RIGHTbert

Bias in Arab Media?

A reader asked.....

In an effort at "multiculturalism" and under the guise of recognizing 911 and media bias, a student at our school wrote in the school newspapaper that students have "too narrow a view and should go to aljazeera.com and palestine-daily.com to see why other countries hate us and why on 911 2001 people on the other side of the globe were running in the streets of the country in joy becuase the U.S. felt the violence and destruction that plague their countries."

He sites these news media as highly respected and unbiased and that American media is pro-American and pro-Israel with too narrow of views.

Can you help me out with this one?

Can you guide me to instances of aljazeera and palestinian papers being truthful, respected, etc.? I don't think they are, who owns and runs these?

The reply....

I can't comment on the ownership of the papers you cite.

The thing about bias is that it exists to promote a point of view or an agenda. The papers cited are Arab and sell their news to an Arab population wanting something closer to home than the BBC or SkyNews(Fox). They sell a point of view desirable to their local consumers.

I will argue that the writer in your school paper correctly directs readers to other than known and trusted sources. There is a vast difference between knowingly seeking out conflicting viewpoints and swallowing the package they deliver.

We suffer in America from severely biased organizations that are received daily into our homes. Both Reuters and the Associated Press have decidedly antiwar agendas and both provide the American masses in small town papers. Many of these small papers surrender their news gathering ability totally to these wire services. While the internet provides daily feeds m directly from the military command in Iraq, the papers choose to take the events filtered through the biased wire services. Dan Rather taught us that network TV news is totaly unreliable and often out right untruthful. He is no more.

The internet provides far more than a person can absorb, but continuous sampling with in-depth research on specific issues is beneficial. A sampling of the opposition is not a completely bad thing. It must be noted that the recent events in Lebanon were totally managed by Hezbollah. An individual known on the internet as Green Helmet Guy was present at each and every press event. He not only managed the event but actually staged false events. He apparently seeded bomb craters with new furry toys meant to show the deaths of children.

Here is a link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1681197/posts

Reuters published an unknown but massive quantity of photo shopped pictures.

Here is a link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1680949/posts

You used the term multiculturism. There is a difference between multiculturism in America and being a citizen of the world. Many today seek American isolation when the exact opposite course is unfolding. To develop a world view, it is necessary to sample thought across a very wide spectrum. To sample and to learn is not to agree.

Thanks for your question

Perky Katie and Uncle Walter

The cartoon has layers of meaning, perhaps one can read more than was intended

At first glance there is the comparison with the superficial leftist with the most trusted man in America. Say what you will now about uncle Walter, but the fact is he was the voice America, trusted, and respected. His mane of near white hair provided the illusion of wisdom. His experience as a reporter and war correspondent was yet more reason for respect. One story he told was about the D Day landing. In the confusion he lost his helmet and picked up one he found on the beach. He scurried to safety to get his bearings only to find a host of soldiers hugging his rear. He had donned the helmet of a slain officer and the troopers followed his lead. The bar on the back of the replacement helmet led them to do so.

Now comes his antitheses , Perky Katie. She tries to look young and beautiful. She exudes charm. She grew up trodding the path already deeply furrowed by her predecessors. She may have done some reporting, but mostly she was talk TV. She read some news provided by others and she interviewed people dumb enough or desperate enough to submit to her sugared blather or her vile recriminations. She was an on camera cheer leader, cheering her left wing team on or vigorously defaming her opposition

There are lots of ways to compare the two but it is near certain that no one would follow the Perky one up a beach under fire. The concept is inconceivable. Her-audience will be old folk. They will reject her in total. Her days as a newsie are over before she begins. If she has any success at all it will be as an interviewer. For that to happen, the 6:30 news will be gone from CBS.

The cartoon says something about CBS as well. There is a big empty chair. The empty chair is metaphor for what once was a big news organization. It is now an empty chair. It has lost the best audience and struggles on handicapped like General Motors with an overabundance of old and burnt out employees.

There is also a big empty table. The table has no papers or scripts just a CBS with Katie will have lost the ability to have a real pro convey the news. A shrunken CBS can't handle the Chair or the desk.

CBS Evening News is Gone. CBS evening talk will soon begin.

Democrat Rants, the Associated Press and the hapless Kingsport Times News

Once again the Kingsport Times News is guilty of bias in reporting the news of the week. Once again the paper published in a medium sized Tennessee city ignored the most important political story of the week. The fairpress.org website in it’s Media Bias 101 lessons lists bias by story selection or bias by omission as being equivalent to bias by lie. The question is why would the Times News take such a biased course?

The unhinged rant by Democratic Senator Durbin comparing the prison at Guantanamo with the torture of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulags was deselected by the Times News editors. A story where numerous Republican Senators took to the Senate floor and denounced the Democrat Senator form Illinois, some even calling for censure, was ignored. The story of a Democrat laboring mightily to bring down a President was ignored. The question is why?

Did the editors think their readers did not need to learn the Senator’s rant backfired and that they must shield their left wing agenda from the onslaught of harsh and justified criticism that resulted. Or, did the editors insulated from the world in a medium sized Tennessee city simply not know the events occurred? Since the Times News has only one link to the outside world, the fact that they did not know is a reasonable assumption.

The Times News has only one usable link to the world, the Associated Press wire. A wire is a 19th century expression for a telegraph line. If the AP decides that a story is contrary to it’s agenda of bringing down a President, the story doesn’t make it on the wire. If a story doesn’t propagandize the agenda, it doesn’t exist. Omission is bias. The bias was shown earlier when the AP and the TN failed for many days to report the substance of Dan Rather's attempt to foist fradulent documents as truth. Such is also the case with the Durbin story.

The Times news is slavishly bound to the AP and permits no other sources of news even though more reliable and significantly more truthful. The Times News lives in the 1930’s world of a telegraph wire and telex machine with only one source of national and international news at the other end. Even though there is good TN coverage of the world of computers and of the internet, use by the paper is apparently not editorially permitted. The Times News by relying on a terminally biased AP has degenerated into a purely local news source. The Times News in an unreliable and untruthful source of real news beyond the county line.