[TexasTycoon]

Note: If this should have been included in the other thread about Giffords, my apologies. I just wanted to focus on one aspect of the coverage.


CNN's Candy Crowley yesterday had Sen Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Alexander of Tennessee on her show, and within thirty seconds, Durbin and Crowley were blaming Sarah Palin for Giffords injuries. Palin put out an ad targeting certain congressional seat before the last election and to show which seats were being targeted, there were crosshairs over the districts.

These ads were never a problem until Crowley and Durbin decided to illustrate how the tea party supposedly used nothing but violent rhetoric to win 60+ seats in the house.

First of all, this idea that that ad promoted violence is so far out of the mainstream way of thinking it's laughable. Sarah Palin is an avid outdoorswoman. She has herself shown hunting at every opportunity. Putting crosshairs ona political ad is an homage to hunting moose and caribou, not going Rambo on politicians, and anyone with a lick of sense would know that. Furthermore, assumuing that a nearly year old ad would inspire someone to wait for a random event to be scheduled five minutes from his house to attack is a stretch. Was he looking at her website every day for six months chanting "Palin wants her dead" to himself waiting for an event to be in his neighborhood, and then it jsut happened to be scheduled? That seems ludicrous.

What it seems to me is that the left is still angry about gettng their asses kicked by historic proportion, still angry that Sarah Palin is the voice of the average American, and still angry that they let Pelosi and Reid lead them so far out of the mainstream in America that it will take them decades to come back, that their only recourse is to blame someone for murder. This theory seems to be put together by 9/11 truthers. There are just as many leaps of faith and holes in the logic.

Once again, the left has targeted Sarah Palin in an attempt to smear her, which, if it works as well as last time, should finish the job and get the Senate and Presidency back for the right in 2012. Thanks Crowley and Durbin. Thank you for making the left look even more incompetant than they already did.

 

[The Boy Wonder]

Once again, the left has targeted Sarah Palin in an attempt to smear her, which, if it works as well as last time, should finish the job and get the Senate and Presidency back for the right in 2012. Thanks Crowley and Durbin. Thank you for making the left look even more incompetant than they already did.

It's good strategy on their part because they need to retain the White House and the Senate in 2012. It's sickening that people would try to gain political points with such a tragedy. This is why people are fed up with politics in this country.

 

[scrilla]

ok then don't watch CNN, stick to fox news broseph. you know they have amazing fair and balanced coverage of every news story.

also sarah palin is not the voice of the average american either. no one from alaska is the voice of the average american, maybe the voice of the average uneducated *******.

 

[TexasTycoon]

So, you instantly attack Fox News? I don't know what the left's hard on is with Fox News. I also like how you assume they're not fair and balanced when Harvard and George Washington Universities' media analysts both claimed that Fox is the fairest of all news channels in their hard news coverage. Editorially, they are far from balanced, but that's the fucking point of editorials, so that isn't a problem to anyone educated.

And, I also enjoy baseless attacks on Sarah Palin. You can say that she's not the voice of the average American all you want, but the candidate she backed won something like 75% of election in November, nationwide.

You are nothing more than another example of the petty leftists who do not deal in facts. You are the people who claim that the Republican party is the party of uneducated ******** in one breath and corrupt CEO's in the other. You don't know who to attack, so you choose a popular governor and the number one news channel because their visibility makes them easy targets for vitriol from people who don't take the time to dabble in facts.

Enjoy your ignorance.

 

[MrMister]

The House went back to Republicans not because of Sarah Palin. She's popular, but she has no power.

Now there are a lot of people that agree with what she believes, but there are also a lot of people that don't.

Fox's actual news shows are good. Shepherd Smith is great. His show is pretty much it though. Everything else is opinionated shows. Fox News is successful because of the agenda they push. Those are the facts.

Even though I'm a staunch social liberal, I agree that pissing and moaning about the crosshairs is fucking stupid.

 

[scrilla]

i don't watch CNN as much as i used to, but as far as i could tell candy crowley is merely a political commentator that leans to the left so i'm not really sure what you expected. if anderson cooper or wolf blitzer were blaming palin i'd see the beef with it.

Even though I'm a staunch social liberal, I agree that pissing and moaning about the crosshairs is fucking stupid.

by the way i pretty much agree with this. it's like the people that want to ban violent video games because it could cause the few psychos might become violent. besides as far as i can tell this guy wasn't some crazy tea partier just some legit psycho. i watched his incoherent paranoid ramblings on youtube dude obviously isn't stable.

 

[TexasTycoon]

The House went back to Republicans not because of Sarah Palin. She's popular, but she has no power.

Now there are a lot of people that agree with what she believes, but there are also a lot of people that don't.

Fox's actual news shows are good. Shepherd Smith is great. His show is pretty much it though. Everything else is opinionated shows. Fox News is successful because of the agenda they push. Those are the facts.

So prove your facts. Is Megyn Kelly's show right wing agenda based? What about Fox and Friends. Surely, Miss America 1990 is a right wing shill. Jenna Lee and Jon Scott? What agenda do they have? From 6 AM until Glenn Beck, Fox is all about hard news and is completely unbiased. They broke the George Bush cocaine story, the DUI story, and many other stories the right would cringe about. Starting with Beck, the shows are all commentary, and thus opinionated. I would even argue that you can;t find an agenda on Greta Van Sustern's show.

 

[MrMister]

Fox even admits that only a few hours a day is devoted to actual news. You know this I'm sure.

 

[TexasTycoon]

Fox even admits that only a few hours a day is devoted to actual news. You know this I'm sure.

