Sour Grapes of Wrath
 

Last night, just before I tuned in to The Daily Show, I caught a freaky little press conference that featured an obviously flustered and scary-looking dude from an organization with the purposefully disingenuous name of The Media Research Center. He actually looked kinda drunk. Regardless, here is what he had to say:

?And then they [the Republicans] had the problem with the national press. I will say this unequivocally: In 25 years of looking at the national media, I have never in my life seen a more one-sided, distorted, vicious presentation of news and non-news by the national press. The national press ought to be collectively ashamed of itself. They might as well take out membership in the Democratic national party, they were simply microphones for the party. They need to be ashamed of themselves for what they did."

http://www.wildfreshness.com/brian/archives/bozell.jpg

I won't go into all the obvious reasons why this asstard's theory is comically delusional, but I will say that he must think all of America is stupid.

And see that fake blond in the back. That's Wendy Wright, President of the equally ambiguous Concerned Women of America . You can always count on Right Wing organizations to give themselves names that either say nothing about their agenda, or sound just the opposite of what they really are; think "Clear Skies Initiative."

What a bunch of losers (literally).

If there was a Liberal Media Conspiracy then why would they let people like this get on TV ??? . . . DUH.

Very clever thread title, too.

right, right, I meant to mention that...
 

What I want to know is why there are never accusations about the evil "liberal" media when the GOP wins big? And how about when the "liberal" press was all over Clinton about the Lewinski affair? And I really notice how Dobson and other Focus on the Family types have been gagged. Notice how hard it is to find a single word uttered by a member of the Christian Wrong these days?

None of you people have the wisdom, it seems, to actually read the guy's magazine: The American Spectator. A year of that would enlighten even a hard-case like Marichiko. I frequently page through it in the library, picked up some stuff to argue with Mari over the Allende regime and its deserved end -- I'm discerning enough to be impressed.

In none of my experience of Brent Bozell's output, Pangloss, has he ever said anything nasty about hermaphrodites.

So if you're not discerning you wouldn't be impressed UG? lol

What about if someone said, I'm discerning enough to know it's a load of crap?

Would that mean we're all discerning?

I'm certainly discerning enough to tell the good stuff from the fertilizer.

The "if I weren't discerning" thing is simply too hypothetical to be of any application.

That's easy;
Good stuff = what most people post.
Fertilizer = what you post.
:rolleyes:

Sweetheart, the fact that you can pick up a rag like The American Spectator, is proof that neither the liberal media nor anyone else is censoring the right or even the whacko's.

And you NEVER replied to my quite lengthy and well researched reply concerning Latin America. That must have been your other girl friend on some different board that you responded to. Or, it could have been that time you were serving 30 days in the county jail for vagrancy.

Whatever the reason for your lack of response, I don't bother with anymore arguments with you, except top of my head insults.

Quick! Who is Bernardo O'Higgins and no fair googling the name.

Hugs and Kisses as always,

- Mari

There you have it folks. Urbane Guerrilla and American Spectator approve of massacres and torture by Pinochet to save Chile from evil. Clearly American Spectator must be the word of good people. We have Urbane Guerrilla's personal recommendation for murder and torture to save Chile from that evil Allende. Tens of thousands of deaths justified because Urbane Guerrilla and American Spectator say so. Clearly marichiko must be corrected because she does not advocate slaughter and torture. Only words from American Spectator can save her.

Scary - no 'spin' summarized what Urbane Guerrilla posted. UG approves of Pinochet's homicide. To think we worry about irrelevant things like extraordinary redention and WMDs. There is real evil out there like Allende. UG tells us this is so that the evil marichiko cannot deceive us. Wow. The world is really that simple!

The Queen of Evil here doesn't have to deceive anyone. Chile was the most stable, most continuous democracy in Latin America for a 100 years or so. Then its people unwisely elected Allende during the height of the Cold War. The CIA assasinated Allende and the rest is history

Except to UG who gets his history out of the yellow press.

If there was a liberal media bias, why did we hear about John Kerry last week?

This is where I get confused about the whole liberal media thing. It seems to me to be so closer to right than left. Is it just perspective? Someone mentioned that there are sheep in America who believe the liberal media. I always felt it was the sheep who were following the Bush administration, not unlike Jim Jones in Guyana.

Don't drink the Kool-aid, folks. It's just not worth it.

