Saudi Prince

[breaksny]

That was just one example. The whole problem with the American media illustrated by its insularity from the outside world. The fact is there is far less coverage, and of a generally lower quality in American broadcast media than on that channel. It's Europeanness has nothing to do with it. Sure Europe's member states r smaller than the US and possibly more affected by events in the outside world than we are, but especially given the fact that we as a country have more global responsibilities in the rest of the world (militarily, economically, diplomatically, and otherwise) than any other nation, we should have the public most educated in world affairs. And it's the media's job in this society to provide that education and it's not. This would apply even if we weren't @ war, but even more so since we are. It's a sad fact that the best coverage is on a partially state-funded network for a 30 min news broadcast originating in a foreign country shown @ most 3 times a day. America can do better and really should since it's in our own national interest to do so.

[malone]

I certainly agree that it would better serve our interests if Americans were better informed. Who among us wouldn't benefit from more information about what's going on in the world, much of in our name. However, the media in this country is big business, and the bottom line is what matters most. If a story is deemed interesting (regardless of its real importance) then that"s what'll garner the most coverage. If it bleeds, it leads!! Public television in some cases addresses the imbalance. But many see it as too high-brow, so it doesn't draw the large viewership. Those most likely to turn to public tv are sufficiently interested in politics and the like to have scoured out other sources of info. anyway. So we're back to square one again. Maybe we're just stuck with the reality that a certain segment of the population are turned off by politics no matter what. Sonicinfusion comes to mind.

[breaksny]

Wow we actually agree on something. I think I'll have 2 let this sink in for a few mins. Anyway, I'd say it's probably a good majority of the population, esp Gen Xers and younger. The problem is CNN Headline News's solution to the problem, for example, doesn't seem a solution really: i.e. the MTVization of newscasts. It's not their visual style of cramming the screen with info that I have a problem with, it's more that their video segments are too concise to the point of leaving critical parts of the day's news out. If they'd take something more of the approach of the BBC's daily 30 min news bulletins, where a typical news video report lasts on avg @ least 90-120 seconds, & often a min or 2 longer per piece, then you'd have the time to go into the depth on a story that it needs to get fully balanced and intelligent coverage, but still keep it concise. Maybe if they or CNN's main channel had a 30-60 world news cast that ran say 2 or 3 times a day, along with their normal coverage on America that would go some way 2 filling the gap. I guess what I'd like to seeis some American alternative where the companies (or ever just 1 single commercial channel) would look beyond the bottom line and put this stuff out there for its educational value, and other practical, but not strictly financial, value. Money may talk loudest, but it often doesn't talk most wisely.

And that's why alot of these other european countries have state-owned medias. You see some conflicts of interests, granted, but it's not like the BBC isn't responding to market pressures @ all anymore anyway. Just read their website or the Financial Times or Economist for proof of that. The fact that the bulk of broadcast media in the US is owned by just 5 conglomerates, which I've already mentioned by name, shows these companies have questions of conflicts of interests in their business news coverage frequently anyway. So it's not like the market is the complete solution to that issue either. It can partially regulate itself, but it's not perfect, otherwise all this communications power wouldn'tve been handed to them in the Telecommunications liberalization act of 1996 anyway. Their PACs worked with Congress to draft said act, along with other PACS such as those of the cable and phone companies, to allow them to achieve early market hegemony in each of their respective sectors and it's frankly a threat to freedom of speech and communication, as well as anti-competitive business practice, effectively codified by the federal government.

Fortunately Letterman's decision may save Koppel, for now. But if I were him I'd jump ship for another network anyway and take my crew with me.

[dusted]

Who gives a flying fuck about Koppel or any of the network anchors. The writing is on the wall for the networks. Their newscasts are on the third grade level. Half the time is spent lecturing people "It's cold outside, make sure you wear a hat and coat" Or "Its hot outside, make sure you drink lots of water".

The anchors are irrelevant at this point. Anyone with any brains at all watches cable news, and ITN and others for other perspectives.

The networks are dead, and deserve to be, they might as well put Letterman and maybe Seinfeld on in their place.

PBS is horrible. Besides blatantly slanting the news to the left, they are SOOOOO boring to watch. Charlie Rose just puts me to sleep. He's so horrible.

PBS has a bunch of granola heads running the show. They don't show anything of any interest to most people. Basically they put on shows that are interesting to them and their friends.

If they weren't being funded by the govt. they would have been dead long ago.

