How does Fox get away with it?

Sparks

In other news have you heard that the French kulturkamf continues? The term E - mail is no longer considered suitable for use by the French people. Freedom fries and all that:|

Got it wrong there Sand. It was deemed that curriel would be used in offical french government documents, not that ordinary people couldn't say "email". Besides, many french-speaking people were already using "curriel" instead of email...

Capt'n Midnight

RE: People buy "The Mirror" , "star" & "Sun". Its all about personal choice.

so it has nothing to do with the price or the freebies or the pictures or cartoons or TV listing .. I doubt many people buy it for IT'S coverage of news stories (all the main stories are in all newspapers - kinda like agruing about brands of lager really)

RTE / EuroNews - say what you want about them but it's nice to hear other stories - all the UK TV news is fairly similar.

Anway during the last UK general election - SKY claimed to have reporters in every count centre - RTE were way ahead of them in the reported results...

At this stage it's Channel 4 at 7 or newsnight - if you want decent news from the UK - anyone know where you can get real impartial news from the USA ?

(Am starting to think news-portal sites can kill the media corporations.. actually I hope it will be so..)

Freedom fries - ha - they can't call them potato chips (slices) - 'cos they aren't ...

I really resent the US media for missreporting Greneda. When they were showing satelite photos of the "airbase" in military breefings, the reporter from the Beeb was standing on the tarmac.

It all harks back to whatsisname (real one does not deserve to be remembered) - citizen Kane - you said - "you supply the stories , I'll provide the war" ....

The US electrol / Legal / media systems - the best money can buy..

Xhen

How does Fox get away with it? Well, the US has a little something called the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech. You may have heard of it?

I'll admit that article is a little over the top but nothing more than the anti-American idiocy disseminated through Europe on a regular basis by people whose opinion of America comes from movies, television, or whatever conspiracy theory they happen to be indulging in this week. The proliferation of this nonsense has dispelled any notions that Europe is a continent populated by political savants. Hell, a recent poll revealed that one out of every three Germans under the age of 30 believes that the American government may have sponsored the 9/11 attacks. Apparently stupidity is reaching epic proportions in Europe as the moonbats become the mainstream.

And you wonder why America is tuning you out?

Victor

Originally posted by Xhen
How does Fox get away with it? Well, the US has a little something called the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech. You may have heard of it?

Doesn't freedom of speech also require a genuine diversity of media? As opposed to Disney, Time Warner AOL and Fox owning virtually everything?

Sparks

Hell, a recent poll revealed that one out of every three Germans under the age of 30 believes that the American government may have sponsored the 9/11 attacks.

Except that they're correct.
OBL gets his money from business with america, then sponsors the 9/11 attack.

Plus, there's the fact that the Congressional investigation shows that 9/11 could have been prevented at several points.

So frankly, I don't see what you're ridiculing.

How does Fox get away with it? Well, the US has a little something called the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech. You may have heard of it?

Yup. We have the whole free speech thing here too. In fact the philosopical movement that spawned the idea was a european one.
But we don't make it legal to knowingly present a lie as news.
Which isn't the case in the states.

edited to say "I don't believe I wasted my thousandth post on responding to Xhen..."

shotamoose

Originally posted by Xhen
a recent poll revealed that one out of every three Germans under the age of 30 believes that the American government may have sponsored the 9/11 attacks. Apparently stupidity is reaching epic proportions in Europe as the moonbats become the mainstream.

Another recent poll revealed that 19% of American's believed that they were in the top 1% of earners in the country. A further 20% expected that they would someday be in the top 1%.

So Europeans don't have a monopoly on stupidity.

We could all do with more balanced media, and just because 'the other side' has its own prejudices does not excuse the biggest news corporation in the world filling its American broadcast time with lies and hateful propaganda.

Zombrex

To quote the Simpsons -

"Welcome to FOX News. Your voice for evil"

FOX is a joke, a laughing stock, even in America .. I wouldn't worry about it anyone who actually takes FOX seriously is probably already a right wing loony and not watching FOX probably would make much difference

Originally posted by Sparks
edited to say "I don't believe I wasted my thousandth post on responding to Xhen..."

My god it was nearly two years before I reached that total;)

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Sparks
Except that they're correct.
OBL gets his money from business with america, then sponsors the 9/11 attack.

Plus, there's the fact that the Congressional investigation shows that 9/11 could have been prevented at several points.

So frankly, I don't see what you're ridiculing.
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I think 'sponsoring' something implies some intention on the part of the sponsor. If I hire and pay a plumber to do a pluming job and he subsequently buys a gun and shoots you with that money, I have not 'sponsored' your death.

Similarly, your failure to wear a bullet proof vest, which may have prevented your death, does not mean that you have 'sponsored' your own death.

Victor

Originally posted by SkepticOne
I think 'sponsoring' something implies some intention on the part of the sponsor. If I hire and pay a plumber to do a pluming job and he subsequently buys a gun and shoots you with that money, I have not 'sponsored' your death.

However, if you pay a mercenary to kill people and the mercenary then uses those skills to go on and kill other people .... oh, that sounds very like September 11th.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Victor
However, if you pay a mercenary to kill people and the mercenary then uses those skills to go on and kill other people .... oh, that sounds very like September 11th.

OK, so do you, like Sparks, also believe that the US therefore sponsored September 11th?

To me this is the same sort of stupidity that is illustrated by the poll that revealed that 40% of Americans believed that Saddam is directly responsible for 911.

Victor

Originally posted by SkepticOne
OK, so do you, like Sparks, also believe that the US therefore sponsored September 11th?

