ann coulter

[ft.niagara]

as for the actualy topic, i wish that women would shut her mouth. the venom she spews is such utter lies and propoganda you would think someone was paying here to make a good april fools joke. believe me many americans including myself love canada. where else would we go to get good looking women ^^?

Yes, isn't it terrible how that AC spews such nonsense. Venom is not half of it. And as for Canada, All Americans LOVE Canada. As said elsewhere, what's not to love?

As for 'where else would we go to get good looking women ^^?', I really don't think the Americans are raiding the Canadian female population.

[caesar]

As for 'where else would we go to get good looking women ^^?', I really don't think the Americans are raiding the Canadian female population.

Probably not (successfully); We got lots of good intelligent men of our own.

[moderateamericain]

who says its intelligence that they are after, it could be my dashing good looks

[caesar]

Well that and a nice fat bank account wouldn't hurt.

[PocketRocket]

  Pocket rocket does have a good point. 

Well thank you, sir. Occasionally we do agree.

  There is always too much spin on the news and not enough straight reporting.

Human nature dictates that we try to turn issues to our own advantage. This often means spinning the news to accomodate our viewpoint (or party) of choice.

People who skim the news or don't really listen do often come up with a lot of cockeyed ideas of the truth. 

Actually, the news is often fairly accurate, but the accompanying commentaries are, as stated previously, matters of opinion. When we KNOW that the opinion is coming from someone with a known agenda, we should take them with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, there are many people who cannot distinguish between fact and opinion. At least that's my opinion. But then again, my opninion is the only one that counts

Lots of people out there still believe that Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction; that Iraq was a serious threat to the USA. 

Lots of people hold their head of state as being something sacred, or someone who can do no wrong, and so they choose to believe whatever "Big Brother" tells them.

Unfortunate, but true. What was it Britney Spears said??? Something about "My President would never lie to us, and he will always do the right thing, and we should support him fully", or something to that effect.

Poor, naive child. Nice body, though.

A head of state is, like the rest of us, merely human, and subject to all the same foibles as the rest of us.

Likewise representatives of the media.

Likewise all these political commentators. ESPECIALLY the political commentators. They are PAID to have foibles that are BIGGER than those of the rest of us.

[PocketRocket]

where else would we go to get good looking women ^^? 

We got lots of good intelligent men of our own.

who says its intelligence that they are after, it could be my dashing good looks

Well that and a nice fat bank account wouldn't hurt.

Ah, but you're all missing a very important quality. Many women have bemoaned the fact that it's very difficult to find a man who is good looking, intelligent, prosperous, AND SENSITIVE.

Unfortunately, most of these men already have boyfriends of their own

[Black Dog]

Actually, the news is often fairly accurate, but the accompanying commentaries are, as stated previously, matters of opinion. When we KNOW that the opinion is coming from someone with a known agenda, we should take them with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, there are many people who cannot distinguish between fact and opinion.

Bingo. I expect people here on MLW tend to be a tab more media savvy than most. Trot out terms like "convergence" to the average Joe Lunchpail and tehy won't have a clue what you're talking about. I'm sure that many people treat the content they see on FoxNews and CNN as unvarnished reporting by virtue of it being on a news channel. The distinction between news and opinion is lost on people, especially when the line is so often blurred by editorializing within straight news and the format in which opinions are presented. Look at someone like Rush Limbaugh, a man prone to making factually challened pronouncements about the world. These are his opinions, but they are couched in such away as to appear factual.

I think programs such as Crossfire or the O'reilly factor should come with warning labels that run across the bottom of the screen and state something along the lines of "the views presented here are soley the views of theparticipants and do not reflect the opinions of this station. X is not responsible for any factual innaccuracies, half truths or wingnuttery expressed by the participants of this program. Especially Ann Coulter. That chick is nutso."

[moderateamericain]

i love how you attack only right winged programs for having biased opinions but clearly leave out left biased commentators. its utterly amazing to me how you can make the assumption that a Left winged opinion is always crouched in fact and that all right wingers are factless. one more reason that i disregard all your post as irrational.

[Black Dog]

i love how you attack only right winged programs for having biased opinions but clearly leave out left biased commentators.

Name me some left-wing pundits who command audiences as big as Rush's and O'Reilly's or who's apperances on talking head programs are as plentiful as Ann Coulter's. There simply aren't that many genuine, prominet progressive voices out there. Maybe that's because, with the exception of people like Michael Moore, progressives depend on facts and reason over the wild accusations, overblown rhetoric, out-there hyperbole and perjoratives used by the right wing pundits I named. Lefty eggheads just don't make as good TV.

its utterly amazing to me how you can make the assumption that a Left winged opinion is always crouched in fact and that all right wingers are factless.

Did I say that? Nope. You assumed. I made a general comment about opinion versus "real" news and cited right-wing pundits because they are simply more abundant. Maybe you should try responding to the substance of the discussion instead of the suppositions you create in your moderate brain.

one more reason that i disregard all your post as irrational.

