Honesty

[scott_harpell]

Well that was an enlightening bit of overgeneralization.

[Peter_Puget]

No, it's not obvious at all. Saying "obviously" is not a statement of fact. If you're going to be upset about bias in the media, it's only intellectually honest to be upset by all bias, not that which simply turns your particular crank the wrong way.

 

You asked: Why don't we see more right-wing bias complaints?

 

I responded obviously because the media is biased to the left. You are free to prove me wrong. But you seem to leave that argument behind and again attack my behavior. (AKA changing the subject)

 

Your assertion regarding "intelectual honesty" is simply bogus. For example, I might consider all bias to be bad but that the current lack of symmetry of that bias to the left is so great as to be a threat to our democracy! My one sided rants in this case are not the actions of an intelectual hypocrite but rather that that of a dedicated patriot!

[slothrop]

Bwahahaha! The ol' "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" argument gets me every time! Rummy is a comic genius!

[scott_harpell]

He has provided a challenge. Are you able to meet his challenge?

[scott_harpell]

How about another genocide cover-up? The 9 figure Armenian genocide.

[j_b]

let's face it people: is there a better way to promote honesty than to perpetuate the "liberal media" lie.

[scott_harpell]

He has provided a challenge. Are you able to meet his challenge?

[slothrop]

If PP wants to prove that there is a pervasive left-wing bias in the media, I welcome him to do so. Until then, I'll have to keep working on my proof that there is no extra-terrestrial life in the universe. I'm almost done, I just have 6 quadrillion more cubic light-years of space to explore.

[scott_harpell]

No.

[rbw1966]

I responded obviously because the media is biased to the left.

 

Like Fox News?

[Peter_Puget]

Other side of the coin:

 

At least no one stepped up and used the term "Freedom fighters"?

 

http://www.arabview.com/articles.asp?article=29

 

http://www.twf.org/News/Y1999/0928-Disgrace.html

 

Two views:

“Russian power structures followed president Putin’s direct orders and stormed the school with a huge number of hostages.” According to Zakaev, “there was a real chance to solve the dreadful crisis without victims or blood,” had the Russian authorities fulfilled the terrorists’ requirements. link Zakeaz is a chechan "rebel"

 

A total of over 200 people were killed over the course of the hostage situation in Beslan, sources in the North Ossetian Health Ministry told Interfax. “Over 200 people were shot by militants or died of injury received when explosive devices were set off by the militants,” a source said. link

 

 

Are they other sides of the coin? I think for the most part not. I would say that despite bias the new aggencies of the west have no equivalent conterparts in the Arab world. .

[IceIceBaby]

Definition of the word terror from Webster

"violence (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands <insurrection and revolutionary terror>"

[foraker]

Slow down there Rambo. I don't think anyone's going to be pinning any medals on your chest any time soon for your 'patriotic' activities. It makes me ill thinking you even use that word.

 

Unless the rules of engagement has changed, if you make the statement "The medias is biased to the left", then you have to prove it. Unless you went to the Pee Wee Herman School of Debate. Otherwise, it's perfectly valid for me to say, "Obviously, the media is biased by right wing corporate interests" and therefore it must be true and it's up to you to prove me wrong.

[scott_harpell]

One perspective I heard (and it makes sense to me) is that the Right Wing big money controls what gets on television (ie the gatekeepers etc) and how those things are handled are given a slant by idealistic democrats. Take it or leave it, this makes sense to me. Look at the Ukrainian situation; the owners/gatekeepers wanted coverage of the event and the reporter decided how he was to cover it.

 

The problem is not is it the left of right, but how much distortion do we get after it has been filtered so many times from primary sources until it gets on our front door?.... scary

[Peter_Puget]

Ah avoiding the whole intelectual honesty crock now are we?

 

I have started a series of thread indicating what I consider to be liberal bias of the mainstream media. You are free to search the site. As the series continues you are free to make your own opinion as to whether or not the case is made.

 

Where did Rambo come from? Please stop these personal attacks!

 

 

yours patrioticaly,

 

Peter

[j_b]

What Liberal Media?

[slothrop]

A Russian official quoted here calls them "bandits", though elsewhere the dreaded "hostage-takers" is used. The same Russian calls the hostages "hostages", if you can believe it. From the New York Times, even! The lead story! Oh the audacity!

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/international/europe/03CND-RUSS.html?hp

 

I'd say this one's neutrally-biased. "Bandits" + "hostage-takers" = 0.

 

This single data point neutralizes your single data point. Begin presenting your case anew, if you please.

 

I would search foxnews.com for evidence of right-wing bias, but it's not responsive at the moment. Probably brought down by e-jihadists or liberal hackers.

[Peter_Puget]

J_B - Finally you let your sense of humor show!

 

I have an old book of IF stone editorials I'll send you!

[j_b]

the media is "so liberal" they spent the past month publicizing the swift boat lies and finally concluded they could not tell who was lying despite massive evidence to the contrary.

 

the media is "so liberal" they rehashed neocon intelligence fabrications during the build up to war while the rest of the world knew they were fabrications. go figure?

 

etc ... the list is so long i could spend all day listing examples of "liberal bias" in the media.

[JayB]

What was the NY Times' role in covering it up/playing it down? Is this Stalin we're talking about?

 

Here you go:

 

"Analysis: Shame of Duranty's Pulitzer

By Martin Sieff

UPI Senior News Analyst

 

Published 6/2/2003 7:46 PM

 

WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.

 

"In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an 'appropriate and serious review' of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times," Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.

 

Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award," Nynka wrote.

 

The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine -- a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others -- has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented -- and potentially immensely embarrassing -- procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.

 

The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the "Harvest of Sorrow" by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.

