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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
CNN is perfect Cult of Centrism territory, from what I understand.
I'd say I watch MSNBC but that's not even true, I can't stand anyone on that network but Maddow. I read Politifact for balance, though I tend to consider the truth-o-meter pretty worthless (their articles are good, but they have weird authority in regards to what truth value they put on things: if you just read the full article but ignore the meter, it's much better material)
Triv: Can you give a link to a post that's an accusation of Cult of Centrism that you think is bunk, so I can defend that particular accusation, at the very least?
edited 14th Nov '12 11:56:37 PM by TheyCallMeTomu
The bias of neutrality from CNN
.
I call it that because, in that article, a poll had a Romney lead with Independents by 22, and CNN still called it a tie.
edited 14th Nov '12 11:58:01 PM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.@Serocco:
The BBC is a robot then. It's legally required to not pick a side and check the facts, and yet, still gets plenty of criticism (some of it deserved, especially with its recent troubles).
Keep Rolling OnWhenever you are not being objective, that's bad.
When there is an objective fact, and you present something that is in contradiction to that objective fact, that's not being objective.
When someone says something that is questionable, it's the responsibility of journalists to hold the person's feet to the fire. Now, who gets their feet held to the fire when is indeed a different means of being unobjective, and that's where bias can set in. But the solution isn't to simply hold no one's feet to the fire. To do that is to set too easy, too useless a task for the news media.
Least accurate? Yeah, right.
◊
CNN was more accurate than PPP.
edited 15th Nov '12 12:04:37 AM by Completion
@Tomu
My original post was in response to this
. I understand the sentiments (GOP on average lies, etc.), but I had to step in to make a counterpoint.
"Among telephone-based polling firms that conducted a significant number of state-by-state surveys, the best results came from CNN, Mellman and Grove Insight."
From Nate Silver of 538, the most accurate poll aggregator.
edited 15th Nov '12 12:07:17 AM by Completion
Okay. And I've been arguing against it, because arguing that abandoning objectivity is just "being unbiased" is downright absurd.
I apologize, but yes-I am calling your position absurd. It is absurd to say that, in the pursuit of remaining unbiased, the news media should abandon objectivity. CNN, ABC, et all have become paranoid to accusations of bias, and have abandoned objectivity-this means that the consciousness of what people consider news has no mechanism for differentiating truth from fiction because it was the news media's job to do that in the first place, and they have abandoned that job.
Rasmussen and Gallup were among the least accurate pollsters regarding the eelction results. Public Policy Polling deemed most accurate
.
Which polls were they considering in the average bias? In terms of usable polls, meaning not national popular vote, PPP had an error of over 2.7 percent. CNN's, the fifth most accurate pollster by aggregation, an error of 1.9 percent.
Taking one poll and claiming that it makes an organization the most accurate is intellectual dishonest. It's like taking the least accurate poll from the most accurate organization and claiming that it makes them worthless.
edited 15th Nov '12 12:11:12 AM by Completion
I was summarizing an assertation by political scientists who are/have been considered completely non-Partisan by both sides. And their argument was essentially the GOP has moved 4 times to the right for every 1 time the Democrats move to the left, roughly.
And they were noting the reason this is continuing, due to their analysis, is that the major News sources are drawing false eqvuilance and letting the GOP get away with crazy.
Let me do a bit of a presentation.
"Objectivity in news media is important for its own sake" is a values judgment. Thus, it's not objective.
"Objectivity in news media is important if we wish for the populace to be informed" is a factual statement; it may or may not be wrong, but that's what fact checking is for; since this is hard to verify, you'd be forgiven for not calling it out as BS.
"Objectivity in news media is at an all time high!" is a factual statement. It happens to be wrong, and with an agreed upon definition of objectivity, presenting this as anything other than wrong is not being objective.
It is technically true that saying someone said something is itself a factual statement. However, there are implications to the presentation of factual statements; a statement that goes uncontested is implied to be equally valid to other statements that go uncontested.
This is not what the News Should Be
edited 15th Nov '12 12:12:29 AM by TheyCallMeTomu
Can you clarify what you mean by "objectivity"? And how far should a media pursue that objectivity before they know they've done enough?
I don't think what I said is as strong as you put it. I agree that if CNN, NBC etc. are trying too hard to be between Democrats and Republicans, then maybe that's not right. That might be why you and many others here are frustrated with those news networks. But I'm proposing that they simply drop "trying too hard" and not become fully partisan, either.
Everything has bias, because everyone is different. You can't remove that from the news media.
Fox News has a right-leaning bias. CNBC has a corporate-leaning bias. MSNBC has a roughly left-leaning bias. CNN has a neutrality bias.
The difference between those four and The Young Turks, for example, is that TYT admits they do opinion news, as in they give out the facts before they say their views on it.
edited 15th Nov '12 12:14:10 AM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.I still don't know what you mean by objective. There's limits to objectivity when people inherently disagree.
Here's my version of "this is not what the news should be", from a liberal site, the type we know and love.
Remember this? Enough people in this thread condemned this article when we discussed it, for a good reason.

@Serocco
Pardon me, but I'm not sure what you're implying that. Can you clarify?
@Tomu
I get what you're saying; media shouldn't just report "X said that" a million times, and should do a little more in depth in journalism. At the same time you would agree that there's only so much media can do before they hit a brick wall of "people simply diverge in views at this point", and it's up to those people to pick up the responsibility at that point.
We might be on the same general picture, but we're just phrasing it differently, and perhaps having a policy difference on how much of it is appropriate.
But I'm saying this because I'm getting tired of "cult of centrism" accusations, which doesn't try to understand the mindset of independents, why they think that way. When it doesn't have that sentiment and only cares about being correct all the time, that's cult of partisanship.
edited 14th Nov '12 11:54:51 PM by Trivialis