i need to write a speech on why people should read their news instead of watchin the television. can someone help me get some statistics?? i know the majority of news is either on crime and "terror alert" bullshit, and stuff of that nature.

thanks in advance for any help.

90% of statistics are made up (on the internet at least).

Well obviously a newspaper can cover more information with much more detail than a half hour news program that spends 10 minutes talking about the weather.

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Eh, some reasons off the top of my head for ya...

Health Reason: Reading is a kind of workout for your eyes and is healthy for them. Television holds no benefits and might even damage them if watched too often.

Time Convenience Reason: The TV news can drag on and on about shit you don't care about, but newpapers or articles can be scanned through so the unneeded news is skipped.

Intellectual Front Reason: Reading makes you look at least remotely smart. Watching television is more closely related to fat asses drinking beer and shitting on the couch. Add in a cup of coffee and eyeglasses and you've got the brainy chicks in the bag.

Emotional Manipulation Reason: Watching the news involves real live people with opinions. They tell you the stories and, whether you like it or not, have an impact through their personality on how you think about certain news. Reading takes more imagination and draws from your own mental voice, usually making it easier to get and form an opinion around.

Hot News Anchor Reason: I've seen some pretty sexy women giving the news. They're a distraction. My eyes and ears say "let's learn what's going on in the world around us", my schlong says "let's play!". There is absolutely nothing sexy about words alone (non-erotic, anyway).

Annoying Fly Reason: You can roll up a news paper and beat the shit out of that annoying-ass fly buzzing all over the goddamn room. If you try to kill it with a TV set, you're just gonna have to buy a new TV set.

Can't really think of any more right now. Good luck anyway.

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awesome. that was really thurough man. i might have to steal some of those ideas, specifically, the emotional one


sidenote: the average person on this site seems to have a much higher IQ than many others i visit. thanks for all your help....waits for PST 88

Haha...yes, let's begin kissing the mods' asses. PST88, FBS, TheDoctor, Darko, the list goes on. MetalTabs is an environment rich with people who use the English language to its fullest, and usually in a delightfully aggressive manner. I just wonder what everybody here is like in real life. If I took a trip to Sydney Australia, I would love to meet FBS. Just to see the real him. To have the honor of not getting an E-wedgie, but a real one. To have my balls hacked off and watch him eat them before my eyes. Or, I would just say "Hey, you're FarBeyondSane, from MetalTabs, right?" and he'd reply "Yeah, that's me, fuck off". Who knows. But it's nice to dream big. When your life is truly worth nothing and more boring than Ben Stein reading the screenplay to The Adventures Of Pluto Nash, you tend to imagine the dumbest shit. But yes, MT is full of intelligence and experience. And magic! Watch me pull my head out of the mods' ass. Ah, there. Back to the normal schedule. Snap snap!

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Haha, good post, Mort. I've actually wondered about that as well, what most of these people are like in real life. Recently I was watching the movie Con Air, and the character Cyris the Virus reminds me of FBS if he was the same in person as on these forums. I can't remember the characers name, but the one they treat like Hannibal Lecter, played by Steve Buschemi (sp?) i think, he makes me think of PST. (Re)Watch the movie and see if you can see where i'm coming from with that.

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Tv is like a passive thing, too, rather than having to use the imagination and various skills to comprehend what's written. Even radio news is better than tv news.

And wally is pretty much like he is on here. He's a scream, but he's smart. I was never as vocal as I am on the net, but I've grown into that persona a bit in real life. I'm an old bitch instead of just old. But hell, if you don't ring your own bell once in awhile nobody else will either.

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For instance, that statistic was made up.

Newspapers cover a much wider array of news. Science breakthroughs, politics, international affairs, national and local affairs, commerce, business, entertainment, weather, sports, etc. can all be found in the average newspaper. What's on your average one hour late-night news program on TV? Most likely the latest stupid local trends, a brief mentioning of prevailing international events (late mentioning mind you), an obnoxious weather man, and boredom delivered by semisomnambulant anchors. There's a reason why there are day-long channels devoted to news (Weather Channel, CNBC, etc.), and no one can watch these things all day long. A newspaper allows you to gain things at your own pace.

I'd go as far as to say fuck newspapers too.

Anything written by journalists is immediately null and void when it comes conveying knowledge. A journalist is a pretty scabrous being in the 21st century, usually an unprincipled hack with little knowledge about the subject that has them frantically scribbling to make a deadline. What's worse, newspapers don't develop theses or arguments around issues - reporting current events does absolutely nothing towards explaining how and why they happen. According to the news, geopolitics was invented yesterday and all the reasons for it are very simple and summarise neatly, now here's Tom with the weather.

Both formats just don't lend themselves well to learning anything, but print media is a cut above. It is:

- available in more formats (few news channels, many papers/magazines)
- clear about the delineation between opinionated and objective information (compare the pretence at 'objective' news like on Fox with newspapers editorialising, which is considered in opposition to news items)
- more likely to be independent, and not centrally controlled or content-monitored
- more likely to seek the opinions of those whose ideas matter (authors, luminaries, politicians etc.)
- more content-rich (12-15 mins of real TV news, versus hours of print material which you read selectively)
- less likely to be presented by a bouffant-encrusted fuckdumpling in heavy makeup who makes you want to scream

My conclusion is that you should read the news to find out what you should be reading (books) about. Also, do your own work. Who do you think you are, a fucking journalist?