Oh that stings. I'll be crying myself to sleep tonight over that one.

Word of advice: spend more time composing arguments and less time casting aspersions on other posters' credibility.

QUOTE (moderateamericain @ Apr 5 2005, 12:32 PM)

hahah you lost all credibilty right there with me and hopefully anyone else who post here.

QUOTE (moderateamericain @ Mar 26 2005, 09:28 AM)

wow you lost all credibility with me you ever had, not that you could care, but ill basically be skipping past 90 percent of your post now

[moderateamericain]

for every one conservative or right leaning media personality theres 6 of the opposite

http://secure.mediaresearch.org/news/Media...per%20Reporters

[Black Dog]

or every one conservative or right leaning media personality theres 6 of the opposite

Wait aminute: a right wing organization dedicated to prove a left wing bias in the media has found a left wing bias in the news media? Well knock me over with a feather!

I really can't help noticing that the study in question focused not on media content, but individual reporters personal beliefs which may or may not manifest itself in their coverage. Nor does it

The discussion is not about media bias. That's already been done and if you want to go back and wade into that thread, be my guest.

But here's a question: if there's such an overwhelming number of liberal voices out there (and in a world where a Democrat is instantly regarded as a liberal, the term liberal means little), can you name, say, five?

[moderateamericain]

Michael Moore, Hilary CLinton(book), Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Tim Graham, Brian Williams, George stephonpolous?

[Black Dog]

Michael Moore, Hilary CLinton(book), Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Tim Graham, Brian Williams, George stephonpolous

Oh yes: raging leftists all.

I'll give you Mike Moore. That's one.

Tim Graham, I've never heard of him, but if it's the same dude google gave me, you've just named a guy who works for the same organization who's study you just cited as proof of liberal media bias.

I disqualifiy Hillary on the grounds that she is not a media pundit, but a politician (and not a particuairly lefty one at that).

Jennings? Williams? How do these telepromter reciters stack up to Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Scarbourough and other fire-breathing righties who have their own shows to disseminate their ideaology from?

Barbara freaking Walters? Is she slipping Marxist class analysis into her teary celeberity puff pieces now?

George Stephawahatsahoozah? You're telling me the former aide to the last Democratic president might be (gasp!) a Democrat?

What you have is mostly a selection of mushy centrists and centre-right establishment drones. In other words, your kind of people.

Great. Now I've gione and turne dthis into anoher discussion on bias.

Oh well.

Just as money and power allow the dominant illiberals to call the media liberal and left, so money and power allow them to study and "prove" media bias. S. Robert Lichter, Linda Lichter, and Stanley Rothman have been the most prominent rightists who have engaged in this "scientific" effort. The Lichters organized their Center for Media and Public Affairs in 1985, with accolades from Reagan and Pat Buchanan; Rothman has an Olin chair at Smith College. In a 1981 article on "Media and Business Elites" (Public Opinion), Robert Lichter and Rothman (LR) tried to prove the liberal bias of the media by showing that the "media elite" votes Democratic and has opinions more liberal than that of mainstream America.

The LR study violated every scientific standard you could name. They claimed to be studying a "media elite," but actually sampled media personnel who had anything to do with media "content," so most of them may be ordinary reporters (they failed to disclose the composition of their sample). LR compared their "media elite" with a sample of middle and upper levels of corporate management, not with comparable professionals like teachers, let alone non- professional "middle Americans." Their questions were ambiguous and loaded (for a good analysis, see Herbert Gans, "Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?," Columbia Journalism Review, Nov.-Dec. 1985), making one wonder why anyone would participate in this survey. And in fact, Ben Bradlee, the top editor of the Washington Post--one of the papers allegedly sampled by LR--claimed that he couldn't locate a single employee who had participated in the LR survey.

One key technique of right-wing proofs of liberal bias is to focus on social issues, as the affluent and urban media journalists and editors do tend to be more liberal than blue collar workers on issues like abortion-choice, gay rights, and the handling of drug problems, as are urban professionals across the board. On the other hand, on matters like government regulation, distrust of big business, income distribution, and jobs policies, "middle America" is to the left of the business and media elite. Rightwingers like LR handle this by bypassing the problematic areas and focusing on social issues, where they can score points.

Right-wing proofs of a liberal media also focus on voting patterns. The 1981 LR piece featured the pro-Democrat voting records of the media elite in the four elections between 1964 and 1976. In April 1996 a similar finding was published by the Roper Center and Gannett Freedom Forum; 89% of a sample of 139 Washington journalists allegedly voted for Clinton in 1992. The inference quickly drawn from this, as from the LR study, was that the media has a liberal bias. But the true media elite is the owners, who have legal control of the media companies, can hire, promote and fire their employees, and can shape policy a la Malone and Murdoch. LR and their allies never poll owners.