I haven't gone though Spark's beliefs, but my point is by slightly varying the language, you can understand the other side of the argument (while not necessarily agreing to it).

Did the USA government finance September 11th?
No, but finance and equipment supplied by the US government was used interchangly by Al-Qaeda.

Did the USA government sponsor September 11th?
No, but they did sponsor Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Did the USA government encourage September 11th?
Yes, by being morally and politically ambivalent in their foreign policies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Who is responsible for September 11th?
Al-Qaeda.

SkepticOne

I realise that there is a line of reasoning through which the US can be shown to have some invovment in the events of 911. In an interconnected world many such lines of reasoning are possible. However, saying that they sponsored the attack is stretching things to the extent that the word has lost it's meaning.

Al Queda planned and executed the attacks using whatever money was to hand. Some of this may have been left over from the US sponsored campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Other money may have come from the Bin Laden construction businesses in Saudi. Some of those profits from the construction business may have come from American firms. Whatever. None of this amounts to an argument that the US sponsored the attacks on the World Trade Centre.

Those Germans that were simply wrong.

Zombrex

Have to agree with Skeptic here, the US government did not sponsored the 9-11 attacks any more than the US government sponsored the 1st Gulf War.

What they did to in both cases was heavily invest in training, weapons and financial support for a group that then turned against its original patrons.

The US government (notice I don't say the US in general) has a lot of responsibility for both events, but that does not mean they sponsored them.

If you sell a gun to a mad man who then shoots you in the head, you are stupid but it doesn't mean you wanted him to.

Zombrex

Originally posted by Cork
Eoughan Harris pointed this out recently about the way it covers news storys.

And you actually listen to Eoghan Harris (you actually read the Sunday Independent)????

Eoghan Harris hates RTE, everything he says stems from that. Maybe FOX should give him a job .. though then again he does work for the Sunday Independent so he is already at a joke of a paper anyway.

Sparks

Originally posted by SkepticOne
OK, so do you, like Sparks, also believe that the US therefore sponsored September 11th?

For someone calling himself a skeptic, you do a lot of jumping to conclusions.
I was pointing out that their belief isn't an indication of stupidity. Not that I thought that Bush sat down one day and said "Ya'know boys, I reckon we need a big kabloie so we can start a war so I won't miss muh secund term like my pappy did".

Mind you, it is interesting to note that the germans aren't the only ones to think that is a likely scenario - the first people to think so were americans...

Originally posted by Sparks
Mind you, it is interesting to note that the germans aren't the only ones to think that is a likely scenario - the first people to think so were americans...

No matter what people, you examine in the world, you are going to get a certain proportion who believe in conspiracy theories eg, the ones being mentioned here.
I don't believe them and to be honest, I haven't spoken to a single American yet, who does.

Like the opening words on an episode of Battlestar Galactica... "There are those that believe..." but that doesn't make it true.
I wouldn't subscribe to UFO theories either, but there are many in America and here in europe that do:rolleyes:
mm

SkepticOne

Sloppy reasoning can lead you to any conclusion you want. For example, if Saddam hadn't invaded Kuwait, the Soudi government wouldn't have allowed US troops on Soudi soil. One of the gripes of Osama Bin Laden, it is said, is that he objected to the presence of US troops on holy Soudi ground and that this motivated him to the various attacks on the US including the one on the WTC as a protest. The 911 attack on the WTC created the political conditions within the US for them to persue their oil interests in Iraq by military force.

By this tortuous line of reasoning, Saddam, it could be argued, brought the war upon himself. This is no worse, in my view than the idea that the US brought upon themselves the 911 attack through morally and politically ambivalent foreign policies in the middle east and central asia.

A more direct reason for the recent invasion of Iraq is because Saddam stood in the way of US interests in the region and had to be eliminated. The positive aspect was that a brutal dictator was removed (and sons). The negative aspect is that thousands of innocent Iraqi's died in the process and the economy and social structures of the country are still in tatters.

The reason for the 911 attacks is simply because Osama Bin Laden is a mad mother****** who believed it was the correct thing to do and managed to convince a number of other idiots
to fly planes into buildings.

Silent Bob

I'm fairly sure that the 'invaded Kuwait' issue is a lot more complex than it is thought to be by the major populace.

This article explains things, and the US involvement in the middle-east (some of which is quite shocking)

Biffa Bacon

Mark Steyn has a funny article on all the media bull**** surrounding the war: BBC World News - now with all content guaranteed sexed down

By the way, isn't it great that he now has a column in the Irish Times?

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Silent Bob
I'm fairly sure that the 'invaded Kuwait' issue is a lot more complex than it is thought to be by the major populace.

Nevertheless, that is what happened. Saddam ordered troops into a UN recognised sovereign nation. He was not forced into it. The option not to invade was always there.

Likewise, the US did not have to invade Iraq although plenty of motivations can be thought up to justify Bush's decision if one so chooses.

To a resident of either country getting shelled, none of the political maneuverings that may preceded the actions carries much weight.

Getting back on topic, I think the Fox article about the French was a bit over the top.

Silent Bob

Originally posted by SkepticOne
Nevertheless, that is what happened. Saddam ordered troops into a UN recognised sovereign nation. He was not forced into it. The option not to invade was always there.

Likewise, the US did not have to invade Iraq although plenty of motivations can be thought up to justify Bush's decision if one so chooses.

I'm not condoning either country's actions. People should be aware of the larger political background though.

The article I linked to also shows the US in a much worse light than France could ever be viewed w.r.t. the Middle-East.

And I think the reason Fox can get away with stuff like that article is because there seems to be a certain cachet of 'cool' associated with denigrating the French among working class America.