What bothers me most about Fox is not that they lie to me, but how bad they are at it. We're so stupid in this country that they don't even need to be subtle in their manipulations. This goes for Olbermann, too.

Maddow clearly leans far to the left but I don't think she twists the truth much as a result of it. She focuses on stories about the right fucking up, yes, but they're still factual. She has taken shots at the Obama administration, too. I don't consider her news, though. More like investigative journalism.

Ultimately you shouldn't watch any of the major news outlets. Bias aside, they've shown themselves to be insanely incompetent.

>>^griefer_queafer
Yeah I agree Zakaria is a talented interviewer. And quite smart. He can actually pronounce names of people overseas properly. But I think you might be giving CNN too much credit in giving him leeway on CNN. I'm thinking they hired him because his ideology is within the spectrum of what they want to broadcast. Because if they actually gave a real voice to the best academics on foreign policy in the US then it would be like CNN stabbing itself in the heart. The amount of so called "official sources say" reports and interviews they depend on is pitiful. CNN is pretty much irrelevant to me. For them to have any credibility to represent reality they have to challenge those in power, take the hit of losing interviews with politicians, then do investigative work rather than he said she said tabloid style what do you think of what that person said about this or that person coverage. I used the word coverage purposely in that I have a hard time calling the vast majority of CNN journalism, more like a 24 hour politician versus politician reality show. If you have one self serving propaganda group versus another self serving propaganda group constantly fighting for power then it's seems obvious to me that the media should be a referee of facts and analysis. But rather than investigate and giving cold hard facts on social issues now you've got networks (generally) representing political parties instead. CNN, took a slightly different path, instead of doing good investigative journalism has opted for getting a wide variety of political ideologues. But they're still mostly political hacks and their viewers aren't given the historical context of current events because of that. OK. I've gone a bit off topic ranting. anyway.

"Democracy Now" should be called "Communism Now".

Have no problem with their investigative journalism, but anyone paying attention understands the Goodman/DN agenda is to 'prove' America (and Israel) are evil, prejudiced lands.

Sometimes they're right...the other 99.99% of the time they're full of the warm brown.

Sorry about the entire South not being a paradise like Detroit.

And what's with using "White" to describe one side and "African-American" to describe another? That's just embarrassing.

>> ^bluecliff:
A nice protestant free-for-all. Capitalist to the core.
Your greatest gift, Stephen, was and for ever shall be poetry. It's amazing that such a boringly imperialistic, and philosophically lukewarm people (except Hume and Hobbes) could produce the likes of... well the list is too long (but beats any other nation in Europe)


The UK is about as imperialist as it is religious. The United States has more resemblance to our Red Coat past than GB does now. Always seemed like a bizarre irony that the Founding Fathers might be more at home in modern day Britain.

I think the "Intelligentsia" are a much more dominant class in the UK which may stem from the relatively high proportion of people going through higher education and University. As a result our nation is characterised by sceptics and cynics. We export them to be judges on Talent Shows, everybody needs at least one Brit on their panel now. Our television is full of them too, mostly thanks to the leftist BBC, our comedians poke holes in every minutiae of society and politics, we must have THE monopoly on investigative journalism and Nature documentaries were invented by Attenborough. So yeah, we end up giving a lot of empirical minds with eloquent voices a spotlight while in other countries they struggle to be heard. Mythbusters had to disguise its scientific methodology in explosions.

It's nice of Jesus to appear in goatee form as well as clean shaven. There's a man with a sense of variety.

Also, hat's off to the hard-hitting, investigative journalism the public can count on to be well-informed citizens.

I have a channel listing on my Sat TV that goes in order of respectability I have towards that news organization.

1. Al Jazeera
2. Euronews
3. BBC World
4. CNN
5. Press TV
6. Russia Today

Al Jazeera is great because 90% of their stories is investigative journalism about issues you didn't know were happening.

Greg Palast did some great investigative journalism about the Florida election and published a book in 2003, 'The best democracy money can buy', I highly recommend it. The first 100 pages are a bit boring but that's because he's going over all the voting statistics, after that the book gets very juicy.

