Quote:Which brings me to the next question here. Do you get angry if you watch Fox news? Or if you watch CNN? Why?
Yes, CNN makes me angry sometimes, like with the Iraq war, and before that, with the Gulf War.
Going on CNN, these wars (especially the first one), were merely "clean", technocratic war games in the sand. So much coverage of the first Gulf War's "smart bombs", and hardly a mention of the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who died being literally bulldozered into the sand.
Dont get me wrong, at the time I was neutral and when I look back I think that war was justified. But I still didnae like the way CNN reported it at all. All America All the Time, is the impression I get from CNN - which would be fair enough for a purely American station, but not for a news station which continuously proclaims itself to be "global" - and did, in many ways, actually have a monopoly of sorts on first-minute news.
And the political slant ... I remember watching Crossfire, back then, with Buchanan versus some weak-willed centrist-sounding liberal ... and that was supposed to represent the width of the political debate? Some loony right-wing radical versus the blandest of centrists? Again, for a purely US context that perhaps made sense, but it seemed like an insult to our intelligence.
That said, I didnt stop watching CNN whenever something was up - war, elections, disaster - as long as I had a TV at home. But yeh, I got agitated at times <grins>. Just like I get agitated when I read some radical leftist defend Milosevic, or when I read articles from the perspective of the "red-brown" (communist-nationalist) parties in Eastern Europe.
I feel much more at home with the Dutch broadcast news or the BBC, with the Dutch newspapers or the Frankfuerter Rundschau or Sueddeitscher Zeitung, or the Guardian or the Independent (though English newspapers have notoriously little foreign news and a ridiculous amount of crime news). But still I keep looking up stuff from far outside my wavelength, too. How else do you get to understand the world? I once spent an evening reading everything the National Review had written about Pim Fortuyn. Very trippy.
