The patent office uses a lot of other prior art sources than just the published patent and application database.
They use IEEE journals, derwent database, the EPO and JPO databases, the internet, various private databases, usenet, trade journals, a good sized libary or old manuals just to name a few. They have a whole staff dedicated to non patent literature searches and resources.
Look at a published patent and most of the time, you will see non patent literature cited as prior art of record.
I have my doubts about protectionism, however I wonder if we would see a repeat of what happened with the japanese auto industry.
Back in the 80's they moved production here and created their premium brands to get around import tarrifs, thus employing more americans, (and after NAFTA, mexicans and canadians).
Re:Where patent law is good
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it is obvious in hindsight. everything is obvious in hindsight.
what about disclosure? Isn't it better to allow people to improve patented technology once it is publically disclosed rather than staying a trade secret?
if you knew anything about the patent process you would know that findings by a junior examiner are already verifyed by a senior examiner.
The vast majority of patents are rejected the first time around, its after several rejections that patents are allowed.
When a patent is allowed, the examiner has to specifically state what portion of the claims are not found in the prior art. Prior art is then discussed saying what portion of the claims have been done. Its called a notice of allowability.
Also patents list all the prior art which was cited by the examiner and the applicant, you can see it on the front page of each patent. It isn't a list of all the prior art the examiner found, but usually what they thought was most pertainent to the application.
wow, I guess you are very familiar with the patent system.
I guess you have never read an examiner's statement for reasons of allowance?
If you had you would have known that an examiner has to search and cite art, then say how that art differs from the applicant's invention, and in particular what aspect of the applicant's invention is not found in the art, or is non-obvious.
examiners aren't paid with your tax dollars. The USPTO is a fully fee funded agency. Some personal time is allotted for webbrowsing.
One of the ways I keep up with technology is via reading slashdot. I also find people railing against a process they barely understand to be somewhat amusing, and hope that I can educate some people on how the process works.
Understanding those basics at least can easily make one realize that the application claims may be very narrow, or very broad. It gets even more hairy when the applicant gives a range in their claim, for example, a value approximatly between 10 and 100. Is 101 approximately 100? Probably, is 110? Maybe. How about 200? It could be as well.
There are lots of procedural things, such as proper antecedent basis for words in the claim, are the claims supported by the specification, the introduction of new matter etc.
Where the technical background comes in, is understanding whether or not there would be sufficent motivation to combine two disparate technologies, if it would be possible to combine two disparate technologies, or even if such a combination would be well known and obvious to one skilled in the art at the time of invention.
The problem many examiners have is hindsight, just about anything seems obvious in hindsight. This is where all the obviousness comes into play. Hindsight is a common argument utilized by attorneys, and requires a lengthly response to which an examiner explains the explicent or implicent motivation found in the references.
Thats the 30 second summary. For more information, read the manual of patent examining and procedure or contact a patent agent or attorney.
The claims presented in this application will likely be signifigantly different if it becomes allowed.
Examiners usually have 10-40 hours based on paygrade to fully examine a case. Keep in mind experts don't need as much time to search, and unless you have a proper legal background to understand the metes and bounds, you may not realize how narrow or broad the claims actually are.
I can not comment on office policy, or validity of the claims for this, or any other patent application.
this is a patent application, not an actual patent. All patents filed after the near end of 2000 are pubished 18 months after they were filed. This is a good thing, as examiners can now search this database of prior art, which is substantially larger than the current USPTO patent database.
As this is only an application, it does not have patent protection.
IAPE I am in no way discussing the validity of this patent or any combination to reject this patent.
your trashcompactor, and many other examples here, are considered non-analogous art. It is very difficult to combine non-analogous art because there has to be a motivation to combine such varying technologies, and there must be some teaching explicity, or implicently in a teaching before it may be combined.
