MSNBC's top programs provide more than 18 times as much coverage of Haiti earthquake as Fox News' to

I obviously meant to say from a "conservative "Australian government in my above post.
Sorry. A bit hot under the collar about this whole "issue".

Well I certainly hope so.

But you do wonder how many peopled are actually influenced.



I'm not sure about that. (Because of Fox's ratings, etc)

I do hope you're right.

No no, bigger influence for sure. I meant similar in terms of being absolute garbage that most people don't like to dignify with attention but that still has a loyal enough following (and opposition who can't help but feed the trolls) to make money.

I'd like to emphasize something RG has said here, because, frankly, it's distressing how Miss Olga continues to insist that Fox is typical of the media, or the most important media outlet. It is not either typical or the most important. If you have a half a dozen people who own roughly equal shares of a company, the fact that one of them owns more shares than anyone else is not evidence that that individual controls the company. Leaving aside CNN and MSNBC as being only available on cable or satellite feed, there are five networks which broadcast in the clear--ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and Fox. These networks own some stations and have some affiliated stations. Excepting PBS, they all also provide local news, weather and sports with their owned stations and affiliated stations. So Fox's high ratings are not evidence that the Fox version of events is the mainstream view of Americans of those events.

Pointing out that Fox wins the cable/satellite ratings doesn't change that picture, because there are even more news sources on cable and satellite feed. So Fox having the highest ratings is not evidence that Fox's jaundiced views of the world represent majority opinion among Americans.

Are you aware, Miss Olga, that Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch? Did you know that he launched Fox News specifically to compete against CNN? That should give you some idea of what Fox's political goals in reporting the news have been since the outset.

I wish you could let it sink in that Fox cannot reasonably be taken to represent the opinion of most Americans. It is unfortunate that you seem to continue to think so.

So it's a small percentage of non-mainstream media then?

This is something I think Australians are aware of much more often than Americans and for every single Australian on this forum I am confident to answer: of course!

I would have thought so, too, RG. However, Miss Olga continues to speak as though she believes Fox has undue influence in the US, and i wanted to be sure that she understands that its motives are sensationalist as well as conservative. Of course, Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship in order to be able to own American television stations a long time ago, but i would expect most people in Oz to understand that, too.

Limbaugh and other non-TV talk show hosts are not what I consider mainstream mediums of the media. But I do consider Fox to be a part of mainstream and "small" is a relative thing I guess. Certainly not representative of most Americans, which seems to be Setanta's point but Fox really changed the landscape of TV journalism and popularized the pander to ideology approach. Most of the audience is probably just there because they are Republican and Fox is the only Republican-biased outlet of the big TV news options (MSNBC panders to the left for it's market share for example).

But these guys are often understood to be trying to out ideologue each other and their strong use of double-speak* should indicate that not even all of their own readers are on board with the nuttier things they say. It's almost like the fake wrestling of journalism where it's clear that even Limbaugh and Beck don't believe the nonsense they are saying but are carefully calculating how to say things that will piss off their ideological opponents the most. A big part of their audience is just there to hear the opposing side get insulted for the entertainment value and this isn't about news at all. It's more like standup comedy where the audience doesn't have to literally agree but just share the basic premise (which for Fox is that liberals drool and conservatives rule).

So they are like trolls on the skirts of journalism and most of America prefers to ignore them and not feed the trolls but yes, they command a larger audience than their commentary merits, which owes in large part to the specifically partisan polarization of America and the increasingly blurring distinctions between entertainment and journalism on both the right and the left.

* e.g. Limbaugh said that Americans already donate to Haiti through income taxes that Obama is pledging as foreign aid. The implication that we don't need to be privately generous was danced around and the next day Limbaugh tried to act like he was supporting private donations and said it would be better than the government aid (which is a shout out to the "private sector is better than government" verse of the conservative Bible).

I'm very familiar with Rupert Murdoch. He is Australian after all. (Sorry, no longer Australian, though he still likes to act & talk like he his when he's here in Oz - he's actually become a US citizen to enable him to further his media interests in the US.) But Australia is where his media "empire" began & those of us who pay attention to such things are very aware of his newspaper & other media outlets taking particular "lines" on particular issues. And his efforts to influence the federal government to endorse media policies that favour his interests.

