Media Bias Revealed - Part XXIV

[JayB]

Watch out for the attacks

Can't wait for someone to say that it's not wal-mart's fault for selling poisoned toys. I mean come on just because you cut corners to save money(in this case selling cheap-unsafe toys) doesn't mean you are responsible when stuff goes wrong. Can you really blame drug dealers when someone OD's *sarcastic sniff*

 

Supply follows demand. Speaking of which, if American consumers were to demand toys manufactured in the US and were willing to pay the requisite differential - the toy manufacture business never would have gone offshore in the first-place. Ditto for any other manufactured good of your choosing.

 

Instead, most manufacturing that still goes on in the US does so in industries where the US still enjoys a comparative advantage. Typically this occurs where requirements for capital and expertise are higher and/or there's a substantial barrier to entry. We're much better off allocating our capital into industries other than those for which the primary determinant of competitive advantage is cheap labor, but I don't expect you to understand this, much less why this is so.

[No. 13 Baby]

The symptoms of chronic lead poisoning include neurological problems, such as reduced cognitive abilities [. . .].

 

Far be it from me to suggest that any of the prodigious walmart shoppers on this board may be experiencing this particular symptom.

[Adam13]

We don't have to make the toys, Euro manufacturers make safe toys. I understand economics just fine. I know why things happen, but that doesn't make it right. But when does cheap labor become outweighed by risks? I'm also fully aware of why walmart became the giant it is today, people like saving money. Although that coupled with the lack of production standards in the countries that make these products, put us in the position we are today.

[JayB]

I wonder, does the aid they gave Katrina victims make up for all the stores they have put out of business and all their employees that dont get benifits.

 

Actually - both their average hourly pay and their benefit payments are higher than the retail average in pretty much every sector that they compete in, with the exception of unionized grocery store employees.

 

I personally don't want to pay higher prices for my groceries so that someone with a GED can forcibly extract a higher wage than their skillset warrants via coercion, but the existence of Walmart isn't preventing anyone who wants to pay more for their food from doing so.

 

The small stores that you bemoan not only were likely to pay their employees less and offer fewer benefits, they were also likely to charge higher prices for the same goods - the benefit of which was confined to their personal balance sheets, and certainly didn't benefit the customers who had no other options available to them. Or the effect that paying less for essentials had on their ability so save, spend a new car, remodel their homes - etc.

 

 

[JayB]

The symptoms of chronic lead poisoning include neurological problems, such as reduced cognitive abilities [. . .].

 

Far be it from me to suggest that any of the prodigious walmart shoppers on this board may be experiencing this particular symptom.

 

Far be it, indeed.

[ClimbingPanther]

Supply follows demand.

 

does that include 8D

[JayB]

We don't have to make the toys, Euro manufacturers make safe toys. I understand economics just fine. I know why things happen, but that doesn't make it right. But when does cheap labor become outweighed by risks? I'm also fully aware of why walmart became the giant it is today, people like saving money. Although that coupled with the lack of production standards in the countries that make these products, put us in the position we are today.

 

What position is that, exactly? The US and its citizens have deprived themselves of chance to work for long hours in settings requiring little or no skill or capital, for low wages, while some 300 million Chinese have lifted themselves out of a grinding poverty far more severe than anything that the worst off amongst us has to contend with by saving us money by selling us goods that they can produce more cost effectively than we can?

 

Edited to add...that "when [the benefits of] cheap labor become outweighed by the risks" is when the alternatives are *literally* starving, prostituting oneself or one's children, scavenging amongst trash-heaps for food, etc.

 

Depriving desperately poor people of the one competitive advantage that they can use to improve their lot in life so that their overfed counterparts in the first world can make a marginally higher wage hardly seems like the more moral course of action to me.

[cj001f]

I'm going to listen to my iPod and steal value from China

[Adam13]

You make great arguements i wont deny that. But the "position" I was speaking of is american children getting toys tainted with lead. I'm not sayin we should make our children work in sweatshops to make their own toys, not by a long shot.

[Fairweather]

The liberal conservative conflict is a false dichotomy designed to distract the uneducated masses from the real crimes going on.

