Ivan Seeking said:
I don't know that has any bearing on what he proposes. This can easily be viewed as a fundamental issue that warrants review. As you know, democracy requires that we have an informed electorate. While I would oppose any government control of the media, I am not necessarily opposed to the government playing a role in analyzing the situation and providing some direction.
Where did he say regulate? What compromise? What role would the government play? It sounds to me like you have your mind made up before we really know much about it.
It's vague enough I guess we can draw our own conclusions about what it means, but where is that default mistrust of government that you usually have? I don't trust him, I don't trust his idea, and I don't trust the government to provide any "direction" to the media. The FCC is screwed up enough as it is.
So aside from getting sloppy in his old age and getting duped on one story, what else did he do to deserve that title? He has been a respected newsman and anchor since before you were a twinkle in your mothers eye. It sounds to me like you are quoting Fox News.
Well there weren't any quotes in my post, but beyond what was already said, toward the end, Rather was infusing his regular newscasts with more and more biased commentary (start with the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#Claims_of_bias ). Dan Rather was 73 when he got fired. You tell me: is that old enough to be "sloppy in his old age"?
Unless he has some undiagnosed age related illness, what I saw was him being empowered by his position to speak his mind more instead of just reading from his teleprompter. Now 60 Minutes is a news magazine - it doesn't have the same implied standard of quality that regular news reports have, so his only-slightly-veiled bias in his anchor work is of far more concern to me. "Rathergate" was him getting his hand caught in the cookie jar, but he'd been snooping about the kitchen for decades before it.
What he said was:
How do you get to your statement from his...
"advisory board" = "commission". It's a pretty obvious and straightforward paraphrase.
Since you know I don't watch Fox News, I guess what you are saying is you want me to bring back my liberal usage of the word "hippie"?
The problem is the business model: It drives news agencies to sensationalism.
Indeed it does - and it has for hundreds of years. It isn't a new or even a big problem.
For example, the networks used to be willing to carry the losses associated with quality journalism both as a public service, and as a matter of reputation, but that incentive is long gone. Now it is all about profit. There is no room left for philanthropy.
The first 50 years or so of tv news was a weird time and I agree it had reasonably high quality content. Perhaps that was due to early competition between TV and radio and newspapers. Now that the newspapers are dying, TV can follow in the path that newspapers laid out for them 100 years ago and battle each other for sensationalism-based ratings. Rather certainly knows the history - he's just a hypocrite.
The problem is not the digital age in and of itself. You know exactly what the problem is because we do battle with it here every day. The age of information has led to the age of disinformation. There is no way to know what to believe without making a career of it.
Certainly - the age of information means information is spread more easily than before, by anyone who has a little bit of web authoring skill. The same was not true for newspapers, for which you at least needed to own a printing press. The barrier to entry was larger.
I do disagree with that last line, though.
Most people can't tell the difference between good and bad, but I consider that more due to laziness than anything else. The signs of bias and misinformation are not difficult to detect if you just pay attention. But people just don't bother trying. It is much simpler to just read something and accept it, especially when it says what you want to hear. We see that here almost every day too. Entertaining as those threads are, they typically die quickly when the obvious flaw is revealed.
Either way, one of the most important driving principles behind my ethics/morality/politics is the concept of personal responsibililty. People are responsible for their beliefs. So unless people are flat-out lied to and in a way that wasn't forseeable, they need to take responsibility for overtrusting their news sources.
In 1969, when Walter Cronkite told us that man had walked on the moon, we all knew it was true. There was no doubt about it. How many people now think it was a hoax?
Selective memory, Ivan. The moon hoax hoax started pretty immediatly after the moon landings, with the first prominent hoaxster publishing a book in 1974. Perhaps it is bigger today, but I don't know. If it is, that would also be due to selective memory (misunderstanding history) since younger people today just don't always understand what was and wasn't technically possible in 1969-72.
If the media were doing its job, we never would have invaded Iraq.
Dunno. That's not a straightforward issue.
