From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun Aug 08 2004 - 22:45:42 BST
> dmb says:
> I'd also like to point out that the SUN is a Rupert Murdoch paper. Like Fox
> news, the Times of London, the New York Post and the Weekly Standard, his
> media outlets are notoriously biased. Anyone interested in learning about
> the many, many specific examples of this bias would do well to read Al
> Franken's LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM. The author is only a
> comedian, but employed the services of a classroom full of Harvard grad
> students as his researchers, so its actually very well documented. Plus its
> funny. This book is aimed specifically at Murdoch's FOX NEWS, which is run
> by Bush's cousin. But the BBC says this about the SUN...
>
> According to the BBC...
> In 1969, the Sun was sold by IPC to Rupert Murdoch for £800,000. He
> quickly relaunched the Sun as a tabloid paper, and cut the number of
> journalists employed. The first topless photograph of a page three girl was
> published in 1970, and the paper began to focus more on sex, showbiz and
> celebrity gossip.
>
> In other words, its a gutter rag. The SUN uses a story about dirty hands to
> score political points, but the logic is so bad that only an ideologue
> could fail to see through it. Its ridiculous.
A boorishly predictable response. When a liberal doesn't like the message,
he attacks the messenger. In my response to Ant McWatt on July 16, 2004
(available in the archives) I included the following from The Guardian, a
newspaper recommended for its reliability, or so Anthony claimed, by
Pirsig:
"The NHS has a severe shortage of capacity, directly costing the lives of
tens of thousands of patients a year. We have fewer doctors per head of
population than any European country apart from Albania. We import nurses
and doctors from the world's poorest countries, and export sick people to
some of the richest. More than one million people - one in sixty of the
population - are waiting for treatment. They are waiting far too long,
every step of the way - for the first appointment with a GP, for initial
consultation with a specialist, for diagnosis and for treatment. Patients
needing heart bypasses often have to wait over a year for treatment. One
in four cardiac patients die while waiting and one in five lung cancer
patients wait so long they go from being treatable to untreatable. The
cancer survival rate in Britain is lower for cancers than almost all other
developed nations. World Health Organisation figures show that if the UK
had the same cancer survival rates as the European average, it would save
10,000 lives a year; if we had the best in Europe, it would save 25,000
lives a year."
The article continues in the same vein for several pages--too much to
reproduce here.
Oh well. Some day maybe, if we can halt the degeneration in the quality of
our educational system, socialist-minded liberals will come to know what "fair
and balanced" reporting really means. In the meantime, they'll continue to site
comedians like Al Franken and Michael Moore as reliable sources, and
continue to prop up socialized medicine despite its well documented failings.
Platt
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