[dusted]

Anyway, back to my original post. The reason I posted it is because it makes me sick that this piece of shit prince is making money off Sept. 11. That sick country spawned 11 of those hijackers, and it was bad enough that the prince tried to use his money to influence our govt., but in the WSJ today he was quoted as saying that he was only taking advantage of the fact that Sept 11 caused the stocks to drop to "ridiculously low prices", that he would have been a fool not to have taken advantage.

What a piece of shit.

Why doesn't he use some of his money and influence to do something about the piece of shit terrorists that his country is producing?

Now he practically owns AOL/Time Warner and whats gonna happen now?

Is he going to use these companies to spread Arab/Palestinian anti American propaganda?

He has always owned a lot of CNN and does anyone remember after Sept 11, CNN refused to refer to it as a terrorist attack? They kept calling it a "disaster" and a "tragedy" and "the recent tragic events" Why wouldn't they just call it what it was?

They also turned the coverage away from the fact that it was a terrorist attack and chose to cover the "human interest" side of it. Like stories about the "heroes" and such.

Obviously, they were trying to be uncontroversial and not offend the Muslims. Also deliberately trying to divert attention away so that Americans wouldn't get too angry, cause apparantly, Americans aren't allowed to be angry about this.

[dusted]

dusted dont why dont you do a favour and stop posting topics about politics .. cause its no use ..it only creats drama and thats it!!

But if you like drama then pls feel free to post about jews and arabs .. I really could not give a flying fuck to both of them !!!

and I hope ppl living in USA dont even !! cause it has nothing to do with us !!

Actually it has everything to do with us.

[dusted]

Israel, the only democratic state in the Middle East, deserves our moral support

The Sunday Independent (Ireland) | Sunday March 10th 2002

Israel, the only democratic state in the Middle East, deserves our moral support, says Declan McCormack

IT'S open season for Jew-bashing in the West at the moment. As the Middle East's only democracy is subjected to wave after wave of vicious terrorist attacks by Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers the pious West and the sanctimoniously 'liberal' Western media lay the blame firmly where it has always lain with the Jews.

Yes, while every other democracy in the 'free world' claims a sovereign God-given right to extirpate terrorism and to protect their innocent citizens from the evil deeds of men and women of violence, the Jewish state of Israel is supposed to take the vicious, murderous attacks on its citizens lying down and presumably apologising for its existence, for the Jewish people's history and for 'going on about' the Holocaust.

The Jews were, after all, made to be attacked, annihilated and scapegoated. First the pogrom, then the expulsion, then the name-calling. How odd of God to choose the Jews, indeed. But, of course, no-one even the rabidly pro-Palestinian Western media really approves of these attacks on ordinary Jews. No-one, that is, except the gore-glorying mobs who celebrate every blood-bedraggled mission by dancing in the little streets of the Palestinian townships.

We in the West would rather ithe ordinary Israelis who travel on buses or who attend bar-mitzvahs or eat as a family in pizza parlours weren't blown to pieces by Palestinian suicide bombers because it doesn't square with our cherished notion that the poor Palestinian freedom fighters are being savagely bullied by the US-backed fascist colonial Semitic superpower that is Israel. Little urchin catapault-wielders fighting against Merkava tanks and Hellfire missile-shooting fighter jets.

Of course, all Palestinian violence is mere retaliation. Sure, wouldn't you blow yourself up right beside a mother and her small children if you had to queue everyday at checkpoints? Sure, we all know that Ariel Sharon is worse than Hitler. Remember the Lebanese massacres. (How could you ever forget when they're mentioned in every news reports even as the blown-to-pieces bodies of Israeli children are picked off the streets of Jerusalem.) Don't, of course, mention the 1997 suicide bomb which killed 13 Israelis in Jerusalem just after Israel had given the PLO control of Hebron. It doesn't really fit in with this schema whereby all Palestinian violence is just the understandable reaction of a downtrodden people to the gratuitous incursions and the targeted killings by Israel.

Don't mention, either, the fact that while Israel only targets terrorists who endanger the lives of their families by using them as human shields (thus the killing of the Hamas leader's family last week, for which Israel apologised) while the lovely, generous Palestinians (as described on Liveline last Tuesday) support terrorist organisations who kill Israelis at random. But then they're only Israelis. Jews. And what are they doing in Zion, anyway. Zionists! Fascists! Colonists!

