Comments on: Monday Afternoon Poll

By: Preston Taylor Holmes

Preston Taylor Holmes — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:44:11 +0000

Interesting points – obviously lumping all newspapers in as leftist is an oversimplification and a bit silly, but on the whole, the print media has leaned leftward for a long time.

I hope you’re correct about people moving from traditional old media outlets to more targeted – and, yes, potentially more biased – news outlets. I hardly ever visit NewsMax anymore because they’re so absurdly right, they’re like a cartoon. Blogs are much the same way, but most of us state on the front end that we’re opinion and entertainment (some days more than others), and not news outlets.

USA Today is a great example of soundbyte/infotainment culture. I’ve always referred to it as People Daily.

W: Yes those two terms are contradictory, but what I meant by “informed” is “aware” as in aware of contemporary world issues or current events. And “mislead” as in only given the story through the filter that the Old Media has set up. When you get a news story from NPR, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll get the story with a lefty slant. Therefore, you’re aware of the story, but you may be missing whatever parts or angles they chose to omit, leaving you mislead unless you bother to dig a little deeper and look for the whole story.

I guess that lack of clarity is why I don’t get paid for this.

By: W

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:42:20 +0000

Isn’t ‘mislead and well-informed’ self contradictory?

I don’t think it’s because of escelating illiteracy. I think it’s more a case of apathy. Most people are more interested in entertainment news these days. Plus, these days, political commentators are mostly just attack dogs anymore.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:32:04 +0000

For me, the question is how to quantify the bullshit. To lump all newspapers together as leftist- and liberal-slanted doesn’t solve the problem for me. There is more to a printed newspaper than just news, opinion, or political slant. There are cultural and sociological components at work here too, since a newspaper takes more time to read and introduces a physical disposable presence to the consumer’s newsgathering process. This is also why I don’t buy the illiteracy argument. If interest in news consumption on the web had declined in the same period, then maybe, but people are reading the news — perhaps more now than ever before — they’re just doing it online. The way Joe Sixpack assimilates information is evolving (or DEvolving, depending on your opinion), and the decline in newspaper readership reflects that as much as anything else.

The “celebrity culture” aspect is also a valid argument, since newsprint doesn’t convey the same flash and immediacy that video and websites do. This type of journalism has so infiltrated the mainstream news media as to destroy understanding of real issues. A tidbit about “Brangelina” and a tidbit about “Plamegate” hold the same intellectual weight, and newspapers, for better or worse, deal with higher word count and deeper research into other aspects of the issue, unless they are USA Today. Other news sources such as video or the web provide smaller, (and in my opinion, much more susceptible to bias) flashier tidbits of information that are easier to not have to think about.

By: Yiddish Steel

Yiddish Steel — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:41:45 +0000

Your Boortz angle made me stop my knee-slapping laughfest and sober up to the fact that it is probably due to the escalating illiteracy rates in this country. But damn! There has to be a fair representation of informed Americans that are just fed-up with the MSM’s slanted bullshit all of these years thanks to the blogsphere.