@okie,
You are aware that Fox went to court to prove that they weren't forced by law to tell the truth, right?
Cycloptichorn
@Cycloptichorn,
Is any news organization bound by law to tell the truth? I hope you would know that it would be pretty easy to find a lie in most of the main stream media reports, including Associated Press? Are you that naive, cyclops, to assume that "news" has always been a perfect interpretation of events and facts? I hope not. I learned that it is not about 40 years ago in a very distinct way when a reporter came and wrote an article about an industrial project that my energy company employer was working on. When the article was published in the paper, it was more than surprising to me how many facts they had gotten wrong. In that case, it was more a case of bad reporting or substandard reporting, rather than intentional distortion, but I never forgot it and it taught me to read news items with a much more critical eye.
By the way, if misreporting is a crime, Dan Rather would be in prison. In fact, his actions were a crime in my opinion, by virtue of the fact that his hit piece was fraudulantly compiled to attempt to alter a federal election, and that is a crime I believe.
@okie,
Just to refresh your memory, Fox News went to court to prove that they weren't wrong to force their reporters to knowingly lie on air.
Quote:Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie.
By Mike Gaddy. Published Feb. 28, 2003
On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.
On August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that Akre was indeed fired for threatening to report the station's pressure to broadcast what jurors decided was "a false, distorted, or slanted" story about the widespread use of growth hormone in dairy cows.
The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers. Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news.
The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.
In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a "policy," not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation. Fox aired a report after the ruling saying it was "totally vindicated" by the verdict.
Fox deliberately distorts the news and have been caught several times doing exactly that. To say that they are anything other than a mouthpiece for telling guys like you exactly what you want to hear is a total joke.
Cycloptichorn
@Cycloptichorn,
Quote:Fox deliberately distorts the news
I suppose if you are very gullible you might believe that they are the only ones .
@Cycloptichorn,
In reading your post very quickly, I suspect the devil is in the details. For example, what the reporter interpreted as distortion may have simply been her opinion, or there may be instances where some information was edited out or omitted because the network felt that it was superfluous or unnecessary. Yo do know I hope that reporters do not have unmitigated license to say anything they please on a network without some management of it? The same with newspapers. That is why their are editors to correct mistakes, improve the stories with better writing, and all of that.
In summary, it would be ill advised to read your information about this court case and assume what you are telling me to be the whole truth, without more detailed exmination of it.
I listened to Ed Shultz talk radio a couple of days ago, and in a couple of minutes, I was talking to the radio in the car, saying you lie, Ed, because I knew some of the stuff he was saying was inaccurate and distorted. Would I try to sue him for false reporting? No, because he has a right to give his opinion. I simply consider the source. I do the same with the Main stream media other than Fox, as they frustrate me to no end if I watch or follow them. I don't know about outright lies, but distortions and omissions of important facts seem common to me, as to make their news often worthless. So as you feel about Fox, I feel about other organizations. And the fact remains Fox is doing pretty well, thank you, because people recognize what they think is credible. Let the people decide, cyclops. Here are the facts about Fox's impressive performance considering they did not even get started until 1986,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Company
"Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as simply Fox (and stylized as FOX),[1][2] is an American television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, from 2004 to 2009 Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the 18–49 demographic.[3] In the 2007–08 season, Fox became the most popular network in America in household ratings for the first time in its history, replacing CBS."
@Ionus,
Ionus wrote:
Quote:Fox deliberately distorts the news
I suppose if you are very gullible you might believe that they are the only ones .
To the best of my knowledge, they are the only ones who have gone to court and fought for their right to do so.
Cycloptichorn
@Cycloptichorn,
Quote:To the best of my knowledge, they are the only ones who have gone to court and fought for their right to do so.
That says more about who hates them then anything else .
@Ionus,
Ionus wrote:Quote:To the best of my knowledge, they are the only ones who have gone to court and fought for their right to do so.
That says more about who hates them then anything else .
That was exactly what I was thinking but had not told cyclops yet. By the way, Rather did not have to defend his practice of lying. He just did it and the libs ignored it and even praised him.
@okie,
So.. okie..
Do you think nature has the right to exist?
@parados,
parados wrote:So.. okie..
Do you think nature has the right to exist?
