wait are you saying you trust or dont trust the american media it sounds like you dont, but then your title says the opposite. you are confusing

Why I trust orathaic...


I agree (I think). All of my news if from NPR, The Economist, or BBC. I know people will bitch and moan about all three of those sources, but I've personally found them significantly better than any TV or Newspaper News source.

The Onion carries the stories most pertinent to me, and they do it well. Where is their Pulitzer?

"...you are confusing"

my over-use of sarcasm will someday be my downfall...

@thucy: perhaps i should have stated what i trust the american media to do, and that would be misrepresenting the story for ratings, at least in this case...

Haaaaa ha ha ha!!! Abgemacht trusts:
1. NPR: ho recieves funding from the Federal Government (and, primarily based upon Dempocrat Part support...)
2. The Economist
3. BBC Government Sponsored...

I don't know about the economist, but I will say this:

Abgemacht relies ***primarily*** upon ***Government*** sources to recieve informati0on about....<gasp>....the Government.

I do not rely upon ANY single source! I use the joy of the 2eb to research ANY topic I am interested in. I find Right Wing, Left Wing, Moderate....Alien....WHATEVER....point of view to form my opinion.

I'm glad that Abge...had shown himslef to be sooooo biased.

Krellin

Did you ever read my criticism of your story?

@orathaic Have you ever read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman? You might find it interesting, particularly the chapter on the news media.

The Economist is slightly right-wing for my tastes but I have always found it to be very accurate in its reporting of events and information.

Krellin, what do you find biased about government funded programmes?

if they are paid for by tax payers money is it not possible that they will be more worried about satisfying their duty to the public than about their ratings?? (if people want to watch comedy central instead of the news that is their choice right??)

I mean what could possibly go wrong? When 'government' funded actually means publically funded/your tax dollars at work!

As for 'using every other source' how likely is it that the most popular sources you can find will also be biased on some ways? (except the ones with a duty to their public) so the average of these will also be biased in several ways.

I'd much prefer to think i have no idea of a given topic than think i had done decent research which gave me a heavily biased average of other people's opinions...

@Sarg Citrus: thanks for that, i think i'll see if i can't find a copy of that at my local library.

I also highly recommend the reporting standards and integrity of the Financial Times.

abgemacht our news sources are the same.

except for i also read aljazeera english

krellin's point is that Government funded in the US means psuhed through by one party or the other with a political agenda. NPR is pushed by the Dems so serves a Dem agenda. In the US, they aren't interested in serving the public trust, but serving the party that makes certain the money gets their way.

i really dont find that npr is so very biased - i dont understand this idea that it is some kind of liberal bastion.

what you may perceive as a "liberal bias" may in fact be an eye toward reason.

many republicans i know listen to npr. there is negligible spin at npr

Also, didn't NPR lose federal funding? I haven't noticed a change in how they cover events.

If you're not reading a ton of sources, you aren't getting the whole story, period. No one source tells the whole story. That's impossible to do in 1500 words or less.

@abgemacht. They lost *some* federal funding. It's called a budget cut. But they still receive federal funds.

http://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr/publicradiofinances.html

5.8% of local funding comes from tax dollars and various government agencies provide grants at the national level, like the Dept of Edu and the Dept of Commerce.

NPR....Federal funding....BAH! Give me a break. Walk in to Target, Meijer, K-Mart, whatever your local retailer is and walk into the toy section, and tell me how many Sesema Street toys are on the shelves? Who *hasn't* heard of Tickle-Me-Elmo? Bert and Ernie are all over the news as people debate whether they are gay or not. That huge-breasted singer went on S.S. and provoked outrage at her revealing top. Sesame Street On Ice frequently comes through and plays at the Palace of Auburn Hills (Home of the Deeee-troit Pistons). In other words, "Not For Profit" NPR has helped create a fricking money machine.

Let's go on...."This show Sponsored by Ford Motor Company..." "Company X did blah blah for thsi show...." Public Radio/TV *constantly* air advertising, so I fail to see how that is "Not for Profit", except that accountants label the "donations" different than advertising expenses.

NPR/PBS whatever needs to stay the hell out of my back pocket *forever*. They *do* have quality programming, and because they do, they *ought* to be able to make it on their own. Sell advertising....I have to listen to it anyway. Up the cost to Sesame Street to air. Up the cost for *all* the successful programming.

Public funding of NPR, no matter how "small" that funding is, is just ridiculous, since businesses all over the place are making a ton of money off their progamming on NPR.

America's Test Kitchen...another example. That dude that make the Documentaries, like "Baseball" and "The Civil War"....airs on publicly funded TV, and then *sells* his DVD's...

Give me a break...

@krellin - First of <*SMACK*>. Sorry, had to be done. You went *way* OTT there. Now, NPR has little if anything to do with Sesame Street (or Mystery or any other PBS show). It's radio, not TV. While I agree that PBS can make it on it's own (and it pretty much does with fund drives and such) it is also unfair to equate PBS and Sesame Street. Sesame Street is a show produced by The Children's Workshop, a for profit company. They and The Jim Henson Company collect all the revenue form Sesame Street, not PBS.

That said, I agree that PBS doesn't need federal money as they get plenty of corporate sponsorship and the local stations have their pledge drives which raise tons of money. Likewise, NPR and All Things Considered (their big show) raise plenty through public donations and corporate sponsoship. But the two are not the same company and Sesame Street does not help NPR and actually costs PBS money to air.

Hope the little lesson in Radio and TV economics helps clarify things for you.