I didn't deny that. MSNBC and CNN are just the same. As soon as business ends on the east coast, all of those networks start in with the commentary, analyzing the day, and that's all going to be slanted. O'Reilly and Hannity are no more biased right than Blitzer, Maddow, Olberman, and Matthews are biased left. When you look into the hard news coverage though, it's been proven time and again that Fox has less of an agenda.

 

[MrMister]

Wolf Blitzer seems too dumb to have an agenda but yeah MSNBC and CNN have their agenda just like Fox does.

Fox having less of an agenda is debatable, but that's probably a futile debate since it's based on perspective.

I'll just say I'm not content with the state of journalism today. I don't think I'm alone in that regard either.

 

[The Boy Wonder]

Fox is biased right, MSNBC is biased left. I've had professors that have argued with me that the US is NOT a centered-right country. If you go by two of the biggest cable news stations -- Fox and MSNBC -- you'd have to say that we might be a centered-right country because Fox dominates MSNBC in the ratings.

 

[MrMister]

You can't go by ratings of a news station alone though. I'm not sure it matters if it's center right or center left, just that it's somewhere around the center. It seems to be that it swings left and right often enough to say we're on average a pretty centrist nation.

 

[Arya Dark]

When it comes to news coverage I like Fox. They are pretty much down the middle when they are covering news.

But, like any other news channel, they are biased alot of the time when it comes to their commentary shows. And I don't have a problem with that. At least they are straight up with what they try to push. And when that's the case I can make the decision not to watch if I don't like it.

But when it comes to opinion shows I'd rather watch/listen to the people I disagree with more. Listening to someone I agree with does absolutely nothing for me.

One clear exception is Glen Beck. I cannot stand to watch or listen to that guy when he does all the fake crying and book selling. O'Reily does the book selling as well but I can watch him and he actually entertains me more times than not. But Beck... fuck off and cry me a river.

 

[Dub]

The only news I like is NPR, Young Turks and KCRW 89.9

 

[Thumbinthebum]

Fox is biased right, MSNBC is biased left. I've had professors that have argued with me that the US is NOT a centered-right country. If you go by two of the biggest cable news stations -- Fox and MSNBC -- you'd have to say that we might be a centered-right country because Fox dominates MSNBC in the ratings.

That's not entirely surprising, most of the left leaning people I know pay attention to both the left and right wing media whereas most of the right leaning people I know only follow the right wing media. Admittedly I'm only talking about a small sample which is not statistically signinicent but I would not be surprised if that pattern held true overall.

As for the Palin bashing, I agree that it seems like cheap political point scoring but it's not as if the right-wing aren't just as guilty. In any case, from what little I've seen so far it appears to be mainly focused on the fact that she immediately took down the cross-hairs map, before anyone even knew the identity of the shooter. That indicates that she was aware of the possibility that it might have had some influence and, rather than stand by it, her instinct was to hide it. That is the issue to me and I would be saying the same if a left-wing politician had done the same.

 

[Cerbs]

I like TexasTycoon. He's a downright no-bullshit Texas conservative. And he hates cricket apparently.

But I'm sorry to break it to you, but FOX News is republican-biased like a motherfucker. They would be the first to admit it actually. They make no secret of the fact they take the right wing stance on everything, but that's not exactly the Nazism way of reporting some people make it out to be. All news reporting has a stance, and I don't even believe in impartial reporting. It's one of the biggest fucking myths in the world.

MSNBC does the same exact thing for those donkey fuckers, mainly because of where NBC proudly hails from (Granted FOX is in NYC too, but at least they know what they're talking about). CNN tends to lean more left as well just because NBC does, which is why I've never taken them seriously. Everything Turner is affiliated with has little to no credibility imo anyways. Fuck him.

I disagree with MrMister on the frequency of how often FOX presents hard facts though, because that's just liberal nonsense. I could make the same claim about the other two networks because they have the democrat agenda at their forefront. FOX also tends to have a lot of debate, which makes for good television. Yeah, they're not as straight-forward about it as they could be, but that's alright with me.

 

[MrMister]

Cerbs Fox released a memo that clearly explained what was news and what was editorial. I don't remember the hours because it doesn't really matter to me. I just remember Shepherd Smith being a part of the news hours. I remembered because the guy does shoot it straight. He's the best in the business at it.

I definitely don't appreciate you saying I'm spouting "liberal nonsense" because I'm not.

The donkey fuckers bit was kinda funny though. Call me names, it's all good, but don't claim I'm doing something that I'm not.

 

[Toots Dalton]

To give FOX credit, their coverage of this has been spot on, they really step up and cover things on the straight line when something bad happens.

 

[Cerbs]

Well my bad, but it seemed like you were implying FOX was more slanted than anything else, and it's not. I even admitted FOX editorializes a lot for the sake of discussion, but they still present the same news everyone else does. Fuck yeah, they shoot down Obama, but I can't imagine who wouldn't considering that idiot hasn't done a fucking thing but undermine his own bullshit that got him elected in the first place and break every single promise he made within his first year in office. Meanwhile, the other networks are still blaming Bush for supposedly screwing up the US economy all by himself, so I go with the lesser of two evils.

Politics is really all a bunch of bullshit anyways, but I lean right because at least they bullshit less. FOX doesn't hide the fact they're slanted and biased, hell... they're fucking proud of it.

 

[MrMister]

I often take cheap shots at Fox because I find it funny. That wasn't the case this time. I know that the other two are just as guilty and sometimes more guilty.