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ha, that made me laugh.

anyways, i was wondering, is there such a thing as unbiased journalism?? i mean you have to have an opinion about what you are writing about unless it is a specific event like a footgame, ect.

Good question.

It depends on your definition of bias. The traditional journalists credo revolves around objectivity. When it comes to a sports match (e.g. The All Blacks crush England 104-12) it's pretty clear what happened. It's very hard to interpret such a result any way other than a merciless beating. But get to a good knotty political problem and you've got a big potential for bias and it can be almost unavoidable - not inasmuch as what a journalist writes is biased, but in whose opinions you choose to report, and to what extent.

Example: In a case of animal abuses on a farm, reporting the opinions of dickless PETA loons, getting a crazy opinion and then letting some perfectly sane person from the Meat and Livestock Corporation respond to the hysteria in a measured manner can make the whole issue seem ridiculous.

But alternatively, you could get a stock quote from the meat people, then take it to an animal rights activist who isn't a fucking tool (good luck finding one) and let them pick it apart methodically until it's clear that the case is of the utmost cruelty and horriblitude.

Both times you have addressed both sides, but you get very different stories on the same issue (i.e. some redneck poking his cows with a spoon).

So, if there are degrees of bias on a practical level, it follows that there can be more or less bias present. But NO bias? Hard to say. Let's look at some examples where "objective" reporting might not be.

a) A journalist is hired to or promoted within an organisation depending on their stated affiliations, previous work (which reveals their sociopolitical opinions) and harmony with other employees. This means that they have strong affiliations. The company says "write the truth", the journalist says "I will", and consistently produces 'objective' work that is Republican/in favour of the free market/Socialist/totally gay etc.

b) Assume person is the product of their experiences, and has an unconscious mind. Can a conscious opinion be heavily biased and thought to be objective?

c) A journalist has a career. If they have a future position in mind, they might (consciously or unconsciously) choose to position themselves as interested in the issues relevant to that position to put themselves in contention for their future job. That is, they see who is "doing well" and what they think, and then they assume that is 'good journalism'.

d) A journalist is only as good as his/her/its sources. Consistent access to biased information = biased output.

This is a long post. More coffee.

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I would say, both reading and watching is good. But then again, the Dutch news program on the public channels is pretty good.

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Naked news?

the news is more bias

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i proposed this question to my philosophy teacher and this is how he responded.

"I don’t think that there can be truly unbiased journalism. Even the choices as to what is news are going to be affected by one’s values. Nevertheless, there can be journalism sufficiently unaffected by one’s own values relative to those of the one’s to whom you are reporting that, for all practical purposes, it is unbiased (and this is undoubtedly the case in a significant range of cases)."

interesting

The only unbiased journalism would be incredibly impractical and would involve getting and giving equal weight to the opinions and statements of every party involved, which would then require background information on the people giving these opinions and making these statements, which would be acquired in the same way and leading to an endless chain growing along these lines that would achieve two things:

a. First, it would show that nothing happens in a vacuum and that the circumstances surrounding everything are very complex and interrelated.
b. Second, it would place the reader or viewer in the position the journalist is supposed to have taken; the person who, confronted with a seeming totality of facts, selects the ones that appear valid or relevant and rejects the rest.

The bias of the reader or viewer would not be eliminated, but that's beside the point, and the amount of time asked of him would be incredibly inflated. That's assuming that it would be possible to find somebody who could acquire all these competing facts and present them all as having equal value until examined by the reader or viewer, which is both unlikely and not necessarily desirable. It also assumes that the reader or viewer is capable of understanding that these facts are all presented as equivalent only so that he may distinguish between them, which is vastly overestimating many peoples' abilities. So, if this is not practical, neither is it exactly ideal. And it's antipathetic to the whole journalistic endeavor.

Anyway, that's all besides the point. The superiority of the print media has mostly to do with the fact that it allows the most viewpoints, since there are many more newspapers than TV channels and there is no government regulating body with regard to them, and that the size and variety of newspapers allows access to the most information. In this sense it more closely resembles the hypothetical practice I outlined above. But if you limit yourself to reading a small portion of any one newspaper you're not much better off than if you just watch the news while you're waiting for the Simpsons to come on.

There are also certain things to consider about the difference between seeing footage of something and reading it; people, even today, tend not to believe in the manipulability of a videotaped image, despite how easy it is to manage. They usually act more emotionally towards something seen on the TV than something written. A quotation in the newspaper, often complete with ellipses, has to acknowledge its excerpted and edited nature in a way that a well edited voice recording doesn't. Things like this, combined with the side-by-side placement of differing opinions, pushes the reader slightly further towards thinking about what he's read in a way the viewer is not inclined to do by the images he's seen.

But the advantages aren't great. Basically you have to deal with a lot of journalism, test the biases of each paper or show, and try to assemble a reading/viewing habit that gives you enough angles on what happened to have some idea of what actually happened. For a lot of reasons, newspapers are more useful for doing this.

watching Naked News makes me love watching news.

the problem is that journalists write for journalists

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