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Thread: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?


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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    to get this back on topic....

    dneal, I don't believe that the Washington Post is, generally speaking, an unreliable news publication.

    The two most well-known and respected web sites that evaluate and track media bias and accuracy both rate the Post favorably.

    allsides.com rates the WP as "Leans Left" (for both news and opinion). There is another category full of publications further Left than this.

    adfontesmedia.com rates the WP as both reliable and only slightly leaning left (this site rates accuracy and bias)

    One can do much worse than reading the Washington Post if one looks at the ratings of the dozens of other possible media sources, on both sides of the political spectrum.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    to get this back on topic....

    dneal, I don't believe that the Washington Post is, generally speaking, an unreliable news publication.

    The two most well-known and respected web sites that evaluate and track media bias and accuracy both rate the Post favorably.

    allsides.com rates the WP as "Leans Left" (for both news and opinion). There is another category full of publications further Left than this.

    adfontesmedia.com rates the WP as both reliable and only slightly leaning left (this site rates accuracy and bias)

    One can do much worse than reading the Washington Post if one looks at the ratings of the dozens of other possible media sources, on both sides of the political spectrum.
    Generally, it's not; but their politics are skewed more than the sports page. I'm just messing with welch since he takes this so seriously and is their mouthpiece. In fairness, he has started linking the New Yorker and NYT.

    I ran across a right-wing "prophecy" type site that claims Joe Biden is dead, and what we see on TV is a clone. Seriously. They went on to say that these clones only last 3 months, so that's how long Biden will last in office. I wanted to ask why they wouldn't just make more clones. Talking to my sister, I laughed when she said "then why wouldn't they have made a Trump clone that couldn't talk or tweet!"

    Both sides have their crazies. I'm going to have to dig a little deeper on the left to find the equivalent of the above. All they have is their gender nonsense. They really need to up their game.
    Last edited by dneal; January 9th, 2021 at 02:29 PM.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Well, no one expects neutrality in the editorial and opinion pages. People get paid there for expressing sharp opinion.

    It's the news that matters, and that is the only thing that we have been debating on these threads: the facts of the election and the legal cases. The WP reported these things accurately, as have many news organizations. I watched Fox for a good bit of news coverage, and that part was nearly identical to CNN and MSNBC because I was flipping through all three, which are next to each other on my dial. I am only saying this because Fox has been rated with the same degree of accuracy in its news reporting. The opinion segments later at night are a different matter, but that's not what anyone is really debating in this point. The Fox folks often make me gag, but so do some of the liberal commentators when they go too far.

    But lots of news outlets get the facts right with little to virtually no bias.

    The stuff you mention here is mental and bizarre. Not even entertaining (to me).

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?


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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Yes, and you can see that the Washington Post is in the top box, slightly left, called "Most Reliable."

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by Linger View Post
    I imagine most of these types of sites try to do a good job, but I have questions when I see Vox and Huffpost closer to the center. Newsmax, OAN and The Blaze are no closer to the middle than Fox. Fox depends on whether you're watching their news shows or their opinion shows. I'd put them reasonable close to the middle if you're talking about Brett Baier or Neil Cavuto, but when you hit the 7 o'clock opinion shows it's hard right. Same could be said for CNN. The "All Sides" chart (below) accounts for this.
    Reason used to be very libertarian, but over the last two years they've had an influx of left-ish writers join. It seems counterintuitive since Bloomberg is a billionaire liberal, but bloomberg news is reasonable objective.

    The biggest problem I have with most of the "neutral" outlets is that their opinion and news are now intermingled. "News" should be free of word and phrasing choices that characterize.

    "Trump's baseless claims" characterizes and belongs in opinion pieces.
    "Trump's claims" is neutral and belongs in news.

    Look back on the first page, at the difference between "U.S. offers to share intelligence with Russia", vs "Trump revealed highly classified information to Russians". The U.S. sharing intelligence with other nations is nothing unusual. "Five Eyes" refers to the five english speaking countries with a specific agreement, but there are other arrangements with other countries. Anyway, "U.S. offers to share intelligence" sounds cooperative. "Trump revealed highly classified info" sounds accusatory and nefarious. That's not accidental. In both cases, the exact same thing happened for the exact same reason; but it got two different headlines.