Also, I'd like to point out that this argument of krellin's is what is called a false equivalency. And I have to say it is a favourite tool of the political right. The argument goes "You're criticizing some aspect of my side of the argument, but obviously the same must be true about your side because some kind of analogy can be drawn between the two structures." In this case the argument has gone "As you can see from this example of news coverage of the Norwegian shooting incident, for profit newsmedia have a tendency to distort facts in order to sell people the narrative they want to hear, because they rely on viewers for funds." and the reply has come "Government funded media must therefore do the same thing in pandering to the government in order to secure their own funding." You've essentially assumed that NPR must do the same thing as Fox news just in the opposite direction, because it is possible to draw some sort of analogy between the two. That's not a valid logical argument. In order to argue that this is the case, you have to actually show that the analogy between ratings based and public funding is completely valid, and you actually have to show evidence that NPR (or some other government source), does consistently show a trend of distorting news, in order to secure funding. You can't simply claim "ah but the other side is as bad as mine, simply because they have to be." The same kind of argument is often used in order to defend people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They're often misleading, frequently distort facts, etc. therefore Rachel Maddow and her ilk must do the same thing. I'm not saying Maddow never lies (not being American I have never watched her show and thus cannot comment on the matter) but the fact that Sean Hannity does lie, doesn't serve as proof that his counterparts on the left are equally dishonest.

Reading this has made me question the sanity of the modern American. The media is designed to get you rallyed up for some cause, whether it's Left or Right. Most news reporters throw in their own opinions, exaggerate the truth, and will introduce topics foreign to the mainstream conversation in order to add doubt and suspicion to the viewer. It's all just a bunch of extremist crap from all sorts of people. And in general, they choose to hide the truth to support their own side, rather than flat out lie about it.

Well, some of us draw that conclussion (that NPR is leberal leaning) because we also listen to it. Fox is the most unbalanced "balanced" netwrok, but NPR is very left leaning as well.

@Mafia - You say "not being American (you) have never watched (Rachel Maddow's) show". Well, I am American and I watch PBS, listen to NPR, and even watch Fox on occasion. I'm a conservative leaning centrist and can say, from my own experience, that NPR and PBS *are* liberal leaning networks.

Watch events yourself on Cspan, and make up your own mind.
That would be impossible for Big Government atomatons who need instructions to get through a normal day.

What a breakthrough, individuals write out of self-interest? Who knew?

Not being American...

I've never heard of NPR, and don't watch PBS, i've always been under the impression that the american media is Fox, CBS, NBC. And my idea of PBS is limited to what hte Simpsons have said about it.

The BBC, on the other hand, don't have advertising, because they are government funded. So most of the complaints leveled against NPR and PBS don't really make me change my mind (trusting US media not be worth listening to)

Also, perhaps you shouldn't think of them as 'your tax dollars'. That was your contribution to civil society, it's not yours anymore it is societies.

Alternatively you can think of 'your taxes' as going to fund the things you like (military, anti-corporate crime divisions, space exploration...) and let the liberals who would like to with-hold their money from such programmes pay for public broadcasting with the taxes they pay...

It's nice to read someone say "I've never heard of NPR" and then post later "So most of the complaints leveled against NPR...."
So by their own admission they are talking out of their ass because they are posting about something that they never heard of.
It's amazing what people say in posts.

The thing about it not being for profit is that they can fund and can cover things that may or may not necessarily be popular.

The programming I find on NPR is not something I would have expected to exist without the initial federal funding and non-profit nature of NPR/PBS.

Some things they do are hits and could be commercially successful, probably yes. But other things not so much - Hearts of Space? Fresh Air? The detailed stories about Kazakhstan?

Yes they play "commercials" but it is a very very different vibe - they are read by the hosts and are socially conscious.

I don't know - yes their primary audience is liberal. But at the same time I would like to hear from you guys what exactly in NPR news' *reporting* makes it liberal. I have never myself noticed this - if it exists I would like you to show it me. It may or may not but I myself cannot think of that sort of thing, I cannot say the same for MSNBC or Fox

I wasn't saying that they weren't left leaning. What I'm saying is that you can't conclude that they're misleading, simply because they're left leaning. Having a political slant as a news outlet, and saying things that aren't true, are not necessarily the same thing.

American news is crap because of the audience it appeals to. However British news magazines like The Economist, The Week, etc are not publically funded and I find to be some of the most reliable news sources in the world.

England has the most competitive news market in the world. And BBC isn't as reliable as you think (I am referring to the fact that 7 our of 8 BBC reporters voted either Liberal or Labour in the last election), it is rather left leaning...

For the last time the fact that a news outlet has reporters that vote one way or another doesn't make it more or less reliable. Now we're running into what's called the fallacy of the golden mean. Would the BBC be more reliable if exactly half of its reporters voted Labour and half of them voted Conservative? Would the things they report be more factually true? This idea that truth lies exactly in the middle of two extremes, and centrists are inherently more honest than anyone else is absurd. Reliability is not a function of the political beliefs of the person in question, it's based on whether or not the things you are saying are in fact true. Why is this such a difficult concept?

Craig Ferguson was the comedian at the last White House Press Correspondents dinner when Bush was in office.

He had a hilarious bit where he said How many Republicans here and few cheered, then he said How many Democrats here and the room erupted.

Then he said that kind of blows the idea of an unbiased media to shit.

It was a classic. Love Craig Ferguson.

@mafia: Left wing reporters will typically report with a left wing bias, same with right wing. Look at fox compared to cnn. The only truly unbiased news magazine is The Week.

There is nothing wrong with adding your own commentary so long as the facts are true, unmasked and not distorted.

Which is why I do not like Fox News.

Does anyone else prefer the Onion?

the onion has it's moments, but i tire of it quickly.

The onion: Making you seem more informed.

Its got to be the most reliable news source out there.

There is absolutely no substitute for the coverage by the Cspan networks.
If you can't watch it on Cspan and understand the issues better and in more depth then just look in the mirror for the problem.
Nightly Business Report is outstanding as well.