 

In all, 10 million Ukrainians, most of them peasants, died as catastrophic, stupid and cruel collectivization policies were imposed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on the richest, most fertile, wheat-exporting breadbasket in the world. In the decades before World War I, its annual grain exports regularly vastly outstripped those of the American Midwest.

 

The enforced collectivization of land and the unbelievable death toll were deliberately whipped up by conscious policy and malice. Stalin was determined to crush the slightest remaining glimmer of Ukrainian national identity and also to liquidate the "kulaks" or wealthy peasants, which in practical terms meant any family with the expertise to raise a decent crop on the land. Mass shootings of entire families, or so-called liquidations, were commonplace. The production of food collapsed.

 

Yet the mainstream Western media was virtually blind to what was going on. And in the United States, serious newspapers across the nation took their lead from the then-revered and utterly trusted Duranty. As Richard Pipes, a leading U.S. authority on Soviet history, noted, "It has been said that no man has done more to paint in the United States a favorable image of the Soviet Union at a time when it was suffering under the most savage tyranny known to man."

 

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, London correspondent for the left-wing Manchester Guardian, scooped the world by fearlessly going into the Ukraine and defying the Soviet secret police -- then known as the OGPU -- to expose the true horrors of the famine. He also knew Duranty well and observed him closely.

 

Writing 40 years later in his classic memoirs "Chronicles of Wasted Time," Muggeridge concluded that Duranty was a sociopath without a grain of professional integrity or human decency to his name. He described Duranty as "a little, sharp-witted, energetic man" who liked "to hint at aristocratic connections and classical learning, of which, I must say, he produced little evidence. One of his legs had been amputated after a train accident, but he was very agile at getting about with an artificial one."

 

Duranty may well have been blackmailed or bribed or both by the Soviets, but Muggeridge concluded that his real motive in lying outright about what he knew to be true and helping the Soviets in their unprecedented, astonishingly successful cover-up was a far simpler one: He loved and revered Stalin precisely because he was so colossally murderous and cruel.

 

"He admired Stalin and the regime precisely because they were so strong and ruthless. 'I put my money on Stalin' was one of his favorite sayings.'" Indeed, Muggeridge related that in one conversation they had, Duranty even admitted to him that he knew there was a catastrophic food shortage, even famine in Ukraine and that he knew the Soviet authorities were prepared to kill large numbers of people there to keep control.

 

As Muggeridge described the conversation, "But, he said, banging the sides of the sofa, remember that you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs -- another favorite saying. They'll win, he went on; they're bound to win. If necessary, they'll harness the peasants to the ploughs but I tell you they'll get the harvest in and feed the people that matter. The people that mattered were the men in the Kremlin and their underlings. ... The others were just serfs, reserves of the proletariat, as Stalin called them. Some would die, surely, perhaps, quite a lot, but there were enough, and to spare."

 

An appalled and a fascinated Muggeridge listened to all this and later recalled, "I had the feeling, listening to this outburst, that in thus justifying Soviet brutality and ruthlessness, Duranty was in someway getting his own back for being small, and losing a leg, and not having the aristocratic lineage ... he claimed to have. ... Duranty was a little browbeaten boy looking up admiringly at a big bully."

 

In his own lifetime -- he lived to the age of 73, though he died broke and forgotten -- Duranty was never called to account. Indeed, as Muggeridge also noted, "He came to be accepted as the great Russian expert in America, and played a major part in shaping President Roosevelt's policies" towards the Soviet Union.

 

The Pulitzer Prize board's re-evaluation of Duranty's award therefore comes late in the day, to put it mildly, but it is still a welcome, indeed necessary gesture towards American journalistic integrity and to the hecatombs of dead whose cries were hushed. "

[slothrop]

Thanks, JayB!

 

PP, you should really read that Alterman article, it's very good.

[j_b]

Yet the mainstream Western media was virtually blind to what was going on.

 

...

 

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, London correspondent for the left-wing Manchester Guardian, scooped the world by fearlessly going into the Ukraine and defying the Soviet secret police -- then known as the OGPU -- to expose the true horrors of the famine. He also knew Duranty well and observed him closely.

 

excellent find, jayb. so, does this mean you are going to have to reassess you typically slanderous diatribes against the left in which you accuse it of condoning stalinist terror?

[scott_harpell]

Considering Duranty was a flaming liberal and the cause of the whole NYT debacle, I somehow doubt it.

[Peter_Puget]

 

 

Malcolm left the left quite decisively:

 

Liberals and Stalin

Liberal minds flocked to the USSR in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, drivelling dons, all utterly convinced that, under the aegis of the great Stalin, a new dawn is breaking in the world, so that the human race may at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity forevermore . . . These Liberal minds are prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth can be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good Liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives . . . They are unquestionably one of the marvels of the age . . . all chanting the praises of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and of Stalin as its most gracious and beloved figurehead. It was as though a Salvation Army contingent had turned out with bands and banners in honour of some ferocious tribal deity, or as though a vegetarian society had issued a passionate plea for cannibalism.

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

The pack [i.e., the media and the "intelligentsia"] is after him and because what he says is unbearable: that the answer to dictatorship is not liberalism, but Christianity. I mean, that is an unbearable proposition from their point of view, and it is where he stands . . . It has been something wonderful to watch and, to more people than you might think, enormously heartening: that that is what this man should have to say instead of a lot of claptrap . . . They started off by never mentioning that he was a Christian. I mean, for a long time, he was made a hero of the cause for freedom, but it was never mentioned that an integral and essential part of it was his Christian belief.

[slothrop]

Hmm... maybe Sean Hannity doesn't count as a biased member of the media since what he practices can't really be considered "journalism":

 

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=138711