LA Times The News: A Nation Divided

[Tsiyu]

Interesting commentary on the Great Divide in news viewership:

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-et-rutten7jul07.story

Is the media finally ready to admit they are failing us?

[papau]

1. Well written - some snips below

the war is between Fox and CNN. The third network, MSNBC, is sort of like the Catalan anarchists — slaughtered by everyone.


(One American in four now is a regular viewer of Fox?).

Fox's winning formula is essentially the continuation of talk radio by other means: All opinions are shouted, and contrary views are admitted only if they agree to come on camera dressed as straw men. To anyone prone to twist the AM dial on the car radio, it's a familiar caldron, a witches' brew of rancor, sneers and resentment stirred for maximum distortion.

Pew's portrait of a news audience fractured along ideological lines carried consistently over into other media. "The audiences for Rush Limbaugh's radio show and Bill O'Reilly's TV program remain overwhelmingly conservative and Republican," the center's analysts wrote. "By contrast, audiences for some other news sources, notably NPR, "NewsHour," and magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harper's, tilt liberal and Democratic, but not nearly to the same degree."

[Tsiyu]

2. Thanks papau

I'm onto so many trails this morning, i really appreciate your contribution.

[papau]

3. No problem - and this PM I have to go back to work!

SS benefits do not pay squat!

[tom_paine]

4. They'll NEVER admit that, especially not on TV Pravda

Which would ruin the whole carefully cultivated and maneuvered effect.

[Martin Eden]

5. I thought this was the best paragraph:

If one believes that the 1st Amendment is meant to protect something other than corporate profits — that fair, nonpartisan journalism serves the common good — then it is clear that more than ratings or circulation is at issue here: The open society is propped open by truth; knowledge is the air that democracy breathes. Factional dogmatism, with its blind preference for the party line and its confusion between attitudes and ideas, abhors the truly open society. Moreover, our contemporary factions are organized around what the late Canadian philosopher J.M. Cameron called "syndrome thinking": a willingness to embrace a complex of beliefs connected by something other than logic.