Tw's Soviet Communist notions of history trip him once again, and I've got the fool by the balls.

It is a matter of historical fact, tw, that Allende's Cabinet officials were beginning to put plans in motion to consolidate their oligarchy's grip on power by killing off approximately 9 million Chileans, within about the first Allende term in office. No visible remorse, no worries about it, nothing but a Mao-style climb to power at the pinnacle of millions of innocents slain for the heinous crime of holding views unpopular with the regime. This is the kind of thing you like? Fried yarbles to you. In the Allende Cabinet, it was the Communists who were the moderates.

You can imagine what a mess such a set of policymakers would have made of the economy.

The total butcher's bill for all seventeen years of Pinochet was approximately 1370. His death squads seem of a rather conservative bent next to your heroes, eh? You may take your tens of thousands, tw, spindle them, and insert them. I've said to you before that you do not have a shred of moral superiority to claim, and your petty resentments merely exacerbate your condition. There's another word that rhymes with exacerbate that describes a good many of your doings here.

Turning to Spexx: if there were NO media bias, 1) why are they so uniformly registered Democrats, rather than more widely distributed across the political spectrum? 2) why aren't at least half the journalists pro-gun, and thus favoring ALL of the human rights?

Mari, simply go back to the thread where you first broached the idea of discussing/disputing South American history, and you will find the reply, at some length, that I made then. I doubt the scholar I quoted some and summarized more of, and named there, would quite qualify as (ha ha ha) "yellow" (Oh ho ho ho ho ho!) "press!" You seemed rather to lose interest in following the matter up just about then, so I let it ride.

Bruce: tripe, or bollocks, your choice. I am not going to be influenced by stupid, collectivism-tainted ideas. Do you have as much presence of mind? You always could, you know.

The left-of-center believe they are the center. This is a poorly-informed point of view, against which I set my face.

First Chilean head of state, won his head-of-state spurs by victory in the Battle of Chacabuco (Feb. 12, 1817) against the royalists. Might have done better as "Interim Supreme Director of Chile" had he been able to get along better with the aristocracy and the Church, though admittedly these were tenaciously clinging to exactly what is wrong with Latin American economies generally: being colonized by a sprinkling of large property owners replicating the economy of medieval Spain rather than the American-style flood-tide of smallholders that constituted a middle class without hardly trying, a byproduct of each running his own small show.

O'Higgins got himself exiled for his pains, spending his last couple of decades in Peru, dying in 1842 in the month of October.

There is definitely a political bias to the media and not seeing it is perspective, but how hard is it to gain perspective? Really hard, you have to follow several different sources on a single story and see what differs.

But there are bigger biases in the media. The biggest bias of them all is for sensationalism. If it bleeds it leads.

Bias for soap opera value: is it something people will not only talk about, but continue to talk about? So they have to stay tuned/keep reading?

Bias for comprehension: they will report on things they understand, and not on things they don't.

Bias for story value: if on TV they are more likely to report something if they have video segments they can use. If on paper they are more likely to report something if they can send a reporter to do original reporting, which usually means getting original quotes.

Nice job of googling. O'higgins was exciled because he tried to bring democracy to Chile and the Church and big land owners were not pleased with his efforts.

I'd love to see some valid sources for your figures on both Allende and Pinochet. Your post is in and of itself proof that no one muzzles the press - either liberal or whacko.

PS At the time, I told you that it would take me a day or two to get back to you since I was in the middle of a 400 mile move. Mayflies have such short little spans of attention, don't they?

I've been wondering why, if the majority votes left wing, they're sheep, but if the majority votes right wing, they're smart (according to the right wingers of course).

Whoa dudes!
 

Jeez guys. Don't get your panties in a bunch. My point was to show that some Right Wing pundits want to spin this mid-term sea change like it was all about people being duped by biased media.

It has always seemed to me that if the media simply reports the "news," the facts of what occurs on the ground, the deaths, the violence, the civillian casualties, that they are accused of being "biased" or "negative." WTF?

I agree that many media outlets do the "if it bleeds it leads" routine, but there are so many objective outlets to get a more objective view: BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, etc.

Whatev.

Haven't you learned buy now, you can't sail a thread, only launch it and watch it drift. :lol:

Drifting
 

I think I'm learning.