    Those examples relate to Trump, but I could pick others on a different topic. I will say that most of the media's rhetoric (left and right) seems to have been toned down after the incident on the 6th. They've been getting lambasted for playing a part in the divisiveness, and rightly so to a large extent.

    Should you trust media bias charts?
    These controversial charts claim to show the political lean and credibility of news organizations. Here’s what you need to know about them.


    “Some nuance has to go away when it’s a graphic,” she said. “If you always keep it to, ‘people can only understand if they have a very deep conversation,’ then some people are just never going to get there. So it is a tool to help people have a shortcut.”

    But perceiving the chart as distilled truth could give consumers an undue trust in outlets, McBride said.

    “Overreliance on a chart like this is going to probably give some consumers a false level of faith,” she said. “I can think of a massive journalistic failure for just about every organization on this chart. And they didn’t all come clean about it.”
    AllSidesMediaBiasChart-Version3.jpg
    Last edited by dneal; January 9th, 2021 at 04:55 PM.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    That's why I called them the two most trusted sites. They aren't perfect, of course, either. But they are more empirical and thorough than anyone on this thread can be, including you and me, dneal. I wonder about some of the placements, too. But I do not seriously question them. I have in no empirical way studied all these publications (nor am I interested in doing it). My point was only to say that the Washington Post is not an unreliable publication (contrary to your claim starting the thread). Which apparently you did not even really mean.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    I went to the CNN and Fox homepages. They both have "politics" and "opinion" sections. If you click "opinion", you'll get just that and that's fine. I clicked on the "politics" section, which should be straight news.

    Fox's formatting makes it near impossible to do a screen shot. The image would be much too large. Their main articles are relatively neutral and the "media buzz" section to the right is highly opinionated.

    Here's CNN's, which I color-coded based on my opinion of the neutrality of the headline. "Analysis" seems to be the word they use for "opinion".

    Screenshot 2021-01-09 180421.jpg

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    On the topic of loaded language in news reporting (again, opinion pieces can do whatever they want), I agree. One has to watch out. The problem in the last 4 years, and the good newsrooms have really wrestled with this (I read about the journalism industry), is that it became clear that Trump played fast and loose with obvious and easily researched facts. And when challenged, he would just simply double down. And then Kelly Conway made that statement about having "alternative facts," and so newsrooms had to debate whether to simply report the lies and falsehoods as simply "statements" or with labels trying to help their readers understand fact versus fiction. Newsrooms and editors had many debates about this, and no president had so pushed this line so far. Trump took on the media by calling any one of them who questioned his "facts" as "fake news" and "enemies of the people," so the battle over truth was on. Finally, over this election nonsense, the major media outlets simply called his claims "false" or "unfounded" or "untrue," etc. I don't like it either, as a practice, but the war over the truth with him started with the birther bullshit, and then rekindled immediately with the bullshit about the inauguration numbers. These things were laughably false, and a little sick, really.

    And here we are. If the news media senses that you are lying to them, and if it becomes more and more apparent that you are lying, they are now going to say so. There is so much falsehood being spread and written on other media that the newsrooms are having to become a kind of truth-arbiter, and not just a reporting of who-said-or-did-what.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    dneal, you are evaluating only the link headings

    I don't disagree with your judgment, but headlines are only one small part of the text.

    And it looks like they do a good job: the news column is more objective than the opinion pieces. But still, you have to look at the texts of each of the articles (the real writing, not the click-bait headings).

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    That's why I called them the two most trusted sites. They aren't perfect, of course, either. But they are more empirical and thorough than anyone on this thread can be, including you and me, dneal. I wonder about some of the placements, too. But I do not seriously question them. I have in no empirical way studied all these publications (nor am I interested in doing it). My point was only to say that the Washington Post is not an unreliable publication (contrary to your claim starting the thread). Which apparently you did not even really mean.
    Oh, I meant it to some extent. If you want to read about the Indonesian fisherman that are missing, it's fine. Their politics is biased. welch has been linking the most highly opiniated political articles as some sort of proof of his point(s), which I think is silly. I've linked right-leaning headlines for juxtaposition, and started this thread because his "Trump pressures Georgia to change votes" ridiculousness.

