CBS officially doesn't care that one of its contributors is a liar; they say they hired him because a rival network hired Glenn Beck, so I guess they decided they needed a fool of their own. This is the kind of thing that makes it a little hard to take seriously the notion that the news biz was all about the unadorned pursuit of truth until bloggers ruined everything.
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MSM Rules
13 May 2007 10:46 pm
Comments (35)
CBS officially doesn't care that one of its contributors is a liar
We on the right have known this since (at least) Dan Rather went on the air repeatedly lying about Bush in 2004. Good to see you on the left finally figuring it out too.
It doesn't pay to be hacktackular anymore. People have access to the entire world with the click of a mouse. I've already read like 10 articles online in the morning before I even remember that I have a television. I'm certainly not going to turn it on for the opportunity to watch some guy on CBS make shit up.
The traditional news media is going the way of the record industry. There's no reason for its continued existence other than to sustain the people already tangled up in it. No one else cares. We don't like their product, we don't trust it and we don't watch it. The proof is in the ratings.
Trust is the most important commodity in this new era and no one trusts the press. I think we're seeing the same thing happen with the media and the internet that we saw with the record industry and the internet. It was easy to screw over your customers when there wasn't any competition, these days, not so much. We have unlimited options now, it rules!
Give people a quality product. Give them news and information that's accurate. Build trust with your audience. People will watch. Or they won't, but they certainly won't watch otherwise. Your ratings are already telling you this, listen to them.
This will sound funny to liberals, but people watch Fox News because they trust Fox News. The other networks don't understand that, it's why they all have their own heap of failed right wing hosts. Sure there's a component of having your views reinforced, but it pales in comparison to trust. Trust trust trustiy trusttrusttrust.
I think Jon Stewart made this point a couple of years ago. The network that pursues accuracy with the same vigor and passion that Fox News pursues Republicanism, will be wildly successful.
Putting on a "liberal" host or a "conservative" host in missing the boat entirely. Put on a host people can trust.
Goebells was "provocative", for that matter..
“The network that pursues accuracy with the same vigor and passion that Fox News pursues Republicanism, will be wildly successful.”
If only. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say something that won't be very popular. The reason that the US discourse has gotten increasingly driven by competing partisan versions of truth is that the so-called “information age” and the decline of a few media monopolies has meant that the fantasy of an easily identified and understood and unbiased truth has been revealed for the wishful thinking that it always was. Almost no one has the skills to work through to something approaching the truth, and even fewer have the temperament to accept the inevitable remaining uncertainty and detailed nuance even if they did.
This means that almost everyone in the US has retreated to a slightly more complex version of the fantasy and that is that all those other people are being misinformed and are deluded but this trustworthy source, free from that X bias will them what to think about the world.
A “truly” accuracy news source will be derided from all sides because it clearly is under at least some influence of those nasty manipulators of the truth and the flat-out liars.
You seem to think that people will recognize the truth on its face. Why would they? The only people who know how to recognize the truth do so via the hard work they put into finding it. That amounts to essentially nobody in the context of three-hundred million people.
Im going to disagree with keith.
People recognize truth becouse it corresponds to their own observations.
your split the middle "A “truly” accuracy news source will be derided from all sides" fails if one of the sides has comitted itself to an alternative false/dishonest/fantasy interpretation of events. presenting those claims in competition with 'the truth' merely endows it with credibility.
Dan Rather went on the air repeatedly lying about Bush in 2004.
You are quite right--Rather acted like there was still some room to doubt whether Bush was a contemptible deserter . . .
CBS loves guys with a point-of-view...oh, unless they're American Patriots like General Batiste and opine on things about which they have expertise and those pesky facts to back them up.
TV has transformed news into an oral-visual (non-verbal) tradition with no memory. People who look good and sound good are credible. Brit Hume and Lou Dobbs have excellent, wonderful newsman frowny-faces which make them look serious and thoughtful. Various blondes have chirpy bright faces that are reassuring and cute. None of them know what they're talking about, and none of them care about the facts, and that's OK. Nothing they say is ever checked. If not-X sounds good today where X sounded good a week ago, just say not-X. No one will care.
Al is an idiot, a liar, and a knee-jerk hack, but some say he's the brightest troll around. No contradiction there, really.
"Trust": people of faith want to lay their burden down and have someone else pick it up. The world is just too much for them. In the big picture it's Jesus. More locally it's George Bush. People of faith are incapable of critical or analytic thinking, which frightens them, and thus are incapable of functioning as citizens. They'll always be giving blind devotion to some leader who forgives their stupidity, laziness, and cowardice and makes them feel less afraid.