I've been lost in the wide sargasso sea for years. ;)

I have to agree with Tony. The Haggard story was sensational becuase Americans have a sore spot for hypocrisy. Actually, the bias was in not running the story because a sex scandal in a national church is national news, and the only difference in organizations is how it is handled.

Fox News has an obvious but sometimes subtle bias. Fox Friends has an in-your-face bias. The one concession to present a 'balanced' view is Alan Colmes, who is usually outnumbered and outgunned. His appearance on Fox is much the same as the token conservative on Bill Maher.

Of course we do have to distinguish between news and commentary. Even so, MSNBC is less biased than Fox when it comes to straight news. Heck, even the BBC is less biased than Fox.

BTW, whatever happened to that junket of conservative reporters who were going to go to Iraq to bring back the 'good news' that was being overlooked by rest of the press. Did they ever make it outside of the Green Zone?

Yup. My favourite of those was the BNP (British National Party- a breakway party from the National Front) whose female members started a group called 'Mothers Against Paedophiles', whose raison d'etre seemed to be an attempt to convince the British public that Pakistani men are fair queuing at the end of decent peoples' streets, intent on grooming and using little white girls.

So I duly went looking, first for my notes and then for the source material. Still haven't found the notes, reread the source, and discovered my memory wasn't quite the steel trap I'd like it to be, but here we go:

The March '06 American Spectator article is by James R. Whelan, and is a review, indeed a refutation, of Jonathan Haslam's The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile. In the June issue of this year, there is a further exchange -- Haslam's try at a rebuttal, and Whelan's counter-rebuttal.

Whelan's credentials as a South American scholar and historian seem not only solider, but downright formidable, comprising thirty-eight years of study and experience, a Harvard Fellowship, the history Out of the Ashes: Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile 1833-1988.

Hardly the stuff of "yellow journalism" that your ideological blinkers made you allege it is, not too long ago. Mari, dear, please accept this life lesson: blinkers deny you data and make you talk silly. Lose the blinkered ideology and you'll be much harder to patronize, which I really only do to the easy targets. I should think you'd find that a plus, all things being equal.

Whelan got the gig to write a review of Haslan's book and found such lacunae in its scholarship and available sources uncited or only the most nail-paring snippets therefrom, that he quit numbering his notes after about problem/error number 149, by his count. Whelan does not complain that his work wasn't cited to speak of. He learnedly takes issue with Haslan's main contention that it was really the Nixon Administration that did in the Allende government, and carries the day. Bone-deep anti-Americanism can make even Cambridge professors lose their abilities at scholarship seems the lesson here -- a third of the book is written to slap the Nixon Administration around.

From Whelan, quoting Allende cabinet member Voloida Tetelbaum, 1 Mar 1973: "A civil war in Chile would probably mean immense loss of life, half a million to one million." This was in a context of what the Allende government would have to set about doing to consolidate its power. The entire population of Chile in 1970 was 9.3 million -- and was the cite which I remembered, being in the same column of print with the civil war quote; mea culpa. These guys were looking at decimating Chile -- after being elected, mind you.

As for the casualties of the Pinochet era, Whelan again, and worth quoting in some extent: "Closer to home, there's the startling absence of the three-volume Informe de la Comision Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliacion, compiled by a commission formed after Pinochet had relinquished power. . . [the Rettig commission] was decidedly hostile to the military regime. Indeed, its report is the preferred bible of leftists the world over. It details the background of the political upheavals leading up to and during the Allende and Pinochet years: describes the terrorist/guerrilla forces that sprang up during those years, and the security forces that combated them; and (mainly) provides a laboriously detailed accounting of the killed and missing during the Pinochet years. (If Haslam had bothered to consult it, he might have learned that in the entire period between September 11 and December 31, 1973, [emph. mine, and this is probably the number I remembered and cited] the total dead and missing was 1,261 -- of the grand total of 2,279 dead and missing during the 17 years of the Pinochet government. In his book, Haslam gives the toll of dead on September 11 as 3,500, including 700 soldiers. The Rettig Commission report lists a grand total, in all 17 years, of 132 military dead.)" (This board does not support Spanish diacriticals, so we must spell 'em as best we can without.)

Twelve hundredish during the coup when a fair bit of lead was flying around the streets, like from the Cuban embassy, and then a thousandish over the next sixteen years. Economical, compared to Tetelbaum's civil war ideas above. One might say conservative -- and from an unfriendly source at that.

