[ExI] "Atlas Shrugged" film review

[Richard Loosemore]

Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
>> Kelly Anderson wrote:
>> The idea that the press is "liberal" is so manifesty false that it is not
>> worth arguing with anyone who would argue otherwise.
>>
>> Only in a country in which the right defines the word "liberal" to be
>> synonymous with "questioning an extreme right-wing position in any way
>> whatsoever", can the newspapers be considered "liberal".
>>
>> The Guardian is liberal.  The Morning Star is extreme liberal/communist.
>>  Anything to the right of those is either centrist (The Independent) or
>> slightly right of center (New York Times) or further to the right.
> 
> UCLA is not exactly a bastion of conservatism, but they found it was real...
> 
> http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-6664.aspx
> 
> I think the New York Times is very left leaning from the stuff I have
> read there, but that's just my personal opinion rather than science.
> The Washington Times is right leaning, as of course is Fox.
> 
> I'm not going to argue this to death, because I know I won't get
> anywhere. I am simply stating my own opinion that people who are
> journalists naturally have a left leaning view of the world. They vote
> Democrat MUCH more than Republican. That's just a simple fact.

Do you know what is funny about people in the US?  They grow up with an 
educational system that trains them NEVER to use their own brains to 
think about something, but instead just take someone else's opinion as 
fact (as long as the opinion agrees with what they want to believe).

So, NEVER read and think about the content of a paper if its conclusion 
seems to support your point of view.  Just cite it as fact.

Exhibit A:  your reference to the Groseclose and Milyo paper.

If you read the report, and think about the methods that Groseclose and 
Milyo used, you can see that the justification for why their measure 
should actually correlate with the direction of bias is pathetic.

Groseclose and Milyo took a measure of the number of times reporters 
cited "think tanks", and then they cross-compared that to the number of 
citations made by politicians, then used the ADA measure (itself 
normalized to put the House at an average of "centrist"!) to find out 
how liberal those numbers were.

Every link in that chain is a joke.

If the vast majority of reporters in the country decided to, say, ignore 
a huge accumulation of evidence pointing to the fact that Iraq has no 
weapons of mass destruction, just before it is due to be invaded on the 
grounds that it has WMD, ......  but at the very same time that the 
reporters ignore this overwheleming evidence, they just do not bother to 
make any pertinent references to various think tanks, this would show up 
in Groseclose and Milyo's study as ....NOTHING.  No evidence of media 
bias there whatsoever.

Or, if those same reporters decided, on the eve of the Iraq war, to bury 
the story about the biggest anti-war protest in world history on page 
23, while devoting their front page to the "historic" news that the 
British Parliament had decided to ban fox hunting

Or:  if there is a big breaking news story that General Electric paid no 
corporate taxes in the last few years, but instead got a massive rebate 
from the government -- with this being extremely relevant to an ongoing 
right-wing crusade against the crippling, business-destroying corporate 
tax rate in this country -- and if the major television news networks 
decide to say absolutely NOTHING about this story, but instead headlined 
with a news item about "LOL" getting into the Oxford English Dictionary, 
this glaring distortion of the news to cover up something embarrassing 
to the right wing would not make any impact whatsoever on Groseclose and 
Milyo's statistical measure of media bias.

But, hell, don't let yourself be influenced by stupid, embarrassing 
little facts like these.

If the Groseclose and Milyo paper tells you what you want to believe, I 
am sure it must be true.




Richard Loosemore