Media Bias [Merged]

[GAP]

I too cannot receive it, other than watching video clips online.....CNN didn't become a household name until Bagdad.....

Can't diss the cleavage though......refreshing, I tell yu, refreshing...... ;D

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I'll stand by my earlier comments. I think they've probably given all sides the same shake in this election, played no favourites and asked some very pointed and topical questions to all.

They'll come into their own eventually. The 'Red' Star has never printed much that I've agreed with or cared reading. I find them just right of Pravda and side by side with News of the World.

 

[Rifleman62]

Anything, anything is better than outright untruths giggled in your face.

CBC radio news last night: (Mr.) Harper is in Toronto attempting to scare voters into voting Conservative.

 

[vonGarvin]

CBC radio news last night: (Mr.) Harper is in Toronto attempting to scare voters into voting Conservative.

Are you serious???

 

[Rifleman62]

Yes. Midnight BC time CBC Radio One newscast.

Not a word for word quote. The female announcer spit out the name Harper IMHO.

Not the phrase "scare up" voters, but scare voters into voting Con.

Item was after upbeat (not a pun) report on Jacko.

 

[observor 69]

Harper’s game
by Paul Wells on Monday, April 4, 2011 2:05pm - 312 Comments


Friends, remember. The global recovery is fragile,” Stephen Harper told a room full of Conservatives in St. John’s. It wasn’t a big room but it was reasonably well-packed; the friendly audience had the Prime Minister surrounded on every side.

“Yes, Canada is doing relatively well,” Harper said. “But a sea of troubles is lapping at our shores.”

Reporters who’d been travelling with the Conservative leader longer than I had rolled their eyes. “Still lapping,” the guy from the CBC said cheerfully.

“Have you heard about the sea of troubles yet?” the lady from the Canadian Press had asked me that morning in Moncton. Apparently it’s a fixture of the Harper stump speech, although I had managed to miss it so far.

Here was my chance to catch up. Harper described the contours of the trouble sea to his latest audience: “Disaster in the pacific, chaos in the Middle East, debt problems in Europe, and all kinds of challenges — some very serious challenges — south of our border. Canada — this country — is the closest thing the world has to an island of stability and security. And we’ve got to keep it that way.”

So far Harper had been reading from a teleprompter, or perhaps by now reciting from memory, his voice brisk but flat. Now he spoke with real emotion. “What would the world think, were we as a country to suddenly head off in some high-tax economic direction, led by a reckless coalition without a coherent program or even basic national principles?”

This is the Harper pitch for 2011. He varies it at each stop. Sometimes he leaves the sea of troubles out. But it’s always the same argument. Life is not perfect in Canada but it’s getting better. Peril lies all around. If Canadians throw off the protective embrace of Harper’s Conservatives… well… well then the Visigoths will descend, won’t they? And by the time they are done with us, everything Canadians cherish will lie in ruin.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/

 

[a_majoor]

Blowback against the constant mudslinging:

http://bcblue.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/air-india-suspect-suing-cbcs-milewski/

Air India suspect suing CBC’s Milewski
May 3, 2011 — BC Blue

CBC’s Terry Milewski’s mud-slinging article (see here) which was intended to damage Conservative Wai Young, has provoked a lawsuit from Ripudaman Singh Malik against Milewski, claiming defamation (see here).

Curious who pays the legal fees for Milewski? Do we as taxpayers pick up his lawyer’s tab?

http://www.cknw.com/Channels/Reg/NewsLocal/Story.aspx?ID=1412029&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Malik claims journalist made defamatory statements on website
CKNW Vancouver (AM 980)

5/3/2011

In court documents, Ripudaman Singh Malik who was acquitted of all charges in the Air India bombing case, claims journalist Terry Milewski published defamatory statements about him in an article on the C-B-C's website last month.

Malik claims Milewski wrote he was a "founder-member, and financier, of the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group which blew up Air India," that he was a close associate of the mastermind behind the bombing, Talwinder Parmar, and that Malik has acknowledged as genuine, his membership card in the Babbar Khalsa.

Malik says the statements imply he was responsible for or criminally associated with the 1985 bombing. 
He says he was not a founder-member or a financier of the Babbar Khalsa, and that he may have been a member 27 years ago but hasn't been since.

Malik says writing that he was associated with Talwinder Parmar suggests the nature of such an association was criminal, and that he has never had a criminal association with Parmar.

 

[Journeyman]

Malik says the statements imply he was responsible for or criminally associated with the 1985 bombing. 
He says he was not a founder-member or a financier of the Babbar Khalsa, and that he may have been a member 27 years ago but hasn't been since.

OK, let me confess right from the top.....math is not my strong suit -- especially 'higher math' as is apparently required here.