From Whelan, quoting a June 1973 remark by Eduardo Frei Montala, President of Chile 1964-70: "Chile is in the throes of an economic disaster -- not a crisis, but a veritable catastrophe no one could foresee would happen so swiftly nor so totally . . . the hatred is worse than the inflation, the shortages . . . the economic disaster. There is anguish in Chile."

So, says Whelan, the Chileans turned on Allende, leaving everybody else standing.

In the June '06 issue, Haslan replies, "Whelan accuses me of believing Communists are just deluded altruists. Surely people can genuinely believe in socialism or communism without becoming monsters?"

That ivory-tower remark from George Orwell's countryman -- oughtn't he to know better? -- causes me to stare. In my experience, if they put these beliefs into actual practice they inevitably do become monsters, by force of those beliefs. The harder they go at it the worse they turn out.

Haslan sticks to his thesis that the Nixon Administration went all out to kill the Allende government: "The White House suspected the [CIA's] Latin Americanists were too soft on Communism in Latin America because the Latin Americanists favored taking the long view -- namely the Allende regime would implode through incompetence and the absence of outside aid from Moscow or Beijing; at that there was therefore no need to pull it down through a golpe negro (a bloody coup), a golpe blanco would suffice. . . Once it failed, Nixon, now beside himself with anger, resolved to revert to a golpe negro." Whelan remarks that absolutely no one of the numerous principals in the matter that he polled on this had ever, nor had he himself ever, throughout his 38 years of South American study, heard either term.

Haslan: "the blank check Allende came to collect in Moscow was denied him despite [Communist Party chief Luis] Corvalan's extensive lobbying." Whelan's reply, "It is not true that Allende emerged empty-handed from his mission to Moscow. They did not give him the $80 million he sought, but they did give him $45 million, on top of 200 million in earlier ruble credits."

Whelan again: "'If Mr. Whelan had read the book calmly and carefully in order to see whether there was something new to learn instead of erupting like a spluttering, formerly extinct volcano. . .' Any number of commentators through the years have referred to my qualities as a meticulous (acusioso) investigator. I bring that same zeal to books I review, as well as those I write. (When I stopped numbering my notes on this one they stood at 149, not counting a number of others drawing on related books. There is scarcely a page of Haslam's book that is not decorated by one or more of my comments.) To what I can only suppose is his sorrow, read it thoroughly I did."

"I have no doubt that Professor Haslam is quite diligent about his work, but he is, after all, a 'parachutist,' dropping in on the country in the fashion of most foreign scholars and authors. And, although he would choose to scorn it, my works include a history of this country . . . surpassed to that point (1995) only by the works of Chile's own two leading historians. . . [and] what would mere Chileans know about Chilean affairs?"

Sooooo... they just did not look at Fox at all, right?

UG, I have not felt like calling you a moron for a long time, too bad you had to revert to type. Please explain to us why, since according to your sources there were "ONLY" a few thousand people murdered by Pinochet and his goons, that his own country has tried him for murder and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to be executed? He gets a free pass, though, because he is about to croak any minute from a variety of illnesses. Are you suggesting that your supposed number is "acceptable collatoral damage" for a US-backed dictatorship? Gee, Pinochet accomplished so much to keep US interests functioning in Chile, when you factor it those lives probably average out to 20 million bucks per which we got in return, a real bargain! :eyebrow:

As for why it was so "vital to our national interests" to kill a legally elected head of state and hurl Chile into a vicious military dictatorship, you do not have to look for communists under every bush. The Mormons had more to do with our getting involved than the Russians did!!! In case somebody doesn't know, they own the largest copper producers in the US. Think they contribute much to politicians here to protect THEIR interests?

Here is information from a research paper I found online, which sums up what I already knew about the role of the US copper industry as key players in getting us into the mess:

MNCs took action in Chile in order to prevent Allende from being elected before his election. The purpose was to prevent Allende from accomplishing his intention to nationalize the copper industry along with other profitable subsidiaries in Chile. In order to do this, International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT), Anaconda Copper, and Kennecott Copper helped to fund Allende’s opponent, Jorge Allesandri, with the help of the CIA. ITT has good reasons to back up Jorge Allesandri in the election against Allende because it had a total investment of $200 million in Chile, the largest holding of any single corporation. In addition, “ITT president Harold Geneen offered $1 million to the CIA to help defeat Allende” (Online posting, Corporate involvement).