And so the West lends immoral support to the Palestinians and delivers high-minded lectures to Israel about 'how to handle terrorists without hurting anyone'. Lesson one when, eh, we haven't worked out the details yet. The Swedes are very good at giving this advice. They had a great record in the last war facilitating Nazi steel transportations. And, of course, the UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson, formerly President of neutral Ireland, has been getting up on her high nelly lecturing Israel and telling them to be respectful of minorities. Especially, one presumes, suicide bombers at bus-stops. It wasn't that long ago since Ms Robinson was emoting about how she herself was a Jew (back in August last year in South Africa, to be precise). She might just show a little consideration for the embattled and terrorised Jews of Israel now.

She might also bear in mind that someone else recently announced in public that he was a Jew. The kidnapped Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was forced by his captors to say on video in a sick parody of the Palestinian Martyrs' final self-glorifying videos that he was a Jew and that his father was a Jew and his mother a Jew. That said, his Muslim captors slit his throat and cut off his head. Nice people.

In the ongoing Middle Eastern and potentially worldwide battle between Islam and Judaism it is sincerely to be hoped that this time out some European countries may learn the lesson of their obscene history and bring themselves to say and mean that 'in that case, I'm a Jew'. They could start by giving moral support to the only democratic state in the middle east as it tries to quell a coldly calculated uprising inspired by little else except the ideology and praxis of terrorism and the undiluted anti-Semitic hatred of the toxic wing of Islam.

[igloo]

Originally posted by tribal

jews and arabs dont control the media? who does then? one man! Howard Stern <- the shmuck thats responsible for all the media propaganda hehehe.

seriously, breaksny has a point, i ve been reading both cnn and bbc and bbc is by far more balanced than american media. plus they got Radio 1 and Essential Mix, how can you beat that?

The BBC is more balanced than what????...with respects to what????...coverage of American interests or European???

I watch both, and you have no fucking idea what you are talking about....

STFU

[breaksny]

I give a fuck about pbs and alot of other people do. Maybe you don't, and I don't really care if u watch it or not. While there's no shortage of conservative talk shows and newscasts on network tv, cable or broadcast, but there's no other regular outlet for moderate discussion on tv where both the left and right actually engage in a dialogue on a regular basis on US tv. Koppel being the exception, These are not the left wing shows you distort them into being dusted, you're just attempting to paint them with some simplistic brush of being right wing. I mean if I wanna watch a straigh conservative show I can turn on a conservative broadcast like the O Riley factor or Alan Keyes's show. Don't forget pbs even gives a weekly forum to conservatives like john mcglaughlin (not the group but his one on one show) and regularly gives conservatives the chance to talk in a level of discourse more sophisticated than anywhere on network tv. And I can tell you Charlie Rose is no leftist @ all. He gave Karl Rove a whole hour long interview last nite, something Jim Lerher and his team do with Bush cabinet members as often as they can as well. He likewise grills palestinian officials much more thoroughly in his interviewing than he generally does Israeli ones. I've seen it literally dozens of times. If you think it's boring cuz the style is too old-fashioned or intellectual or stodgy for you that's one thing, but the left-wing label doesn't apply given how much airtime they do give to conservatives.

[dusted]

So, given that you watch PBS regularly, why is it that you don't know the origins of the Arab/Israeli conflict?

[breaksny]

That's your rather ignorant assumption.

[dusted]

It's not an assumption. I've been listening to your ramblings on the subject for a week. They reveal a shallow understanding.

[breaksny]

Whatever.

[dusted]

Never mind that, check this out:

She was 12 in the first photo. She's about 29 now.

[dusted]

[breaksny]

