one state, two state, red state, blue state
I hate living in a 'red' state. Red is not one of my favorite colors, and as states go, it seems to have all the wrong connotations. Red is the color of stop signs, and the circle with a line through it. It's the color of negativity; the color of NO!..e i e i NO, Marco poNO, talk to the C. E. NO (with all credit going to David Spade and Capitol 1). On top of that, blue is my favorite color.
I think the red states were labeled that way by the network news. NBC had it's little chart of which states went to which candidate, and those that fell in the Bush corner turned red. Those that fell to Kerry turned blue. I won't go so far as to say that decision was part of "media bias" but that is a small part of the topic I'm getting to, and more or less sets the stage.
Fox news is biased. It carries facts and gives them a conservative slant. I'll admit that. Most liberals will scream it at the top of their lungs. What I find humorous, though, is that they believe it is the only news that's biased. NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN are, in their view, completely objective. Granted, there are conservatives, and many of them, who will say just the opposite. They say Fox is the objective news and everyone else leans left. I don't watch Fox news very much. I watch some version of ABC, NBC or CBS because it happens to follow the local news and I'm too lazy to change channels. In doing so though, I do see bias. I see the difference in treatment the same kind of story will get based on administration. If the president sends a bill to congress and it is defeated, the treatment of those facts gets massaged. In the Clinton years, that news would come out sounding like, President Clinton tried really hard to do something good, but that bad ol' congress stopped him. In the Bush years, that news comes across as, President Bush tried to put one over on us, but congress stopped him in his tracks and saved the day. Dan Rather was one of the biggest offenders, but he has taken his opinions into retirement. I am getting to a point though, and it's not the left leaning main stream media, or right leaning Fox news. It's the people on either side of the fence and their attitudes.
Everybody seems to make a point of pointing at the other side and screaming bloody murder without looking in their own backyard. Bias, it appears, is OK, as long as it agrees with you. Michael Moore and the Swift Boat guys in the last election are a perfect example. Liberals were leaving copies of Fahrenheit 911 on their conservative neighbors' doorsteps and hoping they'd watch it, while crying 'foul' at the Swift Boat ads, claiming they had to stop. Get real, people. Both the ads and the movie played fast and loose with the facts, and made a lot of insinuations that were flat out wrong, but people wanted one squelched while promoting the other. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
The same technique is used on both sides of claiming those that don't agree with them are unthinking lemmings. The term 'sheeple' is thrown around. What's funny is it's always tagged on people who don't think like "I" do. So, if someone has opinions different than mine, that makes them part of a group of unthinking people blindly following some talking head. The thought process goes something like, "Those people can't possibly be thinking because if they did, they'd come to the same conclusions that I do, so they must be lemmings." Well, people, not everybody starts with the same premises you do and everybody has their own agendas. We're trying to solve a lot of the same problems but we have radically differing ideas on how. It's part of what makes this country the great conglomeration of ideas that it is, and just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them wrong. Both sides are equally guilty and somewhere in the middle, we all just have to get along (thank you Rodney King).
There is one place where I have observed that the guilt is not equal. I have found interesting the "liberal" attitude that if you don't agree with me, you should be squelched. I don't know many conservatives that agree with Michael Moore, but I also don't know many who say his forum should be taken away. He has just as much right to his opinion as anybody. Nobody was saying his movie should be banned from theaters, but there were people saying the swift boat ads needed to go. True, some of the difference might be that most conservatives saw Michael Moore more as someone preaching to the choir than someone changing minds, where liberals feared the swift boat ads were doing just the opposite. Nobody balks at the television show The West Wing, which has to be the biggest infomercial for the Democratic Party ever created. The other side of the coin, most of the liberals I know want the Rush Limbaugh program taken off the air. At least he's up front with the fact that his show is nothing but conservative opinion. He dresses it up with a sneaky mix of fact and insinuation, but that's no more than Moore does. It seems the right to free speech only exists, for some, if you're saying what they want to hear. That's what resulted in the "politically correct" movement that showed (and still does to some extent) its worst side on college campuses in this country. Say what you want, but if we disagree with you, your voice must die.