And whenever they find out they've been lied to by their leaders, they feel sorry for themselves and angry at everyone else.
Al:
We on the right have known this since (at least) Dan Rather went on the air repeatedly lying about Bush in 2004. Good to see you on the left finally figuring it out too.
Allow me to translate for the rest of you: liar is Rovespeak for truthteller and thus lying is telling the truth, as in Bush dishonorably dodged the Vietnam War, broke the rules by refusing his physical, and was discharged from the National Guard without completing his promised service.
Al doesn't think Bush lied when he told the nation in his SOTU address that Saddam was seeking yellowcake from Niger, despite being told not to say so; that's just a boo-boo, a memory lapse. Bush didn't lie when he told the nation that the intercepted aluminum tubes were for nuclear centrifuges when the consensus at the DOE was they could never be used for that purpose. Al thinks that since there was some low level nut in the CIA that Cheney could convince, then there was debate in the intelligence community about it.
I did not vote for Kerry nor Gore, but those are lies Al, and we already know much of the unprecedented ways this administration has refused to have an honest discussion, shredding, re-writing, firing, bribing MSM shills, etc, etc, etc. Come on Al, I'm baiting you. We want it down and archived that in May of 2007, you still were a Bushie. You still believed that Saddam and al Qaeda were in league together. Come on Al, fall on the floor writhing with the snakes and speaking in tongues, the reality based community could use a good laugh to start the week.
Dan Rather told the truth about Bush's shameful service. If he used a false document, then shame on him, but that doesn't make Bush's wartime service honorable, does it? And I would bet there's a 50-50 chance that the Republicans planted that document to change the subject.
I have a great idea for a provocative news show-- dress a monkey up in a Nazi uniform and have it fling feces at religious icons. After a few minutes of that, give the monkey one of those fridge magnet poetry sets, let him string together a few sentences, and bam!-- news! provacative!. If you want even more informative, the transcript of that day's Rush Limbaugh show can scroll as a ticker across the bottom of the screen.
Re Lou Dobbs
I think it is outrageous to compare Mr. Dobbs with a born again ex-drunk whackjob like Glenn Beck, follower of the left behind crackpot LaHayes. One may disagree with Mr. Dobbs position on immigration issues but, in fact, he is pretty much mainstream on other issues.
Al doesn't think Bush lied when he told the nation in his SOTU address that Saddam was seeking yellowcake from Niger, despite being told not to say so; that's just a boo-boo, a memory lapse.
I don't think this is true. The truth is that Al takes personal pleasure in the needless deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, because those deaths are offensive to liberals and offending liberals is the only principle that Al clings to in life. So Al considers Bush's lies to be a good thing because they made those deaths possible.
One may disagree with Mr. Dobbs position on immigration issues but, in fact, he is pretty much mainstream on other issues.
SLC, maybe you're unaware, but the particular knock on Dobbs here is not his "position on immigration issues" per se but the fact that, to support that position, he told a flat-out lie on his show (about the prevalence of leprosy, which he attributed to illegal immigrants), one from which he refuses to back down even when confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of its falsity. And that for this lie he is relying on a real whackjob rather than doing any real reporting on his own.
David Neiwert has a good summary here
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/05/lou-dobbs-making-up-racist-shit.html
You have to understand that suggesting immigrants are diseased vermin stalking the lands looking to take your accounting job and dishonor your daughter is nothing like the malicious lib bias of the Dan Rathers of this world and their treasonous audacity in suggesting that perhaps that Iraq War may not be going so peachy.
Re Glenn
Mr. Glenn is quite right, I was unaware of Mr. Dobbs' prevarications relative to the issue of the supposed incidence of leprosy in the illegal immigrant population. I have to plead guilty to not watching Mr. Dobbs very much.
However, aside from his extreme positions on illegal immigrants, it is my impression that Dobbs is rather mainstream in his other political and economic views. This is quite different then Glenn Beck whose views on illegal immigrants is at least as extreme as Dobbs' are.
1. For instance, Beck is a global warming denier who has had every whackjob denier, including the imbecile Senator Imhoff, on his show.
2. In addition, Beck is a believer in the Left Behind books authored by the nutcase LeHaye family and has had several of these clowns on his program. In all, Lou Dobbs looks like a sane, cautious commentator compared to Beck.
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Comments closed May 27, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I don't get it. Then the MSM wonders why bloggers hate the MSM. They only have themselves to blame, but they refuse to look in th mirror. What a bunch of two bit hacks.
Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | May 13, 2007 11:12 PM