So the Chileans are mad at Pinochet. How much madder, do you think, would they have been at Tetelbaum and Allende should they have gotten that decimation program, a/k/a a civil war, going. Proportionately? Some arbitrary multiplier? The thing you're failing to see was Allende, perverted by Marxism, was a worse fuckup than Hugo Chavez, which is saying something.

I should have thought it was clear that Chile succeeded in dodging no mere bullet, but something like a 155mm shell, those days in 1973. Mr. Whelan (of whom you clearly haven't read even the snippets I have) seems considerably more to be trusted than the something you got off the net. Bear in mind that Whelan is my source, not Brent Bozell.

What is absent from your something from the 'net is any indication that these entirely understandable efforts at influencing events (after all, if you're a major player, do you just sit back passively or do you try and be proactive?) had any effect on the course of events at all. One shouldn't regard every effort to secure a liveable environment for business and trade as some kind of evil machination -- down that path lies socialist poverty, and that's nowhere you want to live, Tonchi. If you didn't know. Nationalizing an industry is a quick way to screw it up, as its fiscal efficiency goes to hell, followed by collapse, and a resumption of what should have been the case all along: keep the business in the private sector.

Did we play ball with the Pinochet government, wrt Chilean affairs, later? Yes -- precisely in accord with our habit from the earliest days of our nation, that of keeping our hands off the local politics in order not to impair trade -- however much that may be honored in the breach or in the observance, for we've had both, in this case the former. What seems to establish the tipping point is whether politics impairs trade, such as Cuban politics from July 1959. Castro deliberately had things screwed up by the end of that year. Nice for the dictator's grip on power, lousy for everyone not in his inner circle. Now Cuba has enjoyed an equal division of the misery for going on four decades. The place won't come right until the Communists are gone.

It was vital to the Chileans' national interest to kill the guy, as the reputable historians apparently understand. Was I somehow unclear about this in my previous post(s)? They did it. Nobody else really got the chance to.

Frankly, Tonch, your "moron" call cannot stand, and you should withdraw it, instead spending your energies doing your homework. My "type," as you harrumph it, is anticommunist, which is smarter than any communist. More moral too. Plenty of room on the bright side, Tonch; come on over and leave the collectivists to rot in their own malaise and malheur.

O...kkk...aaa...y.

Tonch may I humbly suggest that rather than 'withdrawing' your moron comment, you instead carve it in stone for all prosperity to witness?

Nah, everybody here already knows it. Funny though, maybe it's because I never watch Fox, but before UG I never heard of anybody describing history as not having happened the way it should have because nobody but him realizes what the true definitions of all the words are. Amazing. Rewriting history by vocabulary. Well hon, it actually made me drowsy to read that so I'm signing off now. Catch ya laters ;)

*chuckles*

(Yawn)..... good morning, UG. Well, your lovely rant saying "political assasination and murder of civilians is fine because we are the good guys" is just more of your same ol' same ol'. Fill in the blanks with the nation of your choice, the rant is the same. In MY vocabulary, murder still results in dead people, and they and their families don't much appreciate that "our boys were right." And before you send me off to do my homework, maybe you should know that I already have a degree in the subject, I speak the language there, I have friends who are Chilean, and I have met Ms. Allende when she was at the local university promoting her latest book, I have rented offices to a Chilean dentist and one of my best friends from interpreters school was a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet regime. BTW, you missed the part about how the country was not seized to prevent it being lost to the Marxists (understandable since you have not studied Latin American Coup 101): It's about the POWER, baby. Ideology is for press conferences only. Can't let all the revenues you are funneling into your own Swiss bank account be divided with the unwashed masses, and God forbid that somebody else take charge of those mines which are slipping YOU enough cash to retire like a sultan. Like I said, the Mormons had more to do with the panic to change government in Chile than the Russians ever did. Oh, yeah, and I also handled the copper companies when I was with IBM in Tucson and have visited all the copper mines and seen the environmental disasters they were allowed to become and how they literally bred each succeeding generation of mine laborers onsite. How fortunate that they were allowed to continue with business as usual elsewhere, for the sake of keeping "Marxists" out of Latin America.

Tonchi, Tonchi, *deadpan* you should know by now not to take on the uber intellect of Urbane Guerrilla. His knowledge is.....unassailable and his logic pure in its perfection.