Here is a citation from the manual of patent examining and procedure
2141.01(a) Analogous and Nonanalogous Art
TO RELY ON A REFERENCE UNDER 35 U.S.C. 103, IT MUST BE ANALOGOUS PRIOR ART The examiner must determine what is "analogous prior art" for the purpose of analyzing the obviousness of the subject matter at issue. "In order to rely on a reference as a basis for rejection of an applicant's invention, the reference must either be in the field of applicant"s endeavor or, if not, then be reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor was concerned." In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1446, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1445 (Fed. Cir. 1992). See also In re Deminski, 796 F.2d 436, 230 USPQ 313 (Fed. Cir. 1986); In re Clay, 966 F.2d 656, 659, 23 USPQ2d 1058, 1060-61 (Fed. Cir. 1992) ("A reference is reasonably pertinent if, even though it may be in a different field from that of the inventor's endeavor, it is one which, because of the matter with which it deals, logically would have commended itself to an inventor's attention in considering his problem."); and Wang Laboratories Inc. v. Toshiba Corp., 993 F.2d 858, 26 USPQ2d 1767 (Fed. Cir. 1993).
This bill being voted on today regarding the 3rd party searches.
Right now its up to the patent office to make a primae facie case of obviousness.
3rd party searches have their own issues, such as inherent bias if it is a paid search firm, or will the examiner be able to do a search on their own if an EPO/JPO search is submitted. The bill is silent on that.
Slashdot posters aren't exactly on top of USPTO related news.
Congress is already reviewing the patent process via HR 1561 being voted on today? United States Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act of 2003 is important as it allows for inventors to submit their own searches from an outside source, such as the european patent office or a private search firm.
On a side note, tax payers don't pay patent examiners. The USPTO is a fully fee funded agency.
Perhaps you aren't aware that there is a backlog of patent applications at the USPTO, in some technologies this reaches 4+ years instead of the 14 months it is supposed to be. Depending on the examiner's skill level, which usually corresponds to their GS level, the examiner may not need that much time to examine a given application as they have seen the same features again and again. Primary level examiners actually have the fewest hours allocated per case, but produce the highest number of examinations. Plus they are far more experts in the art in terms of obviousness in botht the technological and legal sense than your average slash dot poster.
Many posters here are looking at the barton patent with hindsight. An examiner must determine if an invention would be obvious to one skilled in the art at the TIME OF INVENTION, not several years after it is filled. This can be rather difficult especially when an application may have priority 10+ years back. How would you respond to a hindsight response by an applicant, how would you find motivation within the cited references to combine?
Now in Tivo's case, there are multiple ways of preforming the same invention, but they are not claimed the same way. A quick search of classes 385, 725 and 348 shows quite a few digital recording devices with pause functionality with good priority dates, but don't have all of the aspects of the tivo patent.
I am an examiner myself and work in class 725, I would love to see how some/. posters would handle a hindsight argument and be able to show proper motiviation to combine.
Disclaimer: I am not a Quentin Tarantino fan in the least, but I did not want to hold that against this film. Plus when I saw the open shaw brothers credits, and preconcieved ideas I had disapeared. Since I teach/do martial arts I wasn't going to hold any the movie to any those standards, as it is ovbious that Tarantino is a fan of these films but hasn't done any martial arts himself. However, I do believe seeing the matrix trailer before the movie soured me on it (i think it gave way too much away) more than anything else.
I am a huge kung fu and chanbara films(samurai sword play movies) , usually the characters in these movies are simple and are motivated by revenge and thus character development takes a back seat to excellent action sequences. I really wanted to like this movie, in fact it had a number of my favourite old school stars in it, Gordon Liu (from my all time favorite kung fu movie, Shaolin Master Killer, aka the 36th Chamber) in a kato mask and Sonny Chiba.
This movie is not at all about plot, but instead about style as to be expected. The scenery, atmosphere, and camera work were excellent and gave it a great "feel".
Arguably, the biggest draw to this movie of course are the action sequences, and there in lies the problem.
I really couldnt figure out of this movie was a homage to, or a parody off these movies from the 60's and 70's, and I think that is the main reason that I really did not enjoy it. There were definatly elements of other films easily recognizable to a fan, but I really couldnt tell if Tarantino was paying homage, or just trying to make a cheap copy (not that these films are high art). The gore didn't bother me, many of the 60's/70's films had plenty of it, and were are spared many of the shots that would have had the worst of it. Heck with , Yuen Woo-Ping doing the choreography, I should have loved it, but I thought the sequences were horrible.
