Slashdot Mirror
Your Opinion Counts At CNN — But Should It?
theodp writes "Some people love how CNN employs Twitter to engage its audience. Not Steve Dahl. 'I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events,' complains Dahl of the access the media gives to Internet know-it-alls. 'I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion.'"
picking a station that validate one's political views
This is pretty much the crux of it. People actively seek out the information sources (radio, TV, internet) that support the opinions they already hold. Accuracy of information and facts run a distant second, and meaningful analysis runs an even more distant third.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
There is a time and place for people to banter on but I don't want it from a news outlet.
I'm with you there. I don't know if this applies across the board, since I have neither the time nor inclination to read all the on-line newspapers (I only buy dead-tree papers when I need something to light a fire with), but I am getting a bit tired of endless screen-space devoted to the inarticulate musings of bored housewives and outraged rednecks. And newspapers aren't the only culprits. New Scientist used to be quite a useful aggregation for scientific journal content, but it's steadily turning into a soap-box.
In the days of the print media, there was something of a class barrier where contributors were expected to know at least something about a subject before pontificating. This survived for a few years with the on-line versions, but now we are seeing a situation where on slow news days we also seem to be getting lumbered with the above-mentioned kind of rubbish presented in a more fleshed-out form as "real" articles under the masthead of formerly reputable newspapers. The Age is a good example of this. I think the editor changed a while ago, and for all the content is now worth, I often feel I might as well be reading Twitter.
Except by every means, The Daily Show covers more news than the typical mouth-breathing news casters, and does so in a funny way. They don't lie, make shit up, or spend thirty minutes covering Madonna's booger incident via twitter: they show news footage, give a quick 60 second real news blurb, then make a joke.
Totally agree. The Daily Show makes news entertaining. Fox makes entertaining news.
Insightful? How soon we forget. There's an academic organization that rates the quality of news shows. The Daily Show ranks quite high.
How do I know about it? This obscure little news aggregation website. You may have heard of it. It's called Slashdot.org.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/2320219
CNN siding with democrats?
"I just got back from Washington DC at a huge protest."
A protest engineered and promoted by an ultra-right propaganda network for half a year.
"The lone dissenter to these guys is Fox News; funny how 'the fringe' has a typical FOUR TIMES the ratings of this and other, lesser outlets."
Those ratings are less indicative of the popularity of their viewpoint and more indicative of just how horrible the alternatives are. If I had a choice between a yugo and walking, i'd choose the yugo too!
please go back to your bunker, the rest of us in the real world want the government to step in to put a long overdue stop to the insurance industry's "death panels". According to the dingbat right, apparently corporations can never, ever do harm!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I have one other question - in a debate a while back, I posted a link to two Youtube videos about why you should never agree to be "interviewed" by the cops. For the discussion it was on-topic, relevant, and a serious point to be made. Because I'm willing to actually speak my mind on occasion and say the occasional uncomfortable truth in the face of the various bury-brigaders here, I saw at least one downmod of "troll" and two "overrateds"; it was briefly sitting at -1 before someone with half a brain saw it and the trend reversed.
The surest sign for me that there are bury-brigaders at work on Slashdot, however, is the number of times I've seen old posts (as in 2+ weeks) suddenly drop from 5 down to 4, 3, or in a few cases all the way to -1. What made them 5's two weeks ago and -1's today? Nothing save for the the fact that organized bury-brigaders were launching an attack on my karma because something else I said was antithetical to their warped worldview. They can't downmod you more than once per comment on a given account, but they can find older posts to dishonestly downmod just to get at your karma.
Hell, I've been downmodded "troll" for correcting someone's bad math before thanks to the bury-brigaders.
So tell me - how does your "pass the guns and shoot to kill" solution fix these problems?