...and in the very next breath:

 

 

JayB, didn't you know Seattle is a majority "liberal" town? There's a lot of us out here with these very same viewpoints. But I'm sort of diverse, social liberal, fiscal conservative.

 

 

Fairweather is in the minority on the entire west coast pretty much. Move to Idaho Fairweather, over there with the hyper-hypocritical CONservative closeted pervs, or should I say "stalled" pervs.

 

You been to Idaho lately, Buckaroo? I think you might be surprised to see most of the stereotypes to which you subscribe debunked. No matter. You are a fucking LOON who needs to pull the conspiracy hook out of his gums and put down the pipe. I'm not even sure why I'm responding to your rants. You're not really worthy.

 

 

[Fairweather]

Unlike my brothers Fairweather and KK, I actually BELIEVE that the public should be given fair and balanced information. Fairweather believes that the public airwaves (not private cable channels) should run propaganda which is presented as "fact" (but only if it is slanted in a direction HE favors, of course).

 

For his part, KK apparently cannot even be bothered to read a newspaper and cries that it shows bias for the NYT to publish a paid political add from MoveONn. The NYT did not give MoveOn any discount. Do you think KK would be complaining if the add were not run by some liberal assclowns.

 

Care to retract that "falsehood", Matt? Did you really have any facts?

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297745,00.html

 

 

The New York Times acknowledged Sunday that a controversial advertisement attacking Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, was sold to a liberal activist group at a discount rate the organization was not entitled to receive, and that the paper violated its own advertising policies when it published the ad.

 

In a column published Sunday entitled, "Betraying Its Own Best Interests," Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote that after reviewing the Times' policies regarding the sale and content of advertisements and conducting his own investigation of the matter, "I think the ad violated the Times' own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to."

 

According to the column, MoveOn.org purchased the ad at a "standby" rate of $64,575 when it should have been charged $142,083. To receive standby rates, advertisers cannot be guaranteed a date when their ads will run, but the sales representative who sold the ad to MoveOn.org told the organization that the ad would run on Monday, Sept. 10—the day that Petraeus was to appear before Congress.

 

Click here to read the full column at The New York Times.com.

 

Hoyt wrote in the column that Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the Times, told him that the price was "a mistake," and that "the advertising representative failed to make it clear that for that rate the Times could not guarantee the Monday placement but left MoveOn.org with the understanding that the ad would run then ... That was contrary to our policies."

 

Hoyt said the content of the ad—a full-page advertisement that questioned Petraeus' truthfulness with the headline "Gen. Petraeus or Gen. Betray Us?" violated Times advertising policy.

 

"The ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, 'We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature,'" Hoyt wrote. He wrote that the Times director of advertising acceptability, Steph Jespersen, told him that while he did think the language of the Petraeus ad was "rough," he "regarded it as a comment on a public official's management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for the Times to print."

 

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., was not aware of the MoveOn.org ad until it appeared in the paper, Hoyt wrote.

 

"If we're going to err, its better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people," Sulzberger told Hoyt.

 

Hoyt wrote in the column that he disagrees with the decisions made by the Times employees responsible for the ad being published.

 

"For me, two values collided here: the right of free speech — even if its abusive speech — and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues," Hoyt wrote. "For the Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility. Were I in Jespersen's shoes, I'd have demanded changes to eliminate Betray Us, a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier."

[mattp]

Care to retract that "falsehood", Matt? Did you really have any facts?

 

No "falsehood" there, Fairweather. They stated over and over that the ad WAS sold as what they refer to in this piece as a "standby" and if I remember correctly that Guliani paid the same rate for his add. If they are now retracting that statement, you can't blame that one on me.

 

If we want to talk about falsehoods, I can fire up the search engine again and show where you have denied making YOUR OWN posts

about calling for the use of a nuclear weapon in Afghanistan (or somewhere "over there") or where you denied that you had ever posted your real name and said that should be the end of any statement from me that you are posting anonymously when you post under the name Fairweather. You forgot what you had previously posted? Maybe. But maybe these were falsehoods.