I know Tarantino has seen may of the japanese Chanbara films, and was mimicing many of them, but they just didnt feel the same because of the style of sword play. I don't think Yuen-Woo-Ping had seen enough of them, to give it the right feel. Again this probably would only be noticeable to someone who has seen a lot of them. If you want to see a movie with much much better swordplay in it, watch any of the Zatoichi films, or my favorite "The Sword of Doom", both of which have 1 person taking on 30 opponents at once.
I thought the anime like sequence was very effective, and the pedophilia scene spared the audience from what would have been a very awkward situtation if real actors had been used. Too much time was spent in Okinawa, which oddly enough isn't a place known for swordmaking.
I do like female action hero's, Sigourny Weaver in Aliens, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1/2 pulled it off well. I don't think Uma Thurman had the screen presence to do it right, and I wonder if she hadn't been dating Tarantino, if she would have been in the film at all.
Minor things that annoyed me and don't effect this review, but 99.9% of the viewers wouldnt notice, were the horrible american accents for the japanese dialouge, so bad in fact I couldnt understand it. Japanese swords don't make metalic noises when you draw them, the clicking noises you hear when they flip the sword around are a sign of a loose blade (many japanese films do this) which is bad, and Uma held the sword wrong in every sequence.
The good:
The unsubtitled japanese dialoge was quite amusing. Great atmosphere, scenery.
the examiner cited:International Standard ISO 9660; Information Processing--Volume and File Structure of CD-ROM for Information Exchange, First Edition, Switzerland, 1988, 31 pages. Jan. 1988.
"I'd bet that if you hooked Dan and Tom and Peter up to a lie detector and asked them if there's a liberal bias on their newscasts, they'd all say 'no' and they'd all pass the test....That leaves one other possibility. Messrs. Rather, Brokaw and Jennings don't even know what liberal bias is. I concede this is hard to believe, but I'm convinced it's why we keep getting these ridiculous denials....The problem is that Mr. Rather and the other evening stars think that liberal bias means just one thing: going hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats. But real media bias comes not so much from what party they attack. Liberal bias is the result of how they see the world.... And it is this inability to see liberal views as liberal that is at the heart of the entire problem. This is why Phyllis Schlafly is the conservative woman who heads that conservative organization but Patricia Ireland is merely the head of NOW. No liberal labels necessary. Robert Bork is the conservative judge. Laurence Tribe is the noted Harvard law professor.... Conservatives must be identified because the audience needs to know these are people with axes to grind. But liberals don't need to be identified because their views on all the big social issues -- from abortion and gun control to the death penalty and affirmative action -- aren't liberal views at all. They're simply reasonable views, shared by all the reasonable people the media elites mingle with at all their reasonable dinner parties in Manhattan and Georgetown...." -- Former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, Wall Street Journal op-ed, "On Media Bias, Network Stars Are Rather Clueless," May 24, 2001.
no not everyone in the media is liberal, but the anchors on the three major broadcast news networks share liberal views. CNN has some balance (Lou Dobbs is most certainly a conservative, but then again his show does have a finanical focus).
Usually bias is present by identification,(the conservative cannidate, think tank etc), direct ommission (not showing both sides of a subject).
polls of the media over the last 30 years consistantly show that liberals outnumber conservites by a large margin, and that washington bureau chiefs and reporters consistanly vote democratic the majority of the time. The odd contrast is that the corporations which own them would likely be considered conservative. Journalists claim they can keep their own personal views out of their stories(and certainly do limit editoralizing their stories compared to the european media, with opinion rightly belonging in the opinon pages), but it still creeps through via story selection and ommison.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/welcome. as p
shows the results of several surveys, goldberg's book points to similiar surveys. mediaresearch center does seem to have an axe to grind since they only show liberal bias in the media and mostly ignore conservative bias in radio and print media (but few people tend to pay attention to the politics of the wall street journal, however many listen to Limbaugh). NPR tries to present a more middle of the road approach, interviewing left and rightwing viewpoints, but their talk shows have a leftward bias, and they do have a bias on story selection.
