Hopefully this will spark some discussion.

He's right about the lack of dissent of anything government between 2001 and Obama. To have done so would have been unpatriotic.

That was pretty well presented.
I wonder if Ted Koppel will respond.

I'm loving this debate. I wonder what will come out of it?

Where's the video for what he is responding to?

>> ^colt45:

Where's the video for what he is responding to?


He's responding to an article Ted Koppel penned for the dead tree media:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html

Thank you very much!

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^colt45:
Where's the video for what he is responding to?

He's responding to an article Ted Koppel penned for the dead tree media:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/
11/12/AR2010111202857.html

As much as I am against NewsCorp and everything it stands for, I have to absolutely agree with Mr. Koppel here and say that the internet helped facilitate this.

"But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers."

With the incredible free flow of information and inevitable formation of online communities, everything in itself becomes a self-feeding information frenzy. The internet will conform to what you search for, and finding factual information is becoming more difficult as it get's crowded out by all of the misinformation sometimes out right lies that are posted every minute.

Every source can call itself as an absolute truth without fear of consequences, and sometimes do so purposefully in order to garner attention and "hits." This sensationalism has always existed and only gets more prevalent and easier to find now that online communities grow larger and more popular. The advent of more advanced search algorithms in search engines allow you to find that one specific article that you're looking for regardless of how true or untrue it is.

Nowadays people equate finding something on google to being true. These ever-increasing online communities almost guarantee that as long as a person sees a headline that supports a certain idea or that person wants to "fact check" someone's point of view/claim, he or she will find the article in question.

The only solution I see to this problem is to educate a person on how to find information on the internet for themselves. I myself have been using the internet for over 17 years, and I can see the people that do not know how to find information always go to single sources and don't do enough digging to find out if what in fact they read is true. This is becoming increasingly difficult as the prevalence of the use of the internet is increasing at a much faster rate than the knowledge one needs to be able to use it effectively and reliably.

The internet, as we all know, is serious business.

@Tymbrwulf, well put, and I have the same thought about how we go about functioning as a society without any real way of sorting truth from misinformation.

I think the response that I (and I believe Keith) would give to that is that this is how it's always been. It's a bit more obvious now that more people have vastly improved means to do their own "fact checking" against what other people have written, but an interested person can find source information to back any position by doing faulty research, or relying on dubious sources.

The value journalists can provide, have always tried to provide, is a way to boil down all the data, try to filter out the noise, put it into context, and then glean the salient relevancy to their readers/listeners/viewers, and present it to them.

The problem is that journalists can also twist all their stories to meet an agenda. They can ignore all the data points that don't support their view, they can conceal or misrepresent the context, and they can blow the importance of a trivial story completely out of proportion.

That problem doesn't go away if the journalists have an agenda of appearing objective by pretending that both sides of a political debate are always making valid arguments. In fact, it's can be worse, because they think that they're being objective, when all they're really doing is making sure their reporting carefully avoids upsetting either partisan camp.

The result is that we have supposed "hard" journalists going out of their way to make every story ultimately say that no sequence of events ever vindicates or repudiates the political philosophy held by any activists, and anything bad that happens in politics or government is always equally to blame on both parties.

For example, they can't say that the BP oil spill casts a tremendous amount of doubt on the idea that corporations will regulate themselves if we eliminate safety inspections. They also can't say that it's largely Republicans who've worked tirelessly for decades to reduce the amount of safety regulations, and worked to systematically hamstring enforcement of what remained.

What's always safe is to criticize the current government for not having fixed the problem instantly and without fuss, and to criticize the megacorporation for trying to minimize their legal liability, the costs of the cleanup, and for using professional PR to try to limit the damage to their reputation.

But if it's just context-free ranting against the people with power in our society, it can't really ever lead to a constructive conversation about how to change our society so things like this don't happen again.

Out of all that talking and the article one thing is very clear... Truth is in the eye of the beholder in, basically, any human historical event. Science, or to be more clear, mathematics and proofs/experiments that can be done by anyone are a real version of truth. As humans we do have many ways to find the differences between a liar and truth teller (sooner or later science may end this debate via PET scans and it's like).

The real point comes down to the Internet and the dissemination of information. There will be a point where the talking heads are much, as Koppel would say, demagogues for a various flavor. From my own experience; Keith has had his moments, but... He tends to be the only voice of reason that's loud. I tend to think he has grown more into this type of position as Fox and their cohorts have grown ever increasingly the person crying fire in the theater.

Fox, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, and the beast that has a framework between all: The Internet; is becoming the prime news source.

While the large number of television viewers will have an impact on thought and truth. The card that seems to have been played from move one to now, is education.

As the future progresses we need the media to get the information we would NEVER have access to. But, the intellectual ability of so many Americans is far from any agreeable state. Many of us on here can see almost all the lies and dismiss them. The problem is the demagogues are using any means to win; religion, "insert"ist, etc... I'd increase the education spending three to four times if I could. Not allowing school boards to break apart lessons. Some sort of law that applies to non-public schools (of course it would skip church vs. state issues, but if you bring up the dissemination of Biology lessons enjoy your Supreme Court appearance). Next, undo the methodology of current teaching setups. Most of it is based on very, very, very old teaching methods. An update would be nice.