You know, it is hard, from a distance, to know how much impact the material I've seen here might actually have had on people's opinions in the US. How many actually see the Glenn Becks & others of his ilk on other media outlets on a regular basis. How many other television broadcasters, newspapers, radio stations support such views. Maybe they are just an extreme fringe that no one much pays any attention to? Maybe the handful conservatives here who have pushed such a strong anti-aid to Haiti line over the past few days are the only ones who have been influenced? I don't know. My understanding (perhaps wrongly) is that the far right of US politics has run an anti-aid (to Haiti) line, as part of an anti-Obama line. That (if it is true) is what I find deeply offensive & opportunistic. I don't really think it matters if those views are aired primarily on Fox, or on a variety of media outlets. It is the message that offends. But, if I've got my wires totally crossed about this, please feel free to tell me so. I'm listening.

Like I explain in my post, I kinda split the difference between what I think your positions are. Fox news certainly doesn't represent most Americans, and folks like Glenn Beck are on the fringe of Fox itself, but it's distressingly successful compared to Australia and even compared to the US media scene prior to Fox.

That level of commentary used to be relegated to a smaller fringe, mediums like tabloids. But Fox certainly has more sway than tabloids ever did so I share some of msolga's concern about the relatively recent degradation in the quality of US TV journalism.

For most of your life a "news" program was predominantly news. Within the last 10 years it has become predominantly entertainment and folks like Glenn Beck used to be relegated to smaller platforms. I'm no fan of what is happening to US TV journalism myself.

Geeze, Miss Olga, i have, and others to a lesser extent have been trying to tell you that Fox, and it's idiot child stars like Beck do not reflect nor control the opinions of the majority of Americans. I mentioned Murdoch both because i genuinely did not know if you knew that, and to point out that this is tabloid journalism, this is sensationalism. So, the point is that millions of people pay attention to them, but it is largely preaching to the choir, telling people what they want to hear; AND, from among more than three hundred million people, they don't represent a significant fraction of the population. That other joker in this thread, Big Texan, was chortling with glee at the thought that one of his favorite pundits might be irritating some other pundit he referred to. That's what sensationalism is all about--getting someone's attention or getting someone's goat. Millions of Americans eat up this drivel. Hundreds of millions of Americans don't.

All I can say then, Setanta, is if I take A2K US posters as a reflection of the US population & political thinking (I haven't got much else to go by), then some very obscure negative political messages from some very obscure media sources appear to have influenced the ultra-conservative posters here very strongly.

Do I have that right?

I am not just talking about this particular thread. I am talking of the combined anti-US aid posts of the past few days.

It's hard to gauge the mindshare they have (as opposed to just ratings) because part and parcel of their gig is to use enough double speak that they end up being a Rorschach inkblot. If you are conservative they make enough vague conservative points and make fun of liberals enough that many conservatives would find them entertaining. And they are sufficiently controversial that liberals will be outraged and advertise them.

But if you want me to ballpark it, I'd give these kinds of nuts about a 10% mindshare at most when it comes to the nuttier interpretations of the nuttier things they say, but about a 30% mindshare when it comes to their more quotidian drivel. It's also important to note that they aren't doing this kind of offensive thing 24/7 and the rest of the time are just more ambiguously conservative.



I think the "tough love" rationalizations for being compassionless are actually fairly common in America and pre-date this event. The bad economy is bringing more of it out, and the ambiguous nature of the scale of destruction (as opposed to the tsunami where the scale was more immediately evident) isn't helping either. It also lacks good emotional visuals and concepts, I know that sounds awful but the tsunami was a more charismatic disaster with the scale being immediately evident just by the number of countries that were hit.

I remember the predominant sentiment during the tsunami, and it didn't have this edge to it at all (and Bush the conservative was more generous than Obama has thus far been). But I don't ascribe it to their influence, they reflect as much as they influence. I think it's largely backlash at government spending during the worst economic times that anyone remembers.



Yeah but I think there's some latent isolationism due to the economy that the aid is tapping into as well, where in hard times more Americans than usual want to "address problems at home before abroad". The worse the economic situation the more powerful and compelling the argument is ("if things are so bad here why are we trying to fix other people's messes?") and another big component to American isolationism in aid is that so many people find it expected that Americans resent it. I get why, but they should also get that when we have close to half the wealth of the world and when lesser economies are being far more generous this isn't an entirely unreasonable expectation for us to be almost as generous as other developed nations.



I think they aren't as responsible for the isolationism as you think. For example, hawkeye is not on the right and didn't get his position of blaming them for their deaths from these guys. There's always been a bit of the "**** the world we can't fix it anyway and they don't like us no matter what" element to American opinion and the bad economy and huge government spending after huge government spending is what is bringing this out. Plus don't forget that Haitians are black and you've seen how hawkeye gets about blacks. There is a race component to this event from folk like him who have a tendency to view the misfortune of certain minorities as being dispositional rather than situational.

