HazzeSwede wrote: 

From:	HazzeSwede
Subject:	Cheers
Sent:	Jul 4, 2010 - 9:25am

  Please DO stand up to the not so bright Peeps
My english is quite good enough to follow but to jump into the forum
I'm at loss.
Happy 4th !

hazze.

———————————————————

You were saying, shithead.....?

 kurtster wrote:  Ask nuggs..I'll bet it's the Jews !

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
No I do not watch Jon Stewart on a regular basis, but IIRC he maintains that he is only a comedy show and never tries to portray his show as real news.  That is what I had in mind when I made my remark.

Madison Avenue ?  That's all me.  Advertisers are what keeps Stewart on the air.  No advertisers, no show.  He would just be another Wayne's World without the support of Madison Avenue.

Q:  Do you ever watch a show and consider who the advertisers are that support the show you are watching ?

I channel surf back and forth between CNN, MSNBC and Fox sometimes just to see which advertisers their shows have in common and which are different.  It matters to me on a certain level.  I want to know who is paying for what I see.

 kurtster wrote: 
Try watching it sometime, it's the absurdest truth.

 kurtster wrote: 
I'm guessing you never watch the show because Jon Stewart says this almost every time he has a politician or a mainstream reporter on. Except for the Madison Avenue part. That makes no sense.

 hippiechick wrote: 

That says a lot about why we are in such a mess right now. 

When a comedy show becomes a primary news source, we are all in a heap of trouble.

Madison Avenue strikes again ...

Jon Stewart’s Ratings Are Now Higher Than All Of Fox News

 hippiechick wrote: 

I'm not going to be doing a blow by blow.  Bush stole the election was the heart and sole of everything leading up to that point.

As a news junkie who cut my teeth on Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley and McNeil/Lehrer from when it began as a half hour and Robin was young, to the present, I don't believe I am easily misled.

I can discern crap and read between the lines.  I rarely quote Fox, more the people on Fox.  However, I did go to Fox for the Japanese Tsunami and Nuclear disaster and am quite pleased to say that I was extremely well informed.  I did erroeously report a major aftershock that they put up as breaking news, but later found out that that was an error and did correct myself here.

Fox is my primary source politically, but I do not believe everything I hear, just as I began to fade away from McNeil/Lehrer some 10 years ago.  When someone like David Brooks is put up as a hardcore right winger for balance, well there goes their credibility.  Saying that Brooks is hard core right wing is like saying that Obama is a centrist.

And don't let me get started on George Will. 

I'll just quietly say that if we still had a draft, there would be a whole hell of a lot more people paying attention to what is really going on in this world of ours.  And someone like Obama would never have been elected, because people would have actually scrutinized the man, rarher than giving him an Ivy League pass and electing him for the sake of an "historic occasion".

But that's just me ...

Kurt, you focused on one aspect of the article. How about the rest? How many times have you quoted Fox, and now you can see how you were being manipulated.

 hippiechick wrote: 
What a crock of Bush stole the election BS written for people too stoopid to know which way the wind blows without having a weatherman tell them.  RS and HC give Fox way too much credit. 

The article has many other inaccuracies, but this seems to be the heart of it all.  One of the reasons I canceled my RS subscription over 15 years ago.

From page 9 of the RS article:

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn't leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network's "decision desk"  on election night - the consultant responsible for calling states for either  Gore or Bush - was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush's first cousin.  As a columnist at The Boston Globe, Ellis had recused himself from covering  the campaign. "There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush's presidential campaign," he told his readers, "because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you."

In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset.  "We at Fox News," he would later tell a House hearing, "do not discriminate  against people because of their family connections." On Election Day, Ellis  was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to  declare Bush the winner - even though Florida was still rated too close to  call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume  announced Fox's call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. - a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers.

"We'll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not," says Dan  Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. "But  when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election."

Dwell on this for a moment: A "news" network controlled by a GOP operative  who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives - including those that helped elect the candidate's father - declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to  Bush over the facts. "Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact," Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. "It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people's minds that he was the man who won the election."

Try this:

How They Blew It   

A behind-the-scenes look at the television networks' dismal performance on election night.

By Alicia C. Shepard
Alicia C. Shepard, a former AJR senior writer, is National Public Radio's ombudsman.     

