From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Sat Jan 15 2005 - 03:17:24 GMT
Ant McWatt commented January 14th 2005:
>The so-called UK “newspaper” that Platt referred to is
>called “The Sun”. If you visit their website at: www.thesun.co.uk that
>will give a good flavour of what the typical daily edition of this
>publication is like i.e. cheap and facile.
Platt, Mark H and Ian G,
Thank you for your responses to my last e-mail. If time allows I’d like to
add a few things to Mark’s lengthy debate with Keith but in the meantime I’d
better quickly respond to Platt’s more controversial e-mail.
Platt stated January 14th 2005:
>Besides expressing a personal matter of taste…
Platt, if you’re referring to my comment that “The Sun” is a “cheap and
facile” media outlet I think that this high quality intellectual statement
would be supported by anyone with average critical faculties who examined
“The Sun’s” output impartially. Have you looked at their website yet?
What is especially worrying is if “The Sun” is so low quality what does this
imply about the other mass media outlets controlled by Murdoch? As Ian G
notes because of the widespread power of the Murdoch media when one of its
outlets does express a falsehood it can soon become received wisdom and the
damage it then can cause, irreversible.
>what Ant fails to mention
>that after he accused that the article about the National Health System
>from "The Sun" was not credible, I posted an article (8 Aug 04) from "The
>Guardian" that confirmed The Sun's story. Ironically, Ant had previously
>cited The Guardian as a highly reliable source!
The Guardian newspaper is relatively a reliable source and – unlike “The
Sun” – it hasn’t been apologising to the City of Liverpool recently for its
coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster. This doesn’t mean the journalist
that Platt cited from the Guardian hasn’t got it wrong about the National
Health Service (NHS) in this particular instance. As an occasional user of
the NHS over the last 35 years, I have found it usually a high quality
service. Moreover, according to my Aunt who used to work as a hospital
doctor, private money rarely buys you medical quality in the system – at
best, only a shorter waiting time for an operation.
>The story Ant relates about the The Sun's error in reporting about
>Liverpool fans is easily matched by Jason Blair's fictional reporting
Such as what report?
>in the venerated "NY Times"
Actually, at his lecture given at Liverpool University last year, Noam
Chomsky didn’t think that highly of the New York Times these days as
evidently they have lost their independent ownership and therefore, some of
their editorial independence. In fact, he made the telling point that there
are few independent papers left in the major US cities. This no doubt
leaves the field open to Murdoch and similar right-wing media corporations
or the demons as the late great American comedian Bill Hicks would say.
>and the patently false story of Bush's national
>guard service perpetrated by "CBS News" in a blatant attempt to prevent
>the election of George Bush.
And what exactly was inaccurate about this story?
>That the mainstream media in the U.S. has a left-wing bias
I think only an extreme right-winger (or someone brainwashed…) would
seriously believe this. As noted in the quote of Ramsey Clarke by Mark H:
“The people don’t rule here, wealth rules, the corporations rule. They rule
the Congress, they elect the President, they run the Pentagon, they own the
media.”
Ignoring this just makes it easier for the corporations to maintain their
power and control. Moreover, by simply finding support in corporate stories
by examining sympathetic media sources is rather counter-productive in
trying to develop an informed and critical viewpoint. We are bombarded by
corporate and government media all the time and independent thought is
purposively made difficult. Of course, as you can see with most of the
contributors on this discussion Forum, it’s certainly not impossible.
>was confirmed
>in a recent editorial in Newsweek where senior editor Howard Feinman, a
>leftist leaning pundit, admitted that in the last election there were
>three parties--Democrat, Republican, and the American Mainstream Media
>Party, dubbed the AMMP. His final summation, after demonstrating how the
>mainstream media went all out to slant the news in Kerry's favor, simply
>was,"It's hard to know who, if anyone, in the 'media' has any
>credibility."
Like Bush, isn’t Kerry a supporter of the capitalist system? What I’m
getting at here is Mark H’s point that the mass media operates to filter and
emphasize only certain boundaries for acceptable discussion. For instance,
it doesn’t seem to me that the Democratic and Republican parties (as with
the UK Labour and Conservative parties) are THAT different in the opinions
that they hold and there is little mainstream debate outside their
relatively narrow parameters. It will therefore be interesting to follow up
Mark H’s suggestion to look at the work being done by the Davids at
MediaLens concerning thought control in the UK. (I wonder why I’ve never
heard of this research before!)
>As for Ant's reference to the website "Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting,"
>(fair.org) one should take his advice and check out "The Media Research
>Center" (mediaresearch.org) to meet his criteria of " . . . it's important
>to examine the full spectrum of opinion, from a wide variety of sources."
>In fact, I suggest Ant take his own advice and reexamine bias against
>"profit-driven mass media," implying that making a profit is somehow a low
>quality activity, even though profits are what build and maintain
>universities.
I didn’t state "profit-driven mass media," - that was Mark H.
I therefore never implied that profit “is somehow a low quality activity”
(I’d privatise everything tomorrow if it made for higher quality living
generally). I think what the MOQ implies is that generating profit is a
social value pattern while education is an intellectual quality pattern.
Therefore, as long as generating profit (for instance, in the media) doesn’t
impede or undermine education (or any other intellectual value pattern such
as truth and justice) it’s a perfectly acceptable activity.
i.e. Quality first, intellectual ideas to work out how to best provide
Quality second and social systems to provide it third.
Best regards,
Anthony.
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