Silly parados. It does exist by force of nature. It does not require man's permission to exist, nor does it need rights to exist by permission of man's set of laws. It exists because God created it. Notice the tornados in this country killing people. If nature was placed on the same scale of protections of rights and privileges as mankind, would you want to prosecute nature for doing all of that killing? How would you prosecute God for his creation?
Do you realize how egotistic and arrogant you are to suggest that it has to be protected or granted a right to exist by insignificant men like yourself?
@okie,
So in other words, nature has the right to exist because it does exist.
God given rights don't require laws. OK... glad to know that.. Tell me why we have a Constitution again.
@parados,
parados wrote:So in other words, nature has the right to exist because it does exist.
God given rights don't require laws. OK... glad to know that.. Tell me why we have a Constitution again.
We have a Constitution to endorse and reinforce, or secure what the Declaration of Independence had already declared when the country was founded, parados. Here is what the Declaration says:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Nothing is said about "nature" having rights. It is all about the rights of people.
@okie,
Why on earth would we have to encode rights granted by God?
Too bad, okie. the rights of ecosystems movement has its roots deep in American and British law, thanks to judicial and legislative actions, by your side, actually, in the 19th century. You will notice the Constitution says nothing about corporations either. Yet a whole series of case laws and legislative acts created the concept of what is often caalled a "fictive person", a legal entity NOT a human being but endowed with the individual rights of an actual person, so a corporation, which is NOT the people who are shareholders or its board, has ITSELF the same rights as a person, in essence. One of the reasons, insidentally, that a corporation is subject to income taxes on its profits, the same way, say, a sole proprietor is since those profits are his income.
So what is going on here is creating another in the line of fictive persons, giving the environment some of the same protections and rights that corporations, to take the one example, have been given. Giving individual rights to non-humans is nothing new. It is in fact conservative doctrine.
And if you think god is doing a good job of taking care of his alleged creation, I invite you to take a look at what has been going on in the Amazon basin, which is the Pachamama Alliance's main area of concern, over the last several decades.
Google around a little bit and look at the depredation and rape (not a metaphor in this case, but fact) of the indigenous people and the land), by illegal, quasi-legal (done under the cover of corrupt officials), and "legal" mining, expecially gold mining, squatter farms and ranching (for which the Amazon is extremely ill-suited), and deforestation.
The Amazon is the lungs of the world. It provides a large part of the oxygen we breathe. It is being destroyed, in large part by the current system of treating the environment solely as property, capable of being exploited for short term gain by people who don't look beyond their interests in making huge quantities of money quickly and to hell with the consequences for others. That is one reason, or a whole series of reasons, whytreating the environment as a fictive person with rights makes a great deal of sense. It's been done before, and a whole series of legal actions say the concept is constitutional. It should be done again.
@MontereyJack,
So many fallacious statements, I won't even start, MJ.
@parados,
parados wrote:Why on earth would we have to encode rights granted by God?
Did you even read the Declaration of Independence statement that I quoted? It says: "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." To try to explain that to you, governments are instituted among men, including our United States bovernment, to endorse or secure the rights already granted to us by God. In a free country that depends upon self government. It is therefore up to us to guarantee to ourselves what has been given us as a founding principle of this self governing country.
If we ever fail to secure or give our consent as the governed people to guarantee the rights endowed by our Creator as stated as a founding principle of our country, then we have lost our way as a culture, as a cociety, and as a country. Actually, I hope you realize that the great political battle raging in this country today between liberal leftist and coservative ideals is precisely over what rights we are supposed to have individually versus collectively. Liberals strive for more collectivism, while conservatives strive for more individual rights.
Do feel free to start, okie. They're all true.
@okie,
If we don't secure rights granted by God then we have lost our way as a culture?
okie, you clearly did not read the Declaration (which is not, incidentally, the law of the land--that's the Constitution). Your quote says very clearly that GOVERNMENTS are instituted to secure those rights. That is what government is for. I would say that liberals believe that every American is the government, and government exists to do what we want it to do (and as it happens most Americans want it to do more than you want it to do. Too bad. You're outvoted).And that governments are what we use to accomplish the big things we want done, because by definition they can mobilize more resources than individuals (or the biggest private corporation you can name or envision) can.
@MontereyJack,
Have you heard of the phrase, "Tyranny of the Majority?" If I am outvoted and everyone wants all freckled people killed, is it just too bad for freckled people, they are all outvoted as you would say?