    The WashPost changed after Bezos bought it. Among other things, it became profitable. I think he just followed the Rupert Murdoch methodology, which is: sensation sells. That kind of comes full circle to the Scott Adams' excerpt I posted. Google, FaceBook, Amazon, etc... all analyze everything about you. What you read, how long you spend on something, what you buy, etc... They take that info and develop a personality profile. I wouldn't be surprised if some AI algorithm Amazon uses informed Bezos' purchase of WashPost and why it's crafted like it is.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    dneal, you are evaluating only the link headings

    I don't disagree with your judgment, but headlines are only one small part of the text.

    And it looks like they do a good job: the news column is more objective than the opinion pieces. But still, you have to look at the texts of each of the articles (the real writing, not the click-bait headings).
    I don't disagree, but I think the click-bait headlines should be less "click-bait-ish" if a journalistic outlet is going to be credible. The interwebz is already full of "you won't believe what happens next", "watch the lib (or con) get owned", etc...

    I'd really love for the Rachel Maddows, Chris Cuomo, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons etc... of the world to go away. It's hour after hour of propaganda. That stuff used to be limited to the Saturday and Sunday shows, and they at least had some semblance of fair debate.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by dneal View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    That's why I called them the two most trusted sites. They aren't perfect, of course, either. But they are more empirical and thorough than anyone on this thread can be, including you and me, dneal. I wonder about some of the placements, too. But I do not seriously question them. I have in no empirical way studied all these publications (nor am I interested in doing it). My point was only to say that the Washington Post is not an unreliable publication (contrary to your claim starting the thread). Which apparently you did not even really mean.
    Oh, I meant it to some extent. If you want to read about the Indonesian fisherman that are missing, it's fine. Their politics is biased. welch has been linking the most highly opiniated political articles as some sort of proof of his point(s), which I think is silly. I've linked right-leaning headlines for juxtaposition, and started this thread because his "Trump pressures Georgia to change votes" ridiculousness.

    The WashPost changed after Bezos bought it. Among other things, it became profitable. I think he just followed the Rupert Murdoch methodology, which is: sensation sells. That kind of comes full circle to the Scott Adams' excerpt I posted. Google, FaceBook, Amazon, etc... all analyze everything about you. What you read, how long you spend on something, what you buy, etc... They take that info and develop a personality profile. I wouldn't be surprised if some AI algorithm Amazon uses informed Bezos' purchase of WashPost and why it's crafted like it is.
    yes, you are right to be suspicious of reading any source on-line. We cannot be sure that each of us is fed the same set of articles from the same sources. Print copies are the most reliable in this regard.

    But the Post itself is considered one of the more reliable sources by these groups that try to measure the reliability and bias objectively (and yes, the criteria they choose involves judgment, too--like any empirical study).

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    I more than once said to my wife, who hates Trump and the GOP more than I do (I don't hate the GOP), that some of the anchors' characterizations of the events this past week have been erroneous. Some of the banner headings are bunk, too. We are definitely being manipulated. But I am not sure that the answer is to consume more and more of all of the types of shit, which is what it seems that you do. I would be careful about all that poison and disinformation. It can mess with one's head, and I mean this seriously. I already see how both facebook and google news are feeding me either what it is clear that I will like or what they know will trigger me and tempt me to comment on. It's a bifurcated landscape of extremes produced by their algorithms. (I know, that social media documentary is all about this....)

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    I more than once said to my wife, who hates Trump and the GOP more than I do (I don't hate the GOP), that some of the anchors' characterizations of the events this past week have been erroneous. Some of the banner headings are bunk, too. We are definitely being manipulated. But I am not sure that the answer is to consume more and more of all of the types of shit, which is what it seems that you do. I would be careful about all that poison and disinformation. It can mess with one's head, and I mean this seriously. I already see how both facebook and google news are feeding me either what it is clear that I will like or what they know will trigger me and tempt me to comment on. It's a bifurcated landscape of extremes produced by their algorithms. (I know, that social media documentary is all about this....)
    I consume all kinds of information, and little of it is from the news. Want to know about Arabs? Read Phillip Hitti's "History of the Arabs". Want to know about Iran and their motivations? Read Vali Nasr. China? Read Gordon Chang. Those are just a few sources for each topic. I'm interested in what smart, knowledgable people think. Dershowitz is a smart guy. I want to hear his views on what's constitutional or not. Thomas Sowell is a brilliant economist. I want his views on the things he studies/has studied. Even Steve Bannon is brilliant, although he comes up with some really crazy shit. His insights on China are astounding though. I could type a laundry list of people worth listening to.

