jasensmith wrote:Martin, I read the Gaurdian from time to time and unfortunately their readership doesn't know how to debate. When I call out some of their erroneous reporting or challenge an editorial leaving a comment on their website, instead of engaging in honest healthy debate they just attack me by calling me a "racist," or "Bigot" or "moron" or whatever. Apparently if you don't goose step to the prevailing left wing drum at the time, you're ridiculed and dismissed.
I'm not sure what that has to do with what I said. I was saying that the accusation being levelled at the BBC (that they don't make good programmes) applies to Sky too (I'd argue that Sky are worse). The BBC do organise and broadcast the Proms (despite PaulR's convenient amnesia).
But yeah the internet is awash with idiots who won't debate. I'm not sure about foreign papers websites but all the UK ones are terrible - populated with idealogues who aren't interested in any view which differs from their own. This applies to the right as much as left though and they're both as bad as each other.
PaulR wrote:Jasen - don't take any notice of Martin.
Jasen - it's difficult for Americans to understand this. But what you
proabably don't know is that the 182 readers of The Guardian are all
mentally ill and need help. They think Captain Pugwash is going to do a
great job of running the country in 3 years time and all their benefits
will be restored, payed for by anyone stupid enough to still be paying
tax.
Kind of proves my point doesn't it? Ridiculing and dismissing going on right there.
Mis-reporting (or as they prefer to call it editorialising) is true of every paper. For example, the Daily Mail hyped up the MMR vaccine scare (though they weren't the only one). Then when the research saying it was dangerous was debunked they didn't print a thing. So now our vaccination rates have plummeted and we had our first deaths from measles in decades (as we were at, or close to, herd immunity levels before the scare) and the Mail print an article saying it's the French that have caused the rise in measles infections.
The Telegraph recently printed a story saying that average wages in the public sector were higher than the private sector (which plays nicely into the narrative of public sector bad & wasteful, private sector good & efficient). The problem is that's is so much more complicated than that. Yes the average wage is higher but that's partly because all the low skilled jobs have been outsourced to private companies. Also, we know that women are paid less than men to do the same job and that women are disproportionally employed in the public sector so if anything the result should be the opposite. However since proper research hasn't happened we don't actually know. And this happens every day in all of the papers - utter crud being printed based on the political stripe of the paper rather than on solid research and reporting.
I don't see a lot of Fox News but I know the lack of balanced reporting in the US isn't just confined to the left.
However, none of this has anything to do with my original point.
Not sure why the font on my site is appearing small - I'll look into it and thanks for the heads up!