Kasz216 said:
Squilliam said:
badgenome said:
Squilliam said:
Isn't that the same as Democrats vs Bush Jr? We didn't see any decent candidates until Bush was out either.
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Yeah. In fact, Mitt Romney is startlingly similar to John Kerry, and if Kerry couldn't unseat an unpopular Bush (though Bush only became epically unpopular during his second term), I don't see how Romney stands a chance against a similarly unpopular Obama who will have the media working overtime for him.
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I suspect the bigger problem is that the Repub candidates have to appease the nutty core of their party, I.E. the ones who bother to vote in primaries when in reality they need to appeal to independents/moderates who aren't affilliated. Elections aren't won by appealing to your base, essentially X % of people will vote Republican anyway, the swing voters win elections. By the time they do actually manage to have a candidate, that person will be dripping with all the dirt and promises made to people who don't matter to the cause anyway and Obama can run a relatively clean campaign in comparison and pick apart all the various promises and indiscretions bought up.
I can't really comment on the media situation as I don't watch the news!
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Any easy way to put it in perspective is that In 2004.
34% of News Reporters self identify as Liberals. While 7% of New Reporters self identify as Conservatives.
While in 2004, the average population that identified themselvs as Liberal was 19%, and the number of people who self identified as Conservatives was 40%.
That's about as clear cut as you can get. While I don't think there is some kind of "overt liberal media conspiracy" you'd have to be insane to suggest that personal opinions don't effect the way you perceive and report on a story.
The numbers get even worse when you consider that a large number of those conservative reporters likely are all grouped at Fox News.
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What proportion of self identified conservatives are actually conservative and vice versa? People usually say one thing and mean another, and the actual meaning of the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' mean different things to different people and that meaning has changed over time. The best thing you could take from this is that binary thinking is in itself extremely stupid. By the standards of most other countries the U.S. media is actually extremely conservative if you take the OECD as a baseline.