Were touchscreens used in Florida in 2000?

While I'll agree that Americans are not keen on digesting complex issues, points being too cerebral are not the issue here. Besides, I don't think the party line of "they hate us for our freedom" is less complex than "they hate us for our foreign policy." If anything, it requires a bit more imagination.

No, if the U.S. government allowed popular opinion to germinate that its foreign policy was the central motivating factor in terrorist attacks, then the U.S. government would eventually have to alter that policy. That's not something they want to do.

We've all seen the vids of the GOP debates where each candidate (except for Ron Paul) toed the party line of "they hate us for our freedom." The Dems are guilty of it too; Clinton said much the same thing after the WTC was attacked the first time.

The U.S. government knows that people like Ron Paul and people like the author of this video will always come across as conspiracy-theory nutjobs. Let's not forget, also, specifically pointing out U.S. foreign policy toward Israel gives off a very pungent whiff of antisemitism which is why the crowd at the BookTV event boos the last questioner. America has been taught very well to frown upon anything that comes in the vicinity of antisemitism.

And these are the reasons why major media news outlets ignore such stories. So even if journalism wasn't dead in the U.S., they do not currently have an investigative journalism segment on American Idol.

So the ultimate goal in hiding this truth is to continue to run their foreign policy the way they want, exclusive of public scrutiny.

Good stuff, when I used to subscribe to Newsweek it was always interesting to read Zakaria's articles. He had some very worldy views from a US perspective.

However CNNi is really not what it used to be, it pales in comparison to Al Jazeera's investigative journalism.

In reply to this comment by winkler1:
good news - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/26/fareed-zakarias-cnn-show_n_103560.html

Of course, the only way to be sure is to ask the scientists at Princeton directly, but I'd expect them to have been smart enough to take that into account.

I'm *really* not a believer in psychics, fortune tellers, ghosts, vampires or anything which appears on the X-files... but when you look at the research, as I have -- and this is research done by the CIA, the military and the government, typically a jaded lot when it comes to any "new age nonsense" -- even I am unwilling to categorically say it's "stupid crap".

I understand and can even relate to your skepticism. Yet I would ask that your suspend disbelief until you read the book Remote Viewers, written by a highly skeptical journalist. After his extensive research, he concluded that there wasn't enough data to ignore the results:

"Remote Viewers is a bit of an odd book for Jim Schnabel, a science writer who has previously published work that could be described as highly skeptical of some things "out of the ordinary." In fact, when Mr. Schnabel was doing his research for this book he asked me for an interview, which I refused to give him because I considered him a "knee-jerk debunker." Considering the outcome of his research, this turns out to be a fortuitous endorsement of Mr. Schnabel's claim of objectivity. In the best traditions of investigative journalism, Schnabel takes an open mind and tunnels into much of the military remote-viewing community, revealing that the remote-viewing phenomenon was considered very real by the U.S. intelligence services, and a phenomenon worthy of high-level funding and research..."
http://www.courtneybrown.com/reviews/BookReviews/SchnabelRV.html

Awesome video. Just put it to my <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bockscar.de" title="http://www.bockscar.de">blog. Great piece of investigative journalism...

You cannot be serious Nazdorovia.

Garafolo - "The reason the corporate media serves the republican agenda so much is it means they don't have to work hard. They don't have to do anything. They don't have to do investigative journalism. They don't have to get into the dirty waters of speaking truth to power. If the corporate media continues to serve their republican masters, then their job is easy peasy. It's nuttin'. You go to Matt Drudge. You go get some stuff from Karl Rove. You go to Grover Norquist meetings. You get the talking points. Easy Peasy."

"[Conservative talk radio hosts] have conned the American people into thinking there is such a thing as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-gun, pro-death penalty Christian."

Coulter - "I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo."

"The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon.org-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims."

The links lead to Wikiquote collectives, I can't really see them being the opposites of eachother. Ann Coulter is a polemic who just spouts anything to get a reaction without adhereing to reason or reality.