/long
//no grammer checking, to tired, except for the first thing--that's a joke

@kceaton1

Call me a cynic, but I believe that any person in a position of power would want to work towards cutting down on the funding of education and education in general. In my opinion it is a great way to cut spending while also ensuring your place among the masses. If you and your cohorts are the only ones who are educated enough to make these decisions, then it pretty much ensures job security as well as influence.

I could then argue that people, being people, would take any opportunity to skim off the top when it comes to the government funding of anything. I can give you an example such as the new payout structure the government uses to pay doctors who work at educational facilities and Veterans hospitals. The format used to give money to the organization, which would then pay the doctors. They then found out that these organizations were skimming off the top of that funding, so the government now pays doctors a direct paycheck and cut out the middle man.

Cynicism aside, I could also argue that when looking at the massive debt we're in, politicians would want to cut spending from everywhere possible. Politicians are people too, and they also know that given the opportunity, a person would definitely keep a few extra bucks for himself as long as he could hide it well. There have been studies done on this (showing that given a certain amount of money to share with a another, people who were told the stranger would know the original value given would give MORE than the group who were told the stranger does not know the amount dispensed). Knowing this, they will want to cut spending to reduce the wasting of funding on people who do this. This will obviously be met with resistance from the people who are now at risk of losing this extra funding and they will scream that they want to destroy education.

Looking at it from both sides, I see no clear solution that can solve extraneous spending while keeping funding for education at a reasonable and effective level. While I agree with you that the system is dated, I'd also like to point out that the people who are a part of that system are also a product of it. Once again I do not see a clear solution due to the fact that people who have already been educated in the past(a past without internet) would make the argument that if it worked for them, it wlil work for everyone else, therefor there is no need to look into further methods of education.

The pessimist in me says things won't change, the realist in me tells me to take advantage of that.

@Tymbrwulf

I pretty much agree with everything you just said. I think the prose you wrote above would make an excellent deface to the preface of the new book I prefaced called, 'Elephants That Became A Morass Relay System That Were "Gored" Into A Multi-Platform Supported Prostitute', written by John C. Dvorak and prefaced by me and your stuff near the back. Right before the end; you'll kindly remind the readers that they read 259 pages of nothing. Literally, (literally) nothing, but THIS (plus our stuff):

"Then on that dissmal day did I look fondly over the barren San Francisco skyline and remembered the quote I had stated so long ago, and evermore..so...truth-worthy now..."
----

'Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.'

@kceaton1 and @Tymbrwulf, I think we've already forgotten that this video was about media objectivity, but while I find the cynicism about "those in power" is justified, I think the right response isn't to try to "limit" government, but to demand that government looks after the people's interests, and not just the interests of a small group of oligarchs.

Media is in the same boat. I forget the exact quote, but the way media used to be is that the programming was the product, the viewers were the customers, and advertisement was the vehicle that made the whole thing possible. Now the paradigm is that the viewers are the product, the advertisers are the customers, and the programming is the vehicle that makes the whole thing possible.

The fix isn't to kill media, but to find a way to make media work for us again. It probably means we should clamor for an end to "free" ad-supported media.

@NetRunner

While I don't have time to get into the debate on the pros/cons of getting rid of an ad supported media(because I feel like I would need to encompass a lot of different viewpoints into the subject and I am not well-versed enough to iterate those kinds of ideas off-hand).

What bothers me is modern US news networks fill their non-news segments with "news-like" segments that are presented as news with a "___ News" logo in the corner of the channel. In my mind this is equivalent to false advertising and an attempt to trick the viewer into presenting opinion as fact. (You can see O'Reilly defend this when Maher questions him about it in another video).

Eliminating non-news segments from 24-hour news channels would be a huge step in the right direction.

@Tymbrwulf, would you remove editorials and regular columns from newspapers as well?

Also, how would you regulate such a thing? What if FNC responded by saying "O'Reilly is objective"? How do you prove or disprove that?

For that matter, is Megyn Kelly really objective? Major Garrett? The gang at Fox and Friends? Changing networks, how about Joe Scarborough? Chuck Todd? Contessa Brewer? Tamron Hall?

What's the litmus test? How do I find out if I'm objective or not?

@NetRunner

I don't have an answer to your question.

I guess my main problem with 24-hour news stations is the distortion and manipulation of facts and people. I realize that any news reporter who is covering a story is bound to add some subjective views on the topic particular to that reporter.

I feel like a lot of "news" reporting is reported for the sake of being there first, instead of being there and being accurate. It really irks me when I hear talking points from both sides that I know are just veiled bullshit, and that people tolerate it without asking questions. (At least that's how it feels to me).

It's frustrating.

@Tymbrwulf, I totally agree. The chief failing of news these days is that it's essentially all ambulance chasing. There's no investigation, analysis, no background, no context, it's just train wrecks and stenography of the spin coming from politicians (and a lot of horse-race reporting about whose spin is suckering the most rubes).

For me, the real eye-opener was the way the mainstream (read: non-blog) press covered the whole battle over health care reform. The press made no effort to explain a) what the proposals were, b) what experts thought the effect of those proposals would be, or c) that one side of the "debate" was making up an endless cavalcade of outright lies, spending millions to shout those lies from every TV in the country, and not offering any constructive input into the process on any level.

Even after the bill passed, the press barely made any effort to explain what was in the law. Instead, they just focused on how the political parties poll numbers changed in the aftermath.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by radx.