- Singh Malik admits to being a member of a terrorist group 27 years ago.
- Said terrorist group blows up an airliner 26 years ago
  - OK, this is the dodgy bit:
    - 27 years ago = 1984.
    - Airliner got blown up in 1985
    - Assuming that some planning went into the operation.....would not a terrorist member 27 years ago likely been vaguely familiar with his terrorist group's attack planned to occur 26 years ago?

I ask only because I'm a military guy. Sure, the Normandy invasion of 6 June 1944 (a Tuesday) was probably hashed out over beers on the Sunday, 4 June......

[Sarcastically posted for those whose math skills aren't as strong as mine  )

 

[Infanteer]

Maybe you could be Milewski's lawyer with those math skills....

 

[Rifleman62]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w--iWMP48Fs&feature=player_embedded

Via Small Dead Animals.

Sun News on "The Media Party".

 

[Kirkhill]

I wonder if the Media will now start paying attention to the NDP's candidates and 'hidden agendas' now that they are the Loyal Opposition.

Have to admit it would have been nice to know about the candidates during the election.... It would even have been nice to know the publicly funded party's private constitution especially as it seems to have been around for at least a couple of years and been cribbed whole and entire from Das Kapital.

 

[DBA]

When CNN first came on the air back in 1980, it was widely criticized too. It soon began to build an audience and performed as least as well as the old line networks in covering the shooting of President Reagan and the Iranian Embassy siege in London. The same could be said of both CBC Newsworld and the CTV News Channel, although the latter was more polished from the start. It seems to me Newsworld had only been broadcasting for a short period when it had to cover Oka, and its performance was spotty at best, at the start. In my opinion Sun News (which I cannot receive) has had to create an operation from scratch and is thus closer to the original CNN than to the other Canadian news channels, which relied on their parent organizations for support.

I would be interested in the impressions of this group of its coverage of the election compared to established networks.

Sun News Network is currently available around Ottawa over the air on 20.1 (a HDTV channel) with a normal antenna and a TV set with a digital tuner. 

I thought their election coverage was well done with some insightful comments as things developed throughout the evening. I live in Ottawa and flipped between CBC, CTV and Sun News Network. I usually watch CTV but it's still an analog channel so looks very poor compared to the other two which are digital (CBC on 4.1 and SNN on 20.1). The CBC coverage was junk with superficial analysis of various topics mixed  in. I thought Sun kept facts and opinion well separated and didn't pronounce their opinion on a topic as if it was fact like CBC tends to do.

 

[a_majoor]

Since Singh Malik was acquitted of all charges, he should be presumed innocent unless new evidence is brought forward. The fact the CBC allowed its reporter to broadcast the statement despite the acquittal and presumption of innocence is what is driving this suit forward.

Now he may or may not actually be a pure as driven snow (as suggested mathematically upthread), but for a reporter to make an allegation, and to do so in such a context as to damage a candidate from a particular party does not speak of good judgement at the very least.

 

[a_majoor]

Explain again why the CBC gets a billion dollars a year?

http://krydoristan.blogspot.com/2011/05/cbc-dtv-and-canada.html

CBC, DTV and Canada

I'm not going to get into a large technical discussion, because all the details can be found at the OTA Digital Forums on Digital Home. ca. I'm also not going to get deep into perceived political biases of the CBC.  This rather short post will  focus more on CBC's intentional failure to meet their mandate on Sept 1, 2011.

For a quick overview, on September 1st, horrible analog TV effectively dies in Canada and will be replaced by super awesome over the air high definition digital television. Some of you lucky people already have access to uncompressed HDTV, free of charge. Newer TV's are already set up for it, older TV's need a converter box. I think the only major centre without at least one over the air digital TV channel is Regina.

There are two things to take note of with the CBC, one is their mandate and the other is their plan for transition.

Mandate first, because the parts we are interested in are fairly self explanatory:

The Broadcasting Act (1991) states that the Canadian broadcasting system constitutes a single system and that the objectives of the broadcasting policy set out in subsection (1) can best be achieved by providing for the regulation and supervision of the Canadian broadcasting system by a single independent public authority.
The Act provides a mandate for all broadcasters, including CBC/Radio-Canada. It declares in Section 3:

(a) the Canadian broadcasting system shall be effectively owned and controlled by Canadians;

(d) the Canadian broadcasting system should:
    (iv) be readily adaptable to scientific and technological change;
(k) a range of broadcasting services in English and in French shall be extended to all Canadians as resources become available;
(m) the programming provided by the Corporation should
    (vii) be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose, and
 
What this says is that if you are Canadian, the CBC is mandated to provide their signal to you. You already own it, so you don't have to pay for it.  However, the mandated transition to digital TV will leave many Canadians without over the air access to CBC. The following cities aren't going to have CBC, but those residents will be paying for it, nonetheless.

Lethbridge
Saskatoon
London
Kitchener
Moncton
St. John


It's almost easier to say that CBC is keeping 3 stations in Quebec: Rimouski, Quebec City and Montreal. The rest are either being shut down or being left in the hands of those that operate CBC affiliates.