I think the red states were labeled that way by the network news. NBC had it's little chart of which states went to which candidate, and those that fell in the Bush corner turned red. Those that fell to Kerry turned blue. I won't go so far as to say that decision was part of "media bias" but that is a small part of the topic I'm getting to, and more or less sets the stage.
Fox news is biased. It carries facts and gives them a conservative slant. I'll admit that. Most liberals will scream it at the top of their lungs. What I find humorous, though, is that they believe it is the only news that's biased. NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN are, in their view, completely objective. Granted, there are conservatives, and many of them, who will say just the opposite. They say Fox is the objective news and everyone else leans left. I don't watch Fox news very much. I watch some version of ABC, NBC or CBS because it happens to follow the local news and I'm too lazy to change channels. In doing so though, I do see bias. I see the difference in treatment the same kind of story will get based on administration. If the president sends a bill to congress and it is defeated, the treatment of those facts gets massaged. In the Clinton years, that news would come out sounding like, President Clinton tried really hard to do something good, but that bad ol' congress stopped him. In the Bush years, that news comes across as, President Bush tried to put one over on us, but congress stopped him in his tracks and saved the day. Dan Rather was one of the biggest offenders, but he has taken his opinions into retirement. I am getting to a point though, and it's not the left leaning main stream media, or right leaning Fox news. It's the people on either side of the fence and their attitudes.
Everybody seems to make a point of pointing at the other side and screaming bloody murder without looking in their own backyard. Bias, it appears, is OK, as long as it agrees with you. Michael Moore and the Swift Boat guys in the last election are a perfect example. Liberals were leaving copies of Fahrenheit 911 on their conservative neighbors' doorsteps and hoping they'd watch it, while crying 'foul' at the Swift Boat ads, claiming they had to stop. Get real, people. Both the ads and the movie played fast and loose with the facts, and made a lot of insinuations that were flat out wrong, but people wanted one squelched while promoting the other. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
The same technique is used on both sides of claiming those that don't agree with them are unthinking lemmings. The term 'sheeple' is thrown around. What's funny is it's always tagged on people who don't think like "I" do. So, if someone has opinions different than mine, that makes them part of a group of unthinking people blindly following some talking head. The thought process goes something like, "Those people can't possibly be thinking because if they did, they'd come to the same conclusions that I do, so they must be lemmings." Well, people, not everybody starts with the same premises you do and everybody has their own agendas. We're trying to solve a lot of the same problems but we have radically differing ideas on how. It's part of what makes this country the great conglomeration of ideas that it is, and just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them wrong. Both sides are equally guilty and somewhere in the middle, we all just have to get along (thank you Rodney King).
There is one place where I have observed that the guilt is not equal. I have found interesting the "liberal" attitude that if you don't agree with me, you should be squelched. I don't know many conservatives that agree with Michael Moore, but I also don't know many who say his forum should be taken away. He has just as much right to his opinion as anybody. Nobody was saying his movie should be banned from theaters, but there were people saying the swift boat ads needed to go. True, some of the difference might be that most conservatives saw Michael Moore more as someone preaching to the choir than someone changing minds, where liberals feared the swift boat ads were doing just the opposite. Nobody balks at the television show The West Wing, which has to be the biggest infomercial for the Democratic Party ever created. The other side of the coin, most of the liberals I know want the Rush Limbaugh program taken off the air. At least he's up front with the fact that his show is nothing but conservative opinion. He dresses it up with a sneaky mix of fact and insinuation, but that's no more than Moore does. It seems the right to free speech only exists, for some, if you're saying what they want to hear. That's what resulted in the "politically correct" movement that showed (and still does to some extent) its worst side on college campuses in this country. Say what you want, but if we disagree with you, your voice must die.
John put this out here at 7:51 AM
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