Your arrogant questioning of my knowledge shows your own shallow one-sidedness in regard to the conflict. The allusions you kept making on the other thread between the start of the conflict and the current so-called "PLO plot to destroy Israel" or however the hell you wanna phrase it, illustrated a fine example of right wing propoganda. Netanyahu called for the destruction of the PA tonite. In effect your use of information from his site says to me that you view it as legimitate. And the reason I cannot is b/c I am convinced for good reason (namely his 3 years in office of systematically stalling in the implementation of the Oslo accords, as well as statements like the one he made tonite) that he is not a credible source of information. Your allusions to the origins of the conflict don't make a convincing connection at all that this so-called "trojan horse," as tribal calls it, is based in fact whatsoever. The way you invoke history to make your arguments show a shallowness, and twisting of the truth that is typical of people who don't understand the palestinian side of the conflict whatsoever. That's the rambling I've been listening to from you and malone lately in particular. You don't have intellectual depth, you have a racist bias and paranoia that Israel's in some imminent danger when it is the party destroying peace and clearly out to destroy the Palestinian government. And as to my calling you a racist, I don't give a rat's ass if you shut up or not. I really don't. I just think you're ignorant. Not to mention bigoted and patronizing, not just to me, but to everyone on the centre-left or left on this issue. The FACTS as you call them don't support your side. That's why I call you a racist cuz it makes me sick to my stomach b/c I think that's wrong. I didn't grow up thinking hate was a good thing. Apparently you did, and you crazily think the Palestinian leadership does when the facts don't bear that out. 1988 was a complete historical watershed in this regard, the PA has been committed, as have most palestinians, ever since to a 2 state solution. Extremist rhetoric invoked by a section of the radical Palestinian elite is not sufficient proof to the contrary. And is simply a pretext for Israel to destroy the palestinian government and to disempower its people. So get over the fact that just b/c I think you are completely wrong and reject out hand your entire arguing style and the substance of your beliefs that I lack any understanding in this conflict. I concede you have some limited merit in the some of the points you make, but on balance I think you're wrong. And alot of people, who are not leftists like me reject much of what you say, just as they reject alot of what I do as well.

[dusted]

Is it possible for you to argue facts and stop calling people names?

[breaksny]

But that's just it. You don't argue with facts. I'm criticizing your whole use of what you call facts b/c many of them aren't facts. And those that you do use, you use to make arguments that are simply untrue. That's not name calling. It's pointing out what alot of us on here think is the truth.

[malone]

Here we go again. While I do think that dusted tends to be brusque in some of his presentations, there's little doubt that he also raises valid points, which certainly acts as a corrective to a lot of the mush on offer here. We can argue these points until the cows come, but I still feel that engaging in reverse race-baiting is wrong. And I don't see how any cause is served by it: unless that is , you think you serve a cause by attempting to silence its critics. It reminds me of the campaign by certain people within the gay establishment attempting to sabotage Dr laura's tv career because they didn't like what she had to say. It's a pernicious practice and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone who claims any kind of respect for freedom of spech,or more pointedly, freedom of thought.

[mysterynyc]

Originally posted by tribal

jews and arabs dont control the media? who does then? one man! Howard Stern <- the shmuck thats responsible for all the media propaganda hehehe.

seriously, breaksny has a point, i ve been reading both cnn and bbc and bbc is by far more balanced than american media. plus they got Radio 1 and Essential Mix, how can you beat that?

that's what I'M TALKIN' about!

"Welcome...I'm Pete Tong and your listening to the Essential Mix on this Saturday night. 97-99 on your radio dial. Enjoy."

"E-E-E-Essential"

[dusted]

Originally posted by malone

Here we go again. While I do think that dusted tends to be brusque in some of his presentations, there's little doubt that he also raises valid points, which certainly acts as a corrective to a lot of the mush on offer here. We can argue these points until the cows come, but I still feel that engaging in reverse race-baiting is wrong. And I don't see how any cause is served by it: unless that is , you think you serve a cause by attempting to silence its critics. It reminds me of the campaign by certain people within the gay establishment attempting to sabotage Dr laura's tv career because they didn't like what she had to say. It's a pernicious practice and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone who claims any kind of respect for freedom of spech,or more pointedly, freedom of thought.

Breaksny REFUSES to argue the facts. In fact, he won't even give you an answer when you ask him a pointed question.

I'm STILL waiting for an answer as to why, in 1947, when the UN wanted to create 2 separate states, one Palestinian, and one Israeli, with Jerusalem being a separate, international entity, the Arabs didn't accept, and instead attacked Israel.

He WON'T ANSWER THE QUESTION. I can only assume he doesn't know. Which leads me to assume that he doesn't know enough about the conflict, that he should be so vehemently taking the Palestinian side.

[malone]

I think that many people hold to views, even when those views have been strongly challenged, or completely discredited because it's so difficult for them to admit that things may be other than they perceive them. Take for example the lefty infatuation with Communism, regardless of the brutality inflicted on those subjected to it, or the general malaise of collectivist societies; or their opposition to welfare reform, regardless of welfare's negative impact on its dependents. That is a quite common human reaction though. I think it's comforting for them to remain in this state of denial. You can see this need for comfort in comments like: "...and a lot of other people on this board agree with me," or " even mainstream popular opinion in Israel agrees with me". So the need to fit in is definately a big factor in propelling this thinking. And when that's challenged?? Well, now we've got problems. But remember : If youn want to lead the orchestra, you've got to turn your back on the crowd.