*blinks*

Nice post. I didn't know that much about the Chilean situation, just the odd thing I'd picked up by osmosis:P I didn't know anything about the Mormons and the copper mines.

Tonch, I see, can't sustain his argument, doesn't refute me on points of fact, and waves the matter away. Can't be bothered. We see that sort of thing all the time from the too-left.

Not my style. I first make certain of my ground, then I eat the opposition alive. The opposition retreats at that point, in disorder.

I volunteer to bother him until he quits being silly -- or is drowned in it.

Dana, you slipped: look up posterity.

Also familiarize yourself with the pogroms and genocides and scarcities uniformly perpetrated by the communist regimes: the century-long record shows the anti-communist is the pro human. Spend your energies on being pro human instead of railing at me, and you will spend your energies in a more intelligent manner than you've hitherto shown. In other words, quit being such a slacker. There is not and never was anything wrong with trying to get rich, either -- yet you seem to think there is. Shame. Shame. Thrice shame.

After you've looked at genocides committed by 'the commies', look up the ones committed by the capitalists. ;)

I can't think of any that really hold up to Stalin and his contemporaries.

But you did not deal in FACTS, this time, UG. You have huge assumptions involved in everything you said. What-ifs, suppose-thats, bias, predictions, political intrigues, and Cold War rhetoric. The only FACT you have was that somebody wrote a book. What I said was very plain and easy to understand, and it did not require a term paper to expound: i.e., that THEN, AS NOW, the United States of America has no right, for the benefit of private interests, to arrange or assist in the murder of a duly and legally elected official of a sovereign nation. It is illegal, immoral, hypocritical, and it has had a nasty way of backfiring on us. Do I expect you to be able to understand and agree with a statement like that? Not a chance. Because, YOU, like too many others of your kind, are not capable of simply saying NO, We Won't Go There. Instead, with bombast and bombs, you charge right in with your you-know-whats waving high and the destruction begins. And nobody could care any less that it is the values which we claim we want to teach the world that are also being destroyed.

That was a really interesting link UT. Thanks for finding it...and sharing it.

That is very interesting. The one printed recently in National Geographic included slaughters of less than one million, though. That allowed for the inclusion of the Philippines, where during the Marcos regime there were at least 10,000 murdered. The United States supported the Marcos regime..... ka-ching!

I can't wait for UG's next installment. :)

I can, at least until tomorrow :neutral:

lol...don't you like UG's input?

I think it's always great, even if I do think a lot of it is pretty much tripe. ;)

I guess that means I like cows bellies. lol

Tomorrow will be worse. We'll be getting into the Posting While Intoxicated phase again.

Well there's nothing wrong with drunk typing. It never killed anyone.

That's 'cause Aussies have it in their genes ;)

haha...we're not all pissheads you know. There's a large proportion of the population that don't drink at all.

Just cause they're under 5 doesn't mean anything!

yes you are right, I typed the wrong word. I meant posterity and don't need to 'look it up'.

I am quite familiar with the 'pogroms, genocides and scarcities' perpetuated by many communist regimes. I am also quite aware of the 'pogroms, genocides and scarcities' committed by many non-communist regimes. (Or do you not consider the Native American cultures to have been subjected to crimes of this nature? ) I do not percieve you to be pro-human. I see you as pro-your own agenda. I however, am pro-human: all humans, regardless of ethnicity, culture or religion are deserving of consideration; all nations have within them positive and negative elements; all political systems have inherent flaws and strengths and self-determination is better than externally imposed political or social values.

Don't be so lazy in your reading/thinking. I have never held, nor ever will, hold the view that there is something wrong with trying to get rich. I have never said, nor will I ever say, that there is something wrong with getting rich. You have made an assumption based on a flawed reading/understanding of my posts. Shame. Shame. Thrice shame.

So the media isn't biased? Or did I get into the wrong thread? I think the majority of the media and its input lean left - except for FOX and another I can't think of at the moment. Its ok though - just take all that is said with that in mind. Please - just don't tell me the "No Spin guy" doesn't spin shit his way though. I have seen too many times where someone refute him with a valid argument and he just "moves on" or "spins away" - :)

I think the media is biased towards their own agenda just like everyone else. At times one media source may present a leftist view, and at others, a more conservative view.

Why do they do this?

Ratings. Nothing more or less. Selling papers or getting people to watch or listen. That's all there is to it, and the head honchos don't really give a shit which view sells better, as long as they're making money.