get. If you'd rather have double talk and "liberal" hate spewing feel free. People are mad at the attacks. You wanna question something go ahead but if I yelled slurs about Obama like Obama supporters and even the MSM have about Palin all hell would have broken loose. What about her sends them into a frenzy anyway? She's attractive, smart, self confident and actually believes in something whether you agree or not the idea that that is something to look down on is ridiculous. She doesn't hate gays, doesn't force her religion on anyone, what the hell has she done that is so bad? Besides improve the state her children are growing up in. Guess we should stone her for that. She might teach them the 10 commandments or something and then they'd be as horrible as she is with all that truth telling and respect. The country couldn't withstand a hit like that, people who aren't two faced bigots that don't stand by their principles, it'd crumble I'm sure.
Well, empirical data now backs it up. Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, a non-partisan organization which takes no position on issues has released a report showing the disparity in coverage between the candidates. I'll put the link below, this isn't some fly-by-night organization. What they found was "coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates."
How can anyone dispute the media bias. They further reported that "for Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.
For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.
Don't take my word for it, check it out http://www.journalism.org/node/13307 but then let's get real. Can we at least pretend that actual research trumps Obama's golden glow for this one issue?
For those of you who haven't gotten this from the news, since they have avoided actually covering anything of substance about Obama/Biden, here's the text of Biden's remarks at one of the fundraisers:
"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. ... Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. ... And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you ... to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right. ... Gird your loins. We're gonna win with your help, God willing, we're gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. ...
"This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh, my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now ... be prepared to stick with us. ... There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision.' Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made ... they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound. ...
"I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here."
Now, someone tell me that he was saying "all presidents are tested" because he wasn't and if he said it it wouldn't be true anyway. Show me a case of George W. Bush being tested, how about Reagan, Eisenhower? The man's own VP candidate is raising doubts about his handling of a crisis, the media ignored that the incidents (plural not singular) happened and we're supposed to believe that media is giving us a full view of Obama? Oh, and by the way, I have this bridge I want to sell ....
This has been my problem with the media and this view comes from someone who knows. The whole thing is scary to me, that we're letting the media choose our leaders and that they are no longer representative of information and instead are just an unending editorial opinion. Don't take my word for it, read the article below, from an ABC news outlet.
Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why
Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE
Oct. 24, 2008 —
The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).
My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.
So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.
But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.
But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.
That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.
Reporting Bias
For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.
Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.
But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.
I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.
And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.
Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.
But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.
I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.
The Presidential Campaign
But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.
Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.
I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.
The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.
No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
Joe the Plumber
The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.
Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.
Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.
So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?
The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.
Bad Editors
Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.
In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.
And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.
With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country &
This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.
Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.
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