"Since when is AIDS a liberal or conservative issue?
Or are you going to claim that AIDS is a scurge upon the gays, and therefore only liberals care about it?
Bah, you do more to discredit yourself. "
In the 80's aids was a risk to everyone, and is still today, however the risk to the general population at that time was disproprotinaly minimal if you were not a member of one of several at risk groups. The risk to a hetrosexual woman who did not engage in drug use or homosexual behaviour or have a bi-sexual boyfriend was minimal. Thus it was blown out of proprotion. The same is true of homelessness. If you evernotice, the homeless people you see on TV didn't look anything like the homeless you actually see on the street, that is disproportionally white, th
go read the book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg is a self described old fashioned liberal, who explains that liberals in the media don't consider themselves liberal, but as centrists,but turn out to be liberal compared to the "average american." While the book may come off as some sort of personal argument between Dan Rather and Goldberg, he makes a number of points about bias which are quite interesting.
an easy way to see if there is bias, is to listen to a news report and see if the person they interview/speak about is identified as liberal or conservative. I did this on my own (im middle of the road politcally) and was quite surprised, that congressmen, think tanks etc, were identified as conservitive, while the term liberal was rather infrequently used.
Goldberg also harps on some of the issues which the media clings on to, such as the AIDS epidemic (certainly in africa is is, but not as much in the USA) and homelessness.
Slashdot Mirror
The patent office uses a lot of other prior art sources than just the published patent and application database.
They use IEEE journals, derwent database, the EPO and JPO databases, the internet, various private databases, usenet, trade journals, a good sized libary or old manuals just to name a few. They have a whole staff dedicated to non patent literature searches and resources.
Look at a published patent and most of the time, you will see non patent literature cited as prior art of record.
I have my doubts about protectionism, however I wonder if we would see a repeat of what happened with the japanese auto industry.
Back in the 80's they moved production here and created their premium brands to get around import tarrifs, thus employing more americans, (and after NAFTA, mexicans and canadians).
it is obvious in hindsight. everything is obvious in hindsight.
what about disclosure? Isn't it better to allow people to improve patented technology once it is publically disclosed rather than staying a trade secret?
it is not the job of the examiner to determine the marketability of a patent, because how does one judge that?
What are the standards?
if you knew anything about the patent process you would know that findings by a junior examiner are already verifyed by a senior examiner.
The vast majority of patents are rejected the first time around, its after several rejections that patents are allowed.
When a patent is allowed, the examiner has to specifically state what portion of the claims are not found in the prior art. Prior art is then discussed saying what portion of the claims have been done. Its called a notice of allowability.
Also patents list all the prior art which was cited by the examiner and the applicant, you can see it on the front page of each patent. It isn't a list of all the prior art the examiner found, but usually what they thought was most pertainent to the application.
i don't recall any corporations handing me money for my vote.
wow, I guess you are very familiar with the patent system.
I guess you have never read an examiner's statement for reasons of allowance?
If you had you would have known that an examiner has to search and cite art, then say how that art differs from the applicant's invention, and in particular what aspect of the applicant's invention is not found in the art, or is non-obvious.
examiners aren't paid with your tax dollars. The USPTO is a fully fee funded agency. Some personal time is allotted for webbrowsing.
One of the ways I keep up with technology is via reading slashdot. I also find people railing against a process they barely understand to be somewhat amusing, and hope that I can educate some people on how the process works.
you need both the technical background and legal training to understand the claims itself.
t _1 claims.htm
some of the basics are right here:
http://www.cambiaip.org/Tutorials/Tutorial_1/tu
Understanding those basics at least can easily make one realize that the application claims may be very narrow, or very broad. It gets even more hairy when the applicant gives a range in their claim, for example, a value approximatly between 10 and 100. Is 101 approximately 100? Probably, is 110? Maybe. How about 200? It could be as well.
