Man Made Global Warming

[kendo65]

Originally Posted by jimson8

Biased, if not corrupt network news directly led to "designer news." It makes little difference if it comes from a desire to please a market or from prejudices seeping out even subconsciously.

It's not even so much the fairness of the journalism, but what is given the most coverage and what is given less. Much is driven by what equals good ratings, but ideology also plays a very significant role.

There is no answer for this.

We are bombarded by so much conflicting information, the "truth" we choose to believe is that which conforms best to our own opinions.

That’s not totally true. To show why I need to get a bit philosophical as it raises the issue of how we decide what constitutes truth or reality. There are two broad classes of question that we are faced with:

The first can be answered by direct observation. In simple cases of this class, such as whether a particular table in front of us has four legs, the answer is a matter of straight verifiable observation - anyone with the necessary visual sense should agree on the answer (and people who don't agree are usually labelled delusional). A more realistically newsworthy example of the same thing would be an earthquake in Japan. This type of 'truth' then can be viewed as 'objective', easily verifiable and NOT dependent on your prior opinion (unless you want to admit to being delusional!)

(There is a more complex variant of this where the observations may require specialised apparatus (eg microscopes) or specialised training/education to be able to discern the facts, but again, anyone with the training and access to the required instruments should be able to agree.)

Then there are questions that are tightly bound up with people's value systems. In these cases simple observational answers are usually not available. Examples of these questions are: is abortion justified?,
was the decision to invade Iraq correct?,
what should be the responsibilities of the state?
In questions like these disagreements are common.

Any competent (honest) news organization should have no difficulty in reporting the first class above. With the second class if they are to give a fair and balanced representation they will need to tread more carefully. In fact, a good way of distinguishing between ‘news’ and ‘propaganda’ is by seeing how diligently a news organization attempts to tread this fair and balanced path.

And here is the problem. The Reagan administration in 1987 effectively abolished the requirement for television news to attempt to provide balanced and fair coverage (I believe the argument was that it infringes freedom of speech and property rights - i.e. wealthy media owners should be able to have their organizations say what they damn well want). This opened the door for the current situation in American news broadcasting where the news channels, having abandoned the need for impartiality, have become ever more partisan in their presentations. It also increases the tendency to chase market share which can lead to sacrificing accuracy of coverage in order to pander to your perceived demographic (i.e. twist the facts so as to keep your viewers)

As Bewolf said, this has generally bad effects on a democracy. For the people to be able to make good judgements they must first be given accurate information. In the UK there is still a requirement for TV news to be impartial. I would suggest that for healthy democracy keeping the media bias-free is important. For this some regulation is needed.

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The above also takes us back to climate change where the argument can be viewed as about being whether it is a Class 1 observable fact (most scientists) or a Class 2 opinion (liberals V conservatives)?