In my last post, I gave a one-day sample of some major news corporations' websites top stories and compared them with other important stories published that same day.
The results from my little survey brought forth some interesting questions regarding what news corporations view as important and worthy of top-story recognition:
Worthy: Man gets out of jail with one-word blog
Not Worthy: Shops rations sales of rice as US buyers panic
Worthy: Man survives 500-foot fall into strip mine
Not Worthy: WWF warns Arctic ice melting faster than predicted
Which brings me to where I left off in the last post. With an agenda. Not mine, but the big news corporation's. What's their agenda? Why would a news company only present one side of a story?
Well, let's look at it this way. If I'm a researcher looking for answers to a specific question (and all I'm after is the truth), then I'm going to try and seek out all possible answers so that I may find out what the truth really is. Once I have all possible answers, I'll keep narrowing it down until I find one that fits best. I give all answers a fair shake at being the right one. It is only through testing, debate, discussion, retesting, etc., that I come to conclusions.
I don't want to favor one answer over another (unless evidence proves that's the correct one) because then I will taint my study and come to conclusions I want; not conclusions shown by independent verification.
Now, if someone has a vested interest in what is being studied, and therefore may desire a particular outcome, are they really the best person to conduct and/or report on this study?
If someone stands to make a lot of money if their product is deemed safe, and therefore to lose a lot of money if it is found unsafe, should they be the person, or have a hand in, testing or reporting the outcome of the tests? Isn't this called a conflict of interest? Bias?
Then why is it ok for the New York Times, one of our nations foremost newspapers, to show glaring evidence of bias? (After all - the were one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, were they not?)
On Sunday, March 16, 2008, the NYT Sunday Opinion section published 9 articles on the Iraq War - five years on.
"To mark this week's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked 9 experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate."
Who are these 9 experts and what did they have to say?
The results from my little survey brought forth some interesting questions regarding what news corporations view as important and worthy of top-story recognition:
Worthy: Man gets out of jail with one-word blog
Not Worthy: Shops rations sales of rice as US buyers panic
Worthy: Man survives 500-foot fall into strip mine
Not Worthy: WWF warns Arctic ice melting faster than predicted
Which brings me to where I left off in the last post. With an agenda. Not mine, but the big news corporation's. What's their agenda? Why would a news company only present one side of a story?
Well, let's look at it this way. If I'm a researcher looking for answers to a specific question (and all I'm after is the truth), then I'm going to try and seek out all possible answers so that I may find out what the truth really is. Once I have all possible answers, I'll keep narrowing it down until I find one that fits best. I give all answers a fair shake at being the right one. It is only through testing, debate, discussion, retesting, etc., that I come to conclusions.
I don't want to favor one answer over another (unless evidence proves that's the correct one) because then I will taint my study and come to conclusions I want; not conclusions shown by independent verification.
Now, if someone has a vested interest in what is being studied, and therefore may desire a particular outcome, are they really the best person to conduct and/or report on this study?
If someone stands to make a lot of money if their product is deemed safe, and therefore to lose a lot of money if it is found unsafe, should they be the person, or have a hand in, testing or reporting the outcome of the tests? Isn't this called a conflict of interest? Bias?
Then why is it ok for the New York Times, one of our nations foremost newspapers, to show glaring evidence of bias? (After all - the were one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, were they not?)
On Sunday, March 16, 2008, the NYT Sunday Opinion section published 9 articles on the Iraq War - five years on.
"To mark this week's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked 9 experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate."
Who are these 9 experts and what did they have to say?
- L. Paul Bremer, III - former presidential envoy to Iraq: "Our soldiers were magnificent in liberating Iraq.
- Anne-Marie Slaughter - dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton: "Our government knew how to destroy but not how to build."
- Kenneth M. Pollack - a former director of Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and a fellow at the Brookings Institution: "If we leave behind an Iraq more stable and less threatening to its neighbors than the one we toppled, I think the intelligence community's (and my own) mistakes about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration's exaggerations of that threat and its baseless insistence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda will all lose their edge - even though they will not, and should not, be forgotten."
- Paul D. Eaton - a retired Army major general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004 and who is an advisor to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton: "Without hearings, the Army could not advance its case for increasing the number of troops and rearming the force."
- Richard Pearle - an assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: "The right decision was made, and Baghdad fell in 21 days with few casualties on either side."
- Danielle Pletka - the Vice President for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute: "After all, for those of us who supported the war, rebutting arguments about weapons of mass destruction has become reflexive."
- Frederick Kagan - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute: "I supported the 2003 invasion despite misgivings about how it would be executed, and those misgivings proved accurate."
- Anthony D. Cordesman - a fellow at the Center for Strategy and International Studies: "...I did not expect that we would discover no meaningful activity in rebuilding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and no Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda."
- Nathaniel Fick - a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer." "We made bets not on whether it would happen, but when."
Eight out of the 9 commentaries are unarguably pro-war, with only Anne-Marie Slaughter's lone voice dissenting.
At least two of the 9 were in the Bush administration and had their hands deep in planning the war itself.
Two are from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, that " is associated with neoconservative domestic and foreign policy views" and "has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy" with "More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions."
One is from the Brookings Institution, a liberal centrist (though some argue it is too supportive of Bush administration policies) think tank.
One from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which includes Henry Kissinger as one of its board members one from the Center for a New American Security, which includes Richard Armitage (the "primary" source for leaking the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame).
How is this an unbiased assessment of where we were and where we are now? Where are the thoughts, then and now, of those major figures who opposed and/or seriously questioned the war from the start, like: Ron Paul, Barak Obama, Dennis Kucinich, Phil Donahue, Brent Scowcroft, Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Ambassador Joesph Wilson, former Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter...
Why were none of these people asked to write for the New York Times' Op-Ed commentary?
Unbalanced, biased, pro-Bush, pro-war - and this is what many on the right call the bastion of liberal newspapers?