 

Now: lets talk about that MoveOn add if you feel it is such a major issue. Do you think Patreus was "fair and balanced" in his report to Congress? If you are all about free speech, wouldn't that Move On add be an acceptable expression of a political viewpoint? If you, like others, are upset that they would call him "General Betray-Us," why is it OK to repeatedly bash Hillary Clinton, call the French "surrender monkey's," drum up a false campaign of lies about John Kerry's swiftboat adventures, or any of the other very public and very scathing attacks that occur daily but that support YOUR political viewpoint? If NYT did give MoveOn some price preference, I disapprove, by the way.

 

[No. 13 Baby]

Thanks to the whining righteous indignation and subsequent coverage of the Petraeus ad by the usual sources, MoveOn.org raised over $500,000 in a single day last week. A delicious example of poetic justice, this fundraising bonanza happened the very same day republicans brought the colossal timewaster known as the Cornyn Amendment to a vote in the senate.

 

That'll buy lots more ads, discount or not!

[Off_White]

Well, at least it sounds like we have a clear case of bias on the part of an advertising sales rep, sales people are never incompetent or make mistakes.

[Crux]

Thanks to the whining righteous indignation and subsequent coverage of the Petraeus ad by the usual sources, MoveOn.org raised over $500,000 in a single day last week. A delicious example of poetic justice, this fundraising bonanza happened the very same day republicans brought the colossal timewaster known as the Cornyn Amendment to a vote in the senate.

 

That'll buy lots more ads, discount or not!

Meanwhile, last week, congressional Republicans successfully filibustered three Democratic initiatives to curtail American involvement and sacrifice in Iraq. Without hardly anybody taking notice, three bills in Congress were kept from a vote. I don't think the Republicans could have had a better week. Lots of convenient mass distraction from the left and the right, and all paid for with not a dime out of the coffers of the RNC.

 

Next.

[No. 13 Baby]

Any week one of your guys isn't caught with his pants down is a good one for the Grand Old Perverts.

[crazy_t]

What's that smell?

 

Ahh, it's just the "Shoveler", getting his daily workout...

 

[Crux]

Any week one of your guys isn't caught with his pants down is a good one for the Grand Old Perverts.

A couple weeks ago I chipped in to help pay for the "Betray-Us?" invitations. Obviously, the party was a big success and a splendid time was had by all -- especially by No.13 Baby, who apparently got a little overdosed on the Kool-Aid (as evidenced by the fact that he just called me a Republican and apparently wants to see me with my pants down).

 

Anyway, I want to thank everybody for coming and hope we can move on and do it again sometime soon.

[Fairweather]

Well, at least it sounds like we have a clear case of bias on the part of an advertising sales rep, sales people are never incompetent or make mistakes.

 

Unfortunately, Mr MattP is incapable of admitting his own misstatements of fact - despite any and all evidence to the contrary. Par for the course.

[crazy_t]

laser-sharp cut, Shoveler.

[chucK]

Here's the actual NY Times editor's comments.

 

Is it just me or does it have a little different feel than the Fox piece that summarized it?

[Peter_Puget]

Good read all the way to the end......

[ClimbingPanther]

So if some incriminating White House e-mails or documents were destroyed, and the White House says it was an mistake, you believe them? I'm not saying... I'm just saying.

[Off_White]

Well Peter, reading both of those links all the way through, it appears that the NYTimes doubly erred by giving Giuliani a page at the same standby rate for a response with a guaranteed run date, thereby donating in kind to that campaign. Of course, the second time was clearly no mistake on the advertising department's part, but a deliberate flouting of campaign finance laws.

 

You must be terribly outraged by this second turn of events! Easy man, no need to bust a gasket, best you should take a deep breath, perhaps take a nitroglycerin tablet. After all, friends don't let friends self-induce heart attacks.

[Fairweather]

The issue here is not MoveOn or Guliani. The issue is this statement by MattP doled out in his usual dismissive (and uninformed) manner:

 

"For his part, KK apparently cannot even be bothered to read a newspaper and cries that it shows bias for the NYT to publish a paid political add from MoveONn. The NYT did not give MoveOn any discount."

 

The very thing Matt accuses KK of he demonstrates himself. When confronted with the facts, he resorts to obfuscation and digs up the usual settled business. And again - he absolutely refuses to ever admit he may have "mispoken". This, OW, is the issue.