New York Time's Benghazi investigation

**SpecOpsScott** · 12-30-13, 07:50 PM

Originally Posted by Red_Lizard2

By the way, not sure the NYT article would help Hilary, considering it say the US fucked up by focusing just on Al-Q and not the threat of other militant groups (or just not recognizing it). Not exactly positive material there.

Maybe not, but i was just describing how it came off to me.

**AetheLove** · 12-30-13, 09:19 PM

Originally Posted by Nuckle

I probably dismiss the New York Times about like you dismiss Fox News.

Is it a ploy to try and clear up Hilary's name "some" for the upcoming election in 2016?

Originally Posted by SpecOpsScott

Either that, or a ploy to wrangle Republicans back into the Benghazi debate, you know, shine the light anywhere but Obamacare.

All i got out of it is.... The Times has no issue contradicting their own reporting over the last 18 months, and in doing so further erodes their credibility as an unbiased source for news. At best, this is an opinion piece that tries to put a spit shine on a turd left on their doorstep by the administration.

Originally Posted by CivilWars

Hey, look over here at Phil Robertson, I mean Benghazi, while we steal more of your freedoms over there...

I'm sure some of this was in good fun, but sometimes I wonder. Do you guys make any fine-grained distinction between:

1) Viewpoint
2) Bias
3) Agenda

?

Please don't think that I'm any less frustrated or jaded with the (terrible) job that our news media is doing of late. But I am less willing to lump it all together.

Bias isn't binary. The nature of taking a position is that it's necessarily subjective, and it can be a matter of degrees. I'm happy that people recognize that bias exists, but it frustrates me that so many people seem to get that far and then stop thinking.

The New York Times has a history of trying to provide news and practice good journalism. They have owners, they accept advertisements, they are for-profit and are subject to market forces. I'm not trying to argue that anyone in this game is purely altruistic. But they also have made an effort to separate business from editorial control. They make significant effort to separate news reporting, editorializing, columnists, and straight-up opinion pieces.

They also fall down. There are examples of them making bad editorial decisions, handling sources poorly, and going against accepted journalism practice. Some of those examples are recent.

But when that happens, people are outraged and it hurts the NY Times' reputation.

When Fox does those things no one bats an eye - because that's what they do every day.

Cheers,

AetheLove

**SpecOpsScott** · 12-31-13, 08:57 AM

Originally Posted by AetheLove

When Fox does those things no one bats an eye - because that's what they do every day.

For the record, i hate it when i see it on Fox too. Opinion shows are one thing, but when i see blatant bias from a news anchor it bugs the shit out of me. Even if they appear to be taking a position i agree with. Expanding upon and issue, and ignoring facts that might be contrary to the anchors own personal view while delivering the news is not the job of an anchor. That said... actual news anchors get what, about 2 hours a day per network, the rest of the time is filled with punditry and pop culture.

**AetheLove** · 12-31-13, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by SpecOpsScott

For the record, i hate it when i see it on Fox too. Opinion shows are one thing, but when i see blatant bias from a news anchor it bugs the shit out of me. Even if they appear to be taking a position i agree with. Expanding upon and issue, and ignoring facts that might be contrary to the anchors own personal view while delivering the news is not the job of an anchor. That said... actual news anchors get what, about 2 hours a day per network, the rest of the time is filled with punditry and pop culture.

Well that's encouraging, though from your posts here I would have guessed as much.

I wonder about the news business. I glanced at a paper this morning, and there were two AP stories (one on the front page, one on the front of the sports page) that had been copy-edited so incompetently as to make me wonder if they'd been proof-read at all. The first 'graph on the sports story was comically bad - like if you were trying to make an example of bad writing for a journalism class you wouldn't use this example because it's so bad as to be implausible.

Then there's stuff like this:

... which isn't new, but most people I know still don't understand that this is how much of the business works. When it's for local news puff-pieces it doesn't bother me. Putting a local face on a pre-canned segment is a big pile of whatever as far as I'm concerned. It's not substantive to begin with, and if it's more economical to mass-produce the BS rather than make BS locally, then fine.

But this is the technique that got Roger Ailes started in the "news" business. As a political media consultant, he'd produce his own "news" stories and send them to news outlets - which would frequently run them as-is.

Looking back now, creating Fox News makes logical sense. I give him huge credit as an innovator. For centuries, companies have sought to own both the production and distribution of their product.

So I wonder about the news business. When I look at this as an economist, I'm struck that the answer might be very simple: We don't want news.

Running with this premise... Since so many people don't want news, people who produce news are finding that the market will not fund their product. Should the response be to produce higher-quality news? In my little thought experiment, the clear answer is: No. As a mass-market product, we don't want news.

Real news, high-quality news, might be a niche product.

*sigh*

Happy New Year,

AetheLove