There are lots of procedural things, such as proper antecedent basis for words in the claim, are the claims supported by the specification, the introduction of new matter etc.
Where the technical background comes in, is understanding whether or not there would be sufficent motivation to combine two disparate technologies, if it would be possible to combine two disparate technologies, or even if such a combination would be well known and obvious to one skilled in the art at the time of invention.
The problem many examiners have is hindsight, just about anything seems obvious in hindsight. This is where all the obviousness comes into play. Hindsight is a common argument utilized by attorneys, and requires a lengthly response to which an examiner explains the explicent or implicent motivation found in the references.
Thats the 30 second summary. For more information, read the manual of patent examining and procedure or contact a patent agent or attorney.
no joke
I work as an examiner.
The claims presented in this application will likely be signifigantly different if it becomes allowed.
Examiners usually have 10-40 hours based on paygrade to fully examine a case. Keep in mind experts don't need as much time to search, and unless you have a proper legal background to understand the metes and bounds, you may not realize how narrow or broad the claims actually are.
I can not comment on office policy, or validity of the claims for this, or any other patent application.
This is a patent application. The story poster says that in his own comment.
OSS is mentioned in the specification, perhaps you should be less paranoid.
this is a patent application, not an actual patent. All patents filed after the near end of 2000 are pubished 18 months after they were filed. This is a good thing, as examiners can now search this database of prior art, which is substantially larger than the current USPTO patent database.
As this is only an application, it does not have patent protection.
Actually entitlements make nearly 2/3s of the budget. cut that and i would have a lot more on my tax bill
IAPE I am in no way discussing the validity of this patent or any combination to reject this patent.
your trashcompactor, and many other examples here, are considered non-analogous art. It is very difficult to combine non-analogous art because there has to be a motivation to combine such varying technologies, and there must be some teaching explicity, or implicently in a teaching before it may be combined.
Here is a citation from the manual of patent examining and procedure
2141.01(a) Analogous and Nonanalogous Art
TO RELY ON A REFERENCE UNDER 35 U.S.C. 103, IT MUST BE ANALOGOUS PRIOR ART
The examiner must determine what is "analogous prior art" for the purpose of analyzing the obviousness of the subject matter at issue. "In order to rely on a reference as a basis for rejection of an applicant's invention, the reference must either be in the field of applicant"s endeavor or, if not, then be reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor was concerned." In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1446, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1445 (Fed. Cir. 1992). See also In re Deminski, 796 F.2d 436, 230 USPQ 313 (Fed. Cir. 1986); In re Clay, 966 F.2d 656, 659, 23 USPQ2d 1058, 1060-61 (Fed. Cir. 1992) ("A reference is reasonably pertinent if, even though it may be in a different field from that of the inventor's endeavor, it is one which, because of the matter with which it deals, logically would have commended itself to an inventor's attention in considering his problem."); and Wang Laboratories Inc. v. Toshiba Corp., 993 F.2d 858, 26 USPQ2d 1767 (Fed. Cir. 1993).
This bill being voted on today regarding the 3rd party searches.
Right now its up to the patent office to make a primae facie case of obviousness.
3rd party searches have their own issues, such as inherent bias if it is a paid search firm, or will the examiner be able to do a search on their own if an EPO/JPO search is submitted. The bill is silent on that.
Slashdot posters aren't exactly on top of USPTO related news.
Congress is already reviewing the patent process via HR 1561 being voted on today?
United States Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act of 2003 is important as it allows for inventors to submit their own searches from an outside source, such as the european patent office or a private search firm.
On a side note, tax payers don't pay patent examiners. The USPTO is a fully fee funded agency.
http://www.aft.org/research/survey01/beginning.htm l
Are american's really over paid, or is it that our cost of living, and our exchange rate with third world currencies makes it look so?
Wow, you sure are knowledgeable about patents!
