Is hangten right about the media?Follow

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1



Wikipedia got me through undergrad. I wonder how many of my papers are floating out there with misinformation.

Well, Varrus's criticism is that the media is biased, typically towards the Left.

As for the story itself, it's kind of a "meh" thing to me. Obituaries are human interest pieces; they dig up some half-interesting sounding stuff about the dead guy and print it for half-interested people. If you get it wrong, it doesn't really mean much. It's bar trivia. I guess my standard for that sort of investigation is considerably lower than it would be for "hard" news pieces.

This has nothing to do with biased reporting, just sloppy reporting. But it is sloppy reporting on a pretty non-critical bit of news or history.

Well, what if I accessed something recent and it hadn't been flagged enough to have been removed at the point that I accessed it?

Well certainly someone can be biased and lazy. They can also be unbiased and lazy, or biased and unlazy. You're defiantly reaching here to criticize liberalism, the liberal media, the media in general, or wiki. I'm not really sure. Doesn't sound like you are either.

There's so much better stuff out there. Do a recent news search on Jeanne Garofalo and Tea parties, or what about Obama wishing Rush were dead.

I think he's still working on finding his point.

Remember - "a point in every direction is no point at all". (this is getting to be a very handy quote for these parts)

My point is that modern insta-media is like a random internet forum. You know how you'll read an article somewhere and scroll down to reader's responses and you'll always see a post that says "first?" The need to be first reported is outweighing the need to be accurate. How often do you read your articles on Slate and then click their cites? Do they even have cites? I haven't read slate since Kerry v. Bush. It's not about the liberal media in particular, it's the media in general. Just because this is particularly about an obit doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere.

Edited, May 12th 2009 7:06pm by BoondockSaint

Fine fine. You make good points. Doesn't hurt to question though, and to be a little suspicious. We should all be a little suspicious.

Honestly, this is pretty much just sloppy reporting, as several others have said. It does lead to the potential for bias and manipulation though, since it shows a tendency/willingness to accept "good" data for a story without fact checking it. An example would be Dan Rather leaping on the Bush National Guard story. And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that reporters are more likely to be sloppy with "convenient" facts which support a point of view they hold, than "inconvenient" facts which oppose them.

So yes. This sort of thing can lead to the appearance of bias in the news. But the bias is already there. These sorts of quotes and facts will tend to be picked up by those who are already inclined to believe them. And there are a lot more liberals in the media than conservatives, so it's going to tend to happen more leaning to the left than to the right.


Honestly, when it comes to media reporting, I'm much more concerned about bias manifesting in the form of simply *not* reporting certain stories and facts than accidentally reporting ones which later turn out not to be true. The latter can be discovered and corrected (kinda). The former simply doesn't exist as far as the public is concerned. Examples of this are the lack of reporting (or pretty obnoxiously slanted reporting) on the recent teaparties. There's some funny tape I heard of a CNN reporter literally walking through the crowd, not asking them what they were doing and why, but trying to find out who was "behind" the event. She couldn't believe that the people there were just people who decided to show up and kept looking for some organization. Someone must have bussed them in. They must all be part of various existing political activist groups. Or at least that's what she seemed to think and got really pissed off as every single person she talked to said that they weren't part of any group and no one organized them to come.


When reporters lead their own stories you end up with a biased result. There are plenty of examples of this.

You know, the original tea parties were a total sham. They were organised by wealthy smugglers, not consumers - which is unsuprising, as the consumers got cheaper tea out of the deal (the tax on tea leaving Britain for America was removed at the same time as the tax on tea entering America was implemented, resulting in much cheaper tea in America, as the new tax was much smaller).

Someone should tell those guys that their protests are emulating a lie.

Ostensibly, yes, though it was a pretty poor cover. But yeah, even if you swallow this blatant mistruth, they still do not make sense.

The lack of representation was about having leaders who didn't represent their own issues, but those of the central government. The new tea parties tied into the idea that to many people Washington seems to be acting on the best interests of the politicians in Washington and not the people of the nation.

It makes a whole lot of sense. And if you'd watched news coverage that did more than diminish and joke about them, you'd likely have heard why people were doing them. Hence, the relevance to this topic.

I'll be honest, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to these things, but isn't that how a representative democracy works? Majority rule? It just seems very similar to 2004 - just because it isn't your guy making the decisions, then the world's obviously ending, only now the shoe's on the other foot.