Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 20, 2010

I hope Roland doesn’t smoke.

R your shorts still bunching, Roland? By the way, try using that nice red kettle barbecue on your deck.

Roland, it’s a dirty job but someones got to do it.

pouncingtiger/radish - you two should play together more often! otravez should have followed with the rimshot!

I hope there’s no explosion and fire - it might trigger traumatic memories of the comm headset fire from the 1980 convention.

Hmm, perhaps Joe can put some Dem propaganda all over the property. Remember that Faux will not broadcast anything in favor of the Dems.

Au contraire, Pot. Fox broadcasts all the good things the Dems are doing. Lately, that takes about 12 minutes out of the 24-hour news cycle.

Nemesys: That explains a lot of Fox’s content, since facts have had a rather distinctly left-bias for the last 10 years…

Fox News needs to be refudiated.

I get all my news from Joh Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Gas leaks.

Wildcard: It’s a popular misconception (or bias) that Fox doesn’t report positive stories about Democrats. Some recent examples:

1) Fox reported very extensively and positivley about Obama’s choice of General Petraeus to take charge of all military operations. This validation of Bush’s general was very much welcomed, particularly since it wasn’t long ago when the left was calling him General Betray-Us.

2) Fox was very positive about the administration’s Dept. of Agriculture firing bigoted Shirley Sherrod last night.

3) Barney Frank’s comments about Kathy Griffin’s slander on Senator Brown’s daughters has been extensively positively covered.

Fox has no problem reporting positve stories on Democrats when those Democrats do positive things. Bush didn’t get that same break with the left media… for example, his commitment to fund HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa was largely ignored by the “mainstream media”.

Nemesys:

So you’re saying that Fox is not mainstream media?

Really?

dimbulb, if you Google “Mainstream Media”, the first definition (from thefreedictionary.com) is “Mainstream media (MSM) are media that reflects the mainstream – “the prevailing current of thought, influence, or activity.””

So no, Fox is not mainstream media. It covers some stories that are not found on other networks. True, it has the largest audience on cable news, but it is significantly outnumbered by all other media sources combined that collectively cover “the prevailing current of thought, influence, and activity”.

If you’re “Really” interested in the question, there’s a recent article in the Huffington Post that explores it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/20/bill-oreilly-fox-news-betn652477.html

Most “news” in the US is simply low-grade entertainment. Some of us who prefer not to have our thinking shaped by media do not even own television sets. Try it. Turn off the tube (or do what I did, throw it away). There will be a period of withdrawal, but in time brief snatches of independent thinking will occur. In my case, after about a year television could no longer hold my attention when I would visit homes where it was on and being watched. In fact, the people who sat and watched TV were no longer interesting to me. Remember, all TV - even TV News - has a hidden agenda …

@nemesys–Just food for thought. If it were truly mainstream, would it not take into account what millions of us are thinking/wanting/needing? From my conversations with people all over the country, there is no “mainstream news media”. Just more “elite professionals” trying to tell me what is good for me. What happened to truth?

Hey Sheik! You’ve given up old movies (The Sheik) for a Wagnerian opera! Such diversity.

Check out a documentary titled “Outfoxed”. It exposes Pox News methods of propaganda delivery.

On DVD.

ringo, I tend to agree with you, but find that there are certain programs that I do miss. I keep my TV pretty much for sports and checking the weather forecast, but occasionally watch programs that catch my eye, such as a few weeks back there was an interesting documentary on Stephen Hawking, and the types of physics he theorizes upon. Very interesting stuff, though not particularly relevant to the problems of today. I do wish there were an unbiased documentary on the study of global climate change, or of an evolutionary theory which includes a viable theory on the actual origin of life which goes deeper than the “primordial ooze” beginning, or a discussion of economics which can differentiate between societal socialistic tendencies and governmental socialism. Alas, I fear those subjects are too polarizing for anyone to truly give a neutral account.

ringokarma, I know where you’re coming from. However, rather than monitor no news at all, I balance my news sources with my local paper, the NY Times, US News & World Report, Fox, ABC, and occasionally the Huffington Post and CNBC. I think an informed person needs to understand the agendas and then decide for themselves.

John Pike, if a person was to only listen to “mainstream” sources, the messages they get are eerily cookie-cutter. Here’s a list of “mainstream” quotes over the past week about the president’s economic plan:

Dan Harris, ABC News: It seems so long ago that the economy was literally on the brink.

Eleanor Clift, Newsweek: He (Obama) brought the economy back from the brink.

Brianna Keilar, CNN: Two years ago the U.S. economy was on the brink of collapse.

William Harwood, CBS News: (The administration helped pull the economy back from the brink.

Erik Menendex, NY Times: He (Obama) has managed to get a lot done, saving the economy from the brink.

Dan Lothian, CNN: As the President has pointed out it’s (the ecomomy) been brought back from the brink.

Tucker Carlson, NY Times: Obama having to regulate the banks, after the banks put all of us on the brink of a economic collapse.

I guess they all copied that from the same White House press release. Fox’s tendancy not to automatically repeat such things places it outside the “mainstream”.

Bush’s General, ha, yet another wing-nut that doesn’t understand that the military works for the COUNTRY.

i wouldn’t smoke here either. The gas leaks are REALLY extensive.

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38)