Perhaps you aren't aware that there is a backlog of patent applications at the USPTO, in some technologies this reaches 4+ years instead of the 14 months it is supposed to be. Depending on the examiner's skill level, which usually corresponds to their GS level, the examiner may not need that much time to examine a given application as they have seen the same features again and again. Primary level examiners actually have the fewest hours allocated per case, but produce the highest number of examinations. Plus they are far more experts in the art in terms of obviousness in botht the technological and legal sense than your average slash dot poster.
Many posters here are looking at the barton patent with hindsight. An examiner must determine if an invention would be obvious to one skilled in the art at the TIME OF INVENTION, not several years after it is filled. This can be rather difficult especially when an application may have priority 10+ years back. How would you respond to a hindsight response by an applicant, how would you find motivation within the cited references to combine?
Now in Tivo's case, there are multiple ways of preforming the same invention, but they are not claimed the same way. A quick search of classes 385, 725 and 348 shows quite a few digital recording devices with pause functionality with good priority dates, but don't have all of the aspects of the tivo patent.
I am an examiner myself and work in class 725, I would love to see how some /. posters would handle a hindsight argument and be able to show proper motiviation to combine.
Disclaimer: I am not a Quentin Tarantino fan in the least, but I did not want to hold that against this film. Plus when I saw the open shaw brothers credits, and preconcieved ideas I had disapeared. Since I teach/do martial arts I wasn't going to hold any the movie to any those standards, as it is ovbious that Tarantino is a fan of these films but hasn't done any martial arts himself. However, I do believe seeing the matrix trailer before the movie soured me on it (i think it gave way too much away) more than anything else.
I am a huge kung fu and chanbara films(samurai sword play movies) , usually the characters in these movies are simple and are motivated by revenge and thus character development takes a back seat to excellent action sequences. I really wanted to like this movie, in fact it had a number of my favourite old school stars in it, Gordon Liu (from my all time favorite kung fu movie, Shaolin Master Killer, aka the 36th Chamber) in a kato mask and Sonny Chiba.
This movie is not at all about plot, but instead about style as to be expected. The scenery, atmosphere, and camera work were excellent and gave it a great "feel".
Arguably, the biggest draw to this movie of course are the action sequences, and there in lies the problem.
I really couldnt figure out of this movie was a homage to, or a parody off these movies from the 60's and 70's, and I think that is the main reason that I really did not enjoy it. There were definatly elements of other films easily recognizable to a fan, but I really couldnt tell if Tarantino was paying homage, or just trying to make a cheap copy (not that these films are high art). The gore didn't bother me, many of the 60's/70's films had plenty of it, and were are spared many of the shots that would have had the worst of it. Heck with , Yuen Woo-Ping doing the choreography, I should have loved it, but I thought the sequences were horrible.
I know Tarantino has seen may of the japanese Chanbara films, and was mimicing many of them, but they just didnt feel the same because of the style of sword play. I don't think Yuen-Woo-Ping had seen enough of them, to give it the right feel. Again this probably would only be noticeable to someone who has seen a lot of them. If you want to see a movie with much much better swordplay in it, watch any of the Zatoichi films, or my favorite "The Sword of Doom", both of which have 1 person taking on 30 opponents at once.
I thought the anime like sequence was very effective, and the pedophilia scene spared the audience from what would have been a very awkward situtation if real actors had been used. Too much time was spent in Okinawa, which oddly enough isn't a place known for swordmaking.
I do like female action hero's, Sigourny Weaver in Aliens, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1/2 pulled it off well. I don't think Uma Thurman had the screen presence to do it right, and I wonder if she hadn't been dating Tarantino, if she would have been in the film at all.
Minor things that annoyed me and don't effect this review, but 99.9% of the viewers wouldnt notice, were the horrible american accents for the japanese dialouge, so bad in fact I couldnt understand it. Japanese swords don't make metalic noises when you draw them, the clicking noises you hear when they flip the sword around are a sign of a loose blade (many japanese films do this) which is bad, and Uma held the sword wrong in every sequence.
The good:
The unsubtitled japanese dialoge was quite amusing. Great atmosphere, scenery.