All of those cities and the surrounding areas will no longer have OTA CBC, even though they pay for it.  The CBC solution to this is to have people get cable or watch online.  That's unacceptable. What isn't understood is that right now, CBC literally covers the entire country with their analog setup.  So, because the CBC isn't mandated to do anything but change out mandatory markets, all those areas served by the repeater stations will not be converted.

One of the arguments being put forward in their plan in that 93% of Canadians get their TV from some kind of provider, so they won't be affected. That's not really the point, because it is a violation of their mandate to not provide service.  The number of people who use over the air exclusively is closer to 10%. The number who supplement their cable with OTA is probably closer to 20%, based on some preliminary numbers found at the first link.

Now, compare that with the private broadcasters. It is mandatory that they are digital by September 1st. It is also mandatory that they convert their transmitters to digital by 2016/ The national public broadcaster doesn't feel the need to service all Canadians. The private broadcasters have no option.  Doesn't that seem backwards?

 

[a_majoor]

A pretty outrageous example of how people let their personal bias drive the story. While this is a US example, we have seen examples upthread of this being done by the CBC and other media enablers. In the long run, this simply creates self inflicted wounds (notice the very same paper which published the story in question debunked the very "facts" used to support the story decades ago) and causes the legacy media to lose credibility. The ability of the Blogosphere to rapidly fact check and debunk these stories just makes things worse for the Legacy media.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/10/new-york-times-magazine-relies-upon-faked-research-to-smear-military/

New York Times Magazine Relies upon Faked Research to Smear Military
Jonathan S. Tobin 05.10.2011 - 10:31 AM

On the day that Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a cover story detailing the murder of Afghan civilians by American troops. The point of the piece was not to break the news of these crimes, since the incidents had already been uncovered and prosecuted by the military. Rather, they served as the jumping off point for a smear job, portraying the U.S. military as a bloodthirsty band of savage war criminals.

Entitled “A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man,” Luke Mogelson’s story described the murder of an Afghan elder in Kandahar province as well as two other civilians by five members of one army platoon. Since the news had already been reported elsewhere, Mogelson had a broader point to make. As his title made clear, he saw the activities of one small group of soldiers led by a sociopathic sergeant as representative of the U.S. military—not only the spirit of the American effort in Afghanistan, but the governing ethos of the U.S. military as a whole. Although the number of U.S. war crimes has been relatively small, Mogelson believes it is wrong to view them as exceptional. The fault is not so much “the exceptional few” who commit atrocities, but the “institutional failures” of the military and the nature of the wars that we are fighting. To buttress this assertion he claims:

Over the course of military history, American soldiers have become increasingly willing to kill. In World War II, just 15–20 percent of infantrymen fired their rifles at the enemy during battles; in Korea that number increased to 55 percent; in Vietnam it reached 90.

The source of these statistics was General S. L. A. Marshall, a military historian who included it in his 1947 book Men Against Fire. Mogelson pulled them from a more recent book by retired military psychiatrist Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, whom Mogelson quotes as accusing the military of “programming” soldiers to kill indiscriminately.

But what Mogelson fails to disclose in his article is that, more than 20 years ago, the New York Times itself published an article debunking the numbers upon which his entire argument rests.

On February 19, 1989, the Times published a front-page story by Richard Halloran detailing the findings of historians who had probed Marshall’s research and discovered it was completely fabricated. Even his defenders were forced to admit that Marshall’s “argument is not very important, in a historical sense. . . .”

The problem for Mogelson and the Times is that if you take away the pseudo-historical research he cites, all you have is a lengthy exposé of a crime that had already been prosecuted by the army. The conceit of the article—namely, that the crimes in Kandahar are indicative of the spirit of the U.S. military—is predicated on fake research that the Times itself discredited many years ago.

The Times owes its readers an apology for faulty fact-checking and sloppy editing. Even more, it owes an apology to the brave fighting men and women of the armed forces of the United States.

 

[PuckChaser]

Some pretty good points here: http://en.video.canoe.tv/video/news/canada/1896809958/trained-by-the-cbc/940305484001

 

[a_majoor]

Ezra Levant on the CBC. Tell me again why the CBC gets $1 billion/year?

 

[PuckChaser]

Think we've got the same link, though yours has the authors name.

The CBC is valuable as a public broadcaster, but not with its current sense of entitlement. It needs cash to push Canadian content, but the viewers should be deciding its cash flow. All of the commercials I see on the network really makes me wonder where the cash from the Feds is going.

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

I sent my obligatory "kill the CBC" letter to Harper.  Not holding my breath that he will take my advice this time but this budget would be a good time to end it.

 

[Neill McKay]

All of the commercials I see on the network really makes me wonder where the cash from the Feds is going.

Radio?  Some of it, anyway.