With the economy in shambles Americans are looking at the bills for two wars, the economic bailouts after bailouts and possibly a large healthcare bill (whether you support it or not you have to agree that it's probably going to involve a lot of money if it passes) coming there's just a lot of political hay to be made at any large spending right now. It's like the perfect storm in favor of American stinginess.

Well . . . sort of. There are quite a few conservatives who come here looking to pick a fight, or to get under someone's skin. But you seem to be afflicted with absolutism of some kind, Miss Olga. You seem to want to believe that either this drivel is typical of American attitudes, or that it is very obscure. I certainly have not said that it is very obscure--but i have said that it is not typical of the attitudes of all Americans. Fox gets the biggest share of the viewing audience, but in a highly competitive market with lots of players. They aren't very obscure. Neither are they typical of American attitudes. They are sensationalist, with all that implies, and their sensationalism is attractive to a great many Americans, but by no means the majority, and not even a significant fraction. I said that millions eat up this drivel, and that hundreds of millions don't. For sake of simplicity, assuming that there were exactly 300,000,000 Americans, that they all watch television news, and that Fox's market share is 15%--that would mean that 45,000,000 Americans would watch Fox. Leaving aside any estimates of how many of those are people who just tune in to see the train wreck, that sounds like a lot of people. But it would mean that 255,000,000 Americans don't tune in.

OK. I am listening & learning. Thank you.

Well it's somewhere in the whole spectrum. What I've been trying to figure out is how widespread the message is in the media & what sort of impact the message might have had.

No way would I believe the mean spirited reactions I've seen in the past couple of days are typical of all Americans.

I suspect that at most, Fox's political attitudes are typical of about 20% of Americans, and probably less. RG's estimate of 10% for the wackier crap is probably not far off. They're not obscure, but they're not typical, either. This is squeaky wheel stuff. If no other point of view gets trumpeted as loudly, it appears to be important. Fox, like all of Murdoch's "journalistic" enterprises, is dedicated to sensationalism.

Speaking from first-hand Oz experience, it is not exactly unknown for the political pronouncements of the Murdoch media to have political motives.

Believe me, we know from Murdoch!!! We are INFESTED with Murdoch!!

The Murdochs began their evil empire right here in my hometown with the local tabloid...and took themselves round the world.

Rupert's a home town boy.

We get that we are discussing the lunatic fringe of the demise of decent journalism.

What I think is surprising to me, at least, is that you get this sort of stuff (re not helping Haiti, and blaming Obama for doing so) said even by the gutter TV shows.

We are not familiar with this.

As I said to Msolga, the closest big media we have to that is a few radio stars, whom we call "shock jocks", who appeal to that sort of audience in the big cities.

Now...when the tsunami struck, our always very difficult relationship with Indonesia was especially bad.

Basically, they were giving us hell over intervening in East Timor.

We had experienced a lot of media investigation into the atrocities the Indonesian army, and its pet militias, had perpetrated upon the people there...including an orgy of killing and destruction after the referendum, and before Australia got there.

We'd had two Bali bombings, which killed a number of us, and had the people behind it promising lots more.

So, for people inclined to hatred, there was a bit of ammunition.

Thing is, I never experienced ANY media saying the sort of things Fox's nasties appear to have broadcast to millions.

Now.....I certainly don't listen to the shock jocks...but I do think, if they had said anything especially awful, it would have become a major drama in the media. There had recently been a scandal about a couple of them taking money to promote particular views....there was a huge inquiry into this...so they were news at the time.


So, for me, this is a different media reality, and I am wondering what is behind it.

I accept this is fringe stuff....but it does seem that a level of awfulness is accepted in the US political debate that Murdoch hasn't tried or dared to run here.

I have found Robert's explanations very interesting...what do you think of them?

I think it's largely plausible, although i am hesitant to accept an explanation that most Americans are affected by considerations of foreign wars and a bad economy. Many Americans have a "F you, i've got mine attitude," so a bad economy only rises above their event horizon if it affects them directly. Similarly, they don't give a rat's ass about foreign countries if no one in their family is involved. As i pointed out in that other thread, American insularity is partly conditioned by the fact that we can get just about everything we need and want from our own territory. So, when you combine those factors, there are many Americans who are not devotées of Fox who still don't give a rat's ass about Haiti and its misfortunes. I also think that his point about racism is well taken. There are still lots of American racists, including some who would never admit to being racist, who sincerely don't think they are racist, who would still take a different attitude toward the misfortunes of "colored" people than they would the misfortunes of "white" people.