There are other questions to be asked in regard to these conservative polls. Why don't they compare the media elite's views on NAFTA with the views of middle America? How can we explain the mainstream media's failure to focus on the declining economic position and insecurity of middle Americans as an election issue? How can we explain the fact that a majority of newspapers came out editorially for Bob Dole with the "liberals" controlling the media? How can we explain the steady attacks on Clinton's character and focus on Whitewater, and more cursory treatment of Iran-contra and the Banco Lavoro case, in terms of a pro-Democrat bias? In what sense is Clinton a "liberal" anyway?

These and other questions can be answered by media analyses that focus on the control, funding, structure, and performance of the media, rather than reporter opinions and voting patterns. For example, the "propaganda model," which Noam Chomsky and I spelled out in Manufacturing Consent, describes the working of the mainstream media in terms of underlying structural factors and "filters" that define the parameters within which media underlings work. These constraints and filters include ownership and the financial pressures for bottom line performance; the need to adapt to the interests of advertisers, who pay the media bills; sourcing processes which cause journalists to depend heavily on government and business newsmakers; the threat of flak, which keeps the journalists under pressure and in line; and anticommunist and market-supportive premises that journalists internalize. The right-wing pundits and their echo chamber fit into this model quite nicely, which is why General Electric and the advertising community give them generous support.

[moderateamericain]

you asked name 5 liberals and i did, they are registered democrats and vote liberal. where is the confusion here? your opinion of them is of no consquence on the matter.

[Black Dog]

you asked name 5 liberals and i did, they are registered democrats and vote liberal. where is the confusion here? your opinion of them is of no consquence on the matter.

Well for starters, a Democrat is not necessarily a liberal (hello Joe Lieberman!). Second, I asked for 5 liberal media personalities. You named 5 including a Democratic Senator (therefore, not part of the media. That would be like me citing the fact that President Bush was on TV as evidence of the riht wing media bias) and a guy who apparently works to prove a liberal media bias. So you didn't respond fully.

Finally, the larger point is that personal political orientation does not prove bias. Content proves bias.

Individual personalities have individual biases, but they pale in comparison to the larger structural biases inherent in the media which tilt the press towards power and money.

[moderateamericain]

i actually named 7 if you could add.

[Black Dog]

i actually named 7 if you could add.

I expect you meant "count". In any case, I'l tak eyour in depth, well thought out and thoroughly informative response to indicate you don't have any thing of consequense to add to this discussion.

[I miss Reagan]

Apparently Ann Coulter's influence is being widely felt around the world. Time has put her on it's 100 Most Influential list of 2005.

Time 100

[Black Dog]

Apparently Ann Coulter's influence is being widely felt around the world. Time has put her on it's 100 Most Influential list of 2005.

Boy that liberal media sure is keeping her down.

Of course, you'll note she's filed under "entertainers", not "thinkers".

[I miss Reagan]

I just posted it for interest. I think the Time list is stupid. She is an entertainer. She makes us laugh at the stupidity of the left. She wouldn't be as big as she is if you guys didn't let her get to you so bad.

[Black Dog]

She makes us laugh at the stupidity of the left.  She wouldn't be as big as she is if you guys didn't let her get to you so bad.

It's funny how the right-wing will get their knickers all in a twist over Michael Moore's propaganda and will fall over each other to pounce on any inaccuracies, distortions or half truths he uses. Yet when one of your own utilizes the same dubious tatics (not to mention the race-baiting that underpins so much of Coulter's b.s.), it's all just a big laugh. How can you claim (as you have) that people who defend Michael Moore risk losing all credibility, while you defend and downplay Coulter's lies?

I learned a long time ago not to expect any intellectual consistency from the right, but it's still gross to see the doublethink in action.

[I miss Reagan]

Nice try BD but not even in the same ball park. Coulter is already preaching to the choir. She's not trying to convince anyone of anything. Her audience are educated conservatives who like her humor. Moore on the other hand is out to manipulate the weak and gullible for political purposes. He pretends to be a 'regular joe American' while living high on the profits he made on the backs of who he portrays as 'victims'. Talk about a hypocrite. No a better comparrison of Moore would be to Joe Camel. (you know manipulative cartoons to get children to smoke).

[The Terrible Sweal]

Her audience are educated conservatives who like her humor.

That sentence is an impossibility.

[I miss Reagan]

Her audience are educated conservatives who like her humor.

That sentence is an impossibility.

ha ha ha, you so funny ha ha ha

[Black Dog]

Nice try BD but not even in the same ball park. Coulter is already preaching to the choir. She's not trying to convince anyone of anything. Her audience are educated conservatives who like her humor.

Bullshit. Nobody writes books, shows up on natonal television etc etc. just to preach to the choir.

Moore on the other hand is out to manipulate the weak and gullible for political purposes

Riiiiight. Totally unlike Coulter who only wants to banter playfully with felow conservatives, and in no way intends to stir up fear and hatred of liberals, democrats, ter'ists for partisan purposes. Do you even realize how ridiculous you sound when you try to peddle this rank bullcrap?