Around 7:45 p.m., exit poll data, which began coming in at lunchtime, showed a 6.6 percent lead for Gore over Bush. But election analysts knew only a fool would call Florida for Gore based on exit poll information alone.
As votes arrived from sample precincts carefully chosen to represent voters across the state, the model predicted a 5.4 percent lead for Gore. It indicated Gore needed a "critical value"—a statistical degree of certainty—of 2.6 or higher before any network could comfortably hand the vice president Florida. At 7:50 p.m., the "critical value" showed 3.2 for Gore. The Voter News Service model was more than 99.5 percent sure Gore would carry the state.

Under "status," at 7:50 p.m. the VNS screen said: "Call."

In the race to be first, NBC "won," jumping even before VNS at 7:49 p.m.

CBS waited one minute. Warren Mitofsky, who invented exit polls in 1967, has been in the race-calling business for 33 years. He ran CBS' election unit from 1972 until 1990 and is known for his caution. Mitofsky, working for CBS and CNN, had vote totals from 12 of 120 sample precincts and data from 38 exit poll precincts. Gore was doing so well that he concluded exit polls had been overstating Bush's numbers. "The real votes were telling us Gore was ahead," says Mitofsky. "The exit poll data gave us a slight lead for Gore, and the overlap of the two was telling us that the exit poll data should have given Gore more support."

There are three sources of data that VNS uses for its projections. Exit poll results, the least accurate of the three, come in three times during the day. They are only used to project winners. Once the polls close, raw votes from sample precincts are phoned in and measured against exit poll data. The tally that counts—the actual vote total—comes in throughout the evening.

At 7:50 p.m., Mitofsky and his partner, Joe Lenski, confidently instructed CBS and CNN to call Florida for Gore. Fox News Channel, in the presidential projection business for only the second time, followed suit at 7:52, joined by the Associated Press at 7:53 and CNN at 7:55.
"The sad fact is that was a straightforward call," says Jonathan P. Wolman, AP's executive editor. "VNS' projection material provides a guidepost that warns you statistically if there's a bias in the material that might skew the results. In this case, that bias indicator said it might be underestimating Gore's advantage."

Networks Try To Explain Blown Call

By David Bauder
AP Television Writer
Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2000; 6:39 p.m. EST

 

This article clearing points out how Fox News influenced the election of Bush in 2000 and since then have been a propaganda arm for the right since then.

Those people on the right who are so convinced that Fox has been telling the truth might be a bit horrified if they actually knew the truth, of how they were being manipulated in order to fulfill the maniacal dream of one man, whose entire purpose is to take down our current president.

It's a very long article, so if you don't want to read the whole thing, start at page 6 or 7, since the last half is the most fascinating.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

"THE INFLUENCING MACHINE: HOW THE MEDIA WORKS"

An interesting conversation about the media from two people who are ostensibly on its fringes.

VINTAGE CHAT: MOYERS AND STEWART

HILARY CLINTON CALLS AL-JAZEERA 'REAL NEWS', CRITICIZES US MEDIA

 arighter2 wrote: 
On msnbc somewhere, yes.

Here is a cross post for you

Anonymous Urges A Total Boycott Of Koch Industries

 hippiechick wrote: 
The information has been available through the alternative press. Are you sure you heard it on Maddow?

 arighter2 wrote: 
I did hear this, from Rachel Maddow, I think.

 arighter2 wrote: 
Shocked. I am shocked.

The Koch brothers involving themselves in politics for personal gain? Shocking.

Unreported (to the best of my knowledge) in either the left or right channels of the corporate media: a clause in Wisconsin's kill the union bill to allow Gov. Scott Walker to sell Wisconsin's state owned utilities in a no bid process. Some of you may be aware that the Koch brothers, who donated almost half a million directly or indirectly to Gov. Walker's campaign, have made billions consolidating energy companies.

Good article on HP about the state of journalism today:

Beyond Left And Right: It's About Reality

...Journalists so frequently deal in the false liberal-conservative dichotomy because it generates the sort of tension that feeds narrative, and narrative makes for more accessible stories. Simply dividing up the interests into two neatly-differentiated competing camps enables lazy beat reporters to claim to have painted all of reality with but two phone calls. Why venture outside and talk to ordinary people — whose experiences and views almost always challenge the traditional labels — when we can simply sit at our desks and dial up a D and then an R and gather a pair of quotes that supposedly cover the whole spectrum of the American take on anything?...