    I look at daily political news from a sociological perspective, not an informative one. I'm not interested in the content of various left or right publications from a news perspective. They're vapid, often barely literate pieces of little informative worth; and only last 24-48 hours before the next political drama is invented. My experience is that journalists are some of the dumbest people on the planet. I'm only interested in the viewpoints to get a sense of what people are hearing, thinking and/or believing.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Interesting argument dneal, I happen to agree with you. News is entertainment and should be enjoyed as such. You learn more from in-depth investigations/studies. Try this one:

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...d-rolf-dobelli

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Quote Originally Posted by Linger View Post
    Interesting argument dneal, I happen to agree with you. News is entertainment and should be enjoyed as such. You learn more from in-depth investigations/studies. Try this one:

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...d-rolf-dobelli
    That is a very good article - probably because it's a book excerpt/summary and not a news piece. Thanks!

    News has a place in our lives. A overturned truck lets us know to take a different route. A weather forecast lets us know to bring an umbrella. Much beyond that and it’s either trivial or manipulative. I was assigned to Army Europe when Russia shot down that Malaysian passenger jet. The news was full of outrage, and rightfully so. I was contemplating the target identification and system effectiveness, weapons hold and command/control procedures, political advantages etc... The information had value in that a thing happened, but little value in journalist's opinions.

    The problem with most journalists is that they're arrogantly convinced they know more than anyone else. While at the Command and General Staff College, we had a "media panel". Four journalists (from major outlets) sat on the stage in front of 1800 Majors. We asked them why they never reported on things we were doing in Iraq. Building schools, winning the IED fight, etc... They said they only had so much "space" in the news (and in the next breath complained that they had to fill a 24 hour news cycle). One guy in particular was a correspondent during Viet Nam, and believed that made him know more about the conditions on the ground in Iraq than the room full of officers who had served multiple tours, had security clearances and knew the intel, etc...

    The other problem is that they simply lie. I was in Afghanistan on an advisory team for the Kandahar Provincial Police. When the Belamby shooting happened, we were tasked to take CNN journalists to the village (because it was assumed General Razziq could make it happen). The first day, Razziq said "Absolutely not. They'll kill us all". CNN said we were hiding something. The second day, we went and the small arms fire was so great we just turned around and drove back to Kandahar. CNN said we were delaying their investigation - even though the journalists were in the trucks with us. The third day, we did get down there. A few days later we brought villagers to Razziq's palace for CNN to talk to in a safer setting. The headlines never matched what happened or what was said.

    I bash CNN in that last anecdote, but it could have been any outlet.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Surely we are able to read or listen and determine if there is a bias. And if so, do a cross reference to invalidate or validate. When we have direct quotes from senators siding with President Trump by supporting baseless conspiracies or have Trump parroting Fox News, this is apparently where the problem originates with people showing up and disgracefully breaking in, destroying, and worse, hitting an officer with a fire extinguisher.

    If you are someone who thinks black and brown people are going too far, do some research into African American history. I did and it will provide you will a objective perspective into why it is important that someone say "black lives matter". What I am saying, we are no longer limited to one newspaper or one news program on TV. My advice is to read broadly as much as possible.

    White priviledge was on full display last Wednesday. Worse, there were Evangelicas present. So, someone thought they were doing the Lord's work, I guess.

    For those still reading and those who will consider this from Tucker Carlson, he says that Fox News is here to "defend" , "“Tens of millions of Americans have no chance; they’re about to be crushed by the ascendant left,” Mr. Carlson claimed. “These people need a defender. You need a defender.” It was not hard to deduce whom he had in mind." Do people need a defender and if so, do you want Mr. Carlson. No one at the Post or Times speak like this do they?

    What I find ironic, that while Trump and Carlson bark like they are going to bite, they were not on the capital steps last Wednesday leading the charge. I find it sad that people died needlessly to carry forth both nonsense and lies. There is a say my old HS chemistry teacher repeated so often I have remembered it even now, "fool me once, shame on you. Shame me twice, shame on me."
    Last edited by Chuck Naill; January 10th, 2021 at 05:05 AM.

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    Default Re: With the Washington Post's history of lying, why do people still read it?

    Surely we are able to read or listen and determine if there is a bias.
    Some are, many aren’t. Rhetoric is more appealing than logic. Emotion overrides reason.

    White priviledge was on full display last Wednesday...
    I have read, and determined a bias is present.

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