3/10
check the filing date and read the claims
the examiner cited:International Standard ISO 9660; Information Processing--Volume and File
Structure of CD-ROM for Information Exchange, First Edition, Switzerland, 1988,
31 pages. Jan. 1988.
"I'd bet that if you hooked Dan and Tom and Peter up to a lie detector and asked them if there's a liberal bias on their newscasts, they'd all say 'no' and they'd all pass the test....That leaves one other possibility. Messrs. Rather, Brokaw and Jennings don't even know what liberal bias is. I concede this is hard to believe, but I'm convinced it's why we keep getting these ridiculous denials....The problem is that Mr. Rather and the other evening stars think that liberal bias means just one thing: going hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats. But real media bias comes not so much from what party they attack. Liberal bias is the result of how they see the world.... And it is this inability to see liberal views as liberal that is at the heart of the entire problem. This is why Phyllis Schlafly is the conservative woman who heads that conservative organization but Patricia Ireland is merely the head of NOW. No liberal labels necessary. Robert Bork is the conservative judge. Laurence Tribe is the noted Harvard law professor.... Conservatives must be identified because the audience needs to know these are people with axes to grind. But liberals don't need to be identified because their views on all the big social issues -- from abortion and gun control to the death penalty and affirmative action -- aren't liberal views at all. They're simply reasonable views, shared by all the reasonable people the media elites mingle with at all their reasonable dinner parties in Manhattan and Georgetown...." -- Former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, Wall Street Journal op-ed, "On Media Bias, Network Stars Are Rather Clueless," May 24, 2001.
no not everyone in the media is liberal, but the anchors on the three major broadcast news networks share liberal views. CNN has some balance (Lou Dobbs is most certainly a conservative, but then again his show does have a finanical focus).
Usually bias is present by identification,(the conservative cannidate, think tank etc), direct ommission (not showing both sides of a subject).
polls of the media over the last 30 years consistantly show that liberals outnumber conservites by a large margin, and that washington bureau chiefs and reporters consistanly vote democratic the majority of the time. The odd contrast is that the corporations which own them would likely be considered conservative. Journalists claim they can keep their own personal views out of their stories(and certainly do limit editoralizing their stories compared to the european media, with opinion rightly belonging in the opinon pages), but it still creeps through via story selection and ommison.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/welcome. as p
shows the results of several surveys, goldberg's book points to similiar surveys. mediaresearch center does seem to have an axe to grind since they only show liberal bias in the media and mostly ignore conservative bias in radio and print media (but few people tend to pay attention to the politics of the wall street journal, however many listen to Limbaugh). NPR tries to present a more middle of the road approach, interviewing left and rightwing viewpoints, but their talk shows have a leftward bias, and they do have a bias on story selection.
"Since when is AIDS a liberal or conservative issue?
Or are you going to claim that AIDS is a scurge upon the gays, and therefore only liberals care about it?
Bah, you do more to discredit yourself. "
In the 80's aids was a risk to everyone, and is still today, however the risk to the general population at that time was disproprotinaly minimal if you were not a member of one of several at risk groups. The risk to a hetrosexual woman who did not engage in drug use or homosexual behaviour or have a bi-sexual boyfriend was minimal. Thus it was blown out of proprotion. The same is true of homelessness. If you evernotice, the homeless people you see on TV didn't look anything like the homeless you actually see on the street, that is disproportionally white, th
go read the book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg is a self described old fashioned liberal, who explains that liberals in the media don't consider themselves liberal, but as centrists,but turn out to be liberal compared to the "average american." While the book may come off as some sort of personal argument between Dan Rather and Goldberg, he makes a number of points about bias which are quite interesting.
an easy way to see if there is bias, is to listen to a news report and see if the person they interview/speak about is identified as liberal or conservative. I did this on my own (im middle of the road politcally) and was quite surprised, that congressmen, think tanks etc, were identified as conservitive, while the term liberal was rather infrequently used.
Goldberg also harps on some of the issues which the media clings on to, such as the AIDS epidemic (certainly in africa is is, but not as much in the USA) and homelessness.