Willie71 wrote:willhud9 wrote:Willie71 wrote:willhud9 wrote:You cited the public's low trust in the media I.e public opinion I.e argument via popularity as to why the mainstream media is bad.
Argumentum ad populam. Logical fallacy. Just because the masses believe something to be true does not make it so. That is what I accused you of invoking in the particular quote I quoted. You decided to bitch and whine when I called you out on it and do a whole "Nuh-uh" instead of stepping back and realizing that citing people's opinions does not equal substantiated facts.
Will, you are on the losing side of this argument. Are you aware of how many people were gagged or fired from the MSM regarding the Iraq war? I'll give you a hint, you can find a lot of them on RT America. Just scroll through their hosts. There are numerous others too.
Oh good. Another member here to just assert that I'm wrong without actually showing substance.
Give me names. Oh and don't just cite their personal anecdotes as to why they said they were fired. That's not credible information as it implies a bias.
The most obvious one was Phil Donahue.
Wow, I can't believe people actually drank that kool-aid. Donahue was not a popular show on MSNBC and had a high production cost. Those factors + Donahue's ultra liberal stances made the cancellation of the show inevitable for MSNBC at the time.
But Donahue is your obvious example? Political commentators are not journalists. They have a role on their media programming which is to comment on news and are subject to the media providers whims. What journalists were being gagged or silenced?
I can't believe you really thought there was balanced coverage of the iraq war.
Your snide incredulousness is cute, but again unsubstantiated. You nor Crank have actually done anything to verify your incessant claims that the media biasedly covered the entrance of Iraq. You keep perpetuating the echo chamber.
Do you have no critical thinking?
This was one of the most blatant propaganda campaigns in modern history. You can see it continue with the whole terrorism spin we repeatedly see. Same process.
a) the media tends to influence public opinion. This is true.
b) a good portion of coverage was pro-war. This is true.
c) This does not mean, however, that the media somehow conspired to be pro-war and only pro-war.
The media goes on rating. It was incredibly unpopular to speak out against the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. So unpopular that Fox New's viewership spiked in comparison to CNN's and MSNBC's ratings and viewerships. The "media" is subject to supply and demand pressures. If people don't care to hear a certain opinion they don't want to listen to it.
The few cases of reporters being fired over anti-war statements are exaggerated most of the time and involve more than just them making anti-war statements. There were a lot of reporters who were against Iraq and they voiced their opinions and those opinions were available to the public. The public did not care and chose to ignore those stories.
The thing is journalists like Christopher Hitchens also believed Iraq was justified. Hitchens was by no means a non-skeptic, or as Crank likes to say, "blind." You may disagree with him, but that is the cool thing about having differences of opinions on topics like Iraq. You can civilly discuss them.
But I have a feeling that if anyone said anything pro-Iraq War you would also have an aneurysm.
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