Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
dsgrue3 said:
GameOver22 said:
Because I don't think there is a truly objective viewpoint. Opinions are fine.....best example probably being Murrow's reporting on McCarthyism. The problem is, even with opinionated reporting, there will always be people who disagree. In some ways, I think the media often times tries to be too objective and doesn't call politicians out on their lies. They just try to take what politicians say and report it, with little to no fact checking. If there is anything we know, it's that politicians lie...... a lot....for meaningless reasons often times.
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Sure there can.
"Airplane exploded today at 9:15 AM."
"Jim Boehner met with President Obama today to discuss (insert topic)"
"Congressional Republicans vetoed the (insert bill) today by a margin of (insert vote)"
No need to add opinions to break the news to people.
I find you highly suspect now that you want the media's opinion about their own out of context quotations of politicians.
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I think you're missing my point....I'm talking about philosophical objectivity....not whether the news can report a story without adding their opinion to it, which is why I don't like the term (I thinks it's a loaded term). I don't understand why its a bad thing for me to want politicians called out on their lies....it informs the public. If Obama starts citing some numbers to prove a point, I find it useful if the media can tell me whether those numbers are true or misconstrued. I personally find politifact to be one of the most useful news sources for this reason.....especially during debate season.
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The only probably with Politifact is they often seem to have their answer first, and then work back what the poltician said. Often lieng or taking out of context what was said to put in a false. While making the point of difference for the other side.... and genrally just picking what stories they want that benefit them.
I stopped trusting Politifact a while ago, when I noticed they were paraphrasing and taking statements out of context to mean things that were never intended. This doesn't help either...
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2011/02/selection_bias_politifact_rate.php
That's why there are so many fact checkers out there right now... they're all biased... and they generally have different answers about what's true, half true or false... even on the same statements. They'll all give you plenty of numbers to back i up too.
Heck you even get blogs fact checking the fact checkers
http://www.politifactbias.com/2013/03/rand-paul-filibuster-you-should-have.html
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I won't deny that they take things out of context sometimes. I've seen it a few times, but part of the problem is that context is often difficult to identify. For the most part, I think politifact errs on the side of giving false ratings and taking statements too literally (that's just my assessment). As for the study.....I'm not sure about it. Once again, its just a simple count with no statistical analysis. I imagine a lot of the reason for their findings is just the political context, meaning there is going to be more Republican criticism during Democratic control, and the criticisms are more likely to get covered and be false.
Just a hypothesis, but I imagine you would get similar results that showed more false ratings for Democrats if politifact is around when Republicans have control of the government. I think there is definitely a selection bias, but I think it's more along the lines of finding false/misleading statements rather than a partisan bias. It's just that the out-party has more incentive to go negative, especially under unified control, when the out-party is more removed from the legislative process.
