Thought I'd pose this idea to people and see where people on both sides stand:

My belief is that the real problem in politics today is the overexposure of everything due to 24 hour news. Ideally, 24 hour news would mean greater transparency about what is going on both in politics and around the world. We could find out more in-depth information about stories from near and far.

Instead, 24 hour news has turned into a series of shouting matches and ideologically-inspired hatefests where a commentator gets on and either yells at someone who expresses the opposite viewpoint or bypasses the whole debate idea and simply tells the audience why someone is to blame for all their problems.

I think 24 hour news has simply increased sensationalism without actually increasing content, so instead of talking about the merits and drawbacks of major bills/laws or informing the public about international affairs, we pick on little sound bytes, which are often taken out of context (for instance, when Mitt Romney said he liked to fire people--I think the average person would agree with the sentiment of the overall speech, but when you take the one line out of context, it sounds terrible) and then built upon until it's completely out of control.

For this reason, I refuse to watch any show or listen to any host who seems to care more about ratings than reporting. As a liberal (those of you who have been arguing with me in the McCain/abortion/other threads surely know this by now), I absolutely detest people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but while I don't hate his general message as much, I really think Keith Olbermann does the same type of bullfluff and I'd be perfectly okay with him being shut down.

All that 24 hour news does in my opinion is force people further to the extreme than they'd probably otherwise be. I think there'd be far more cooperation between both Democrats and Republicans if Boehner wasn't dragged further to the right by public opinion dominated by Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh and by people like Pelosi and Reid if they weren't dragged to the left in the same way. This hurts the discourse, because I think bills like "Obamacare" could have been something that everyone was at least moderately happy with, but instead, Democrats were encouraged to go as left as they could with the bill and Republicans were encouraged to simply be the party of "no."

So I wonder: How many of you guys watch these sensationalist shows and get your main news content from them? Do you think of these sources as reliable? Do you agree or disagree that all they do is try to spread hatred?

I just wonder because sometimes these shows are so bad at interpreting what the truth is, that sometimes I find myself wanting to defend people that I cannot stand (for instance, I felt the need recently to defend Rick Santorum in a discussion over the "taking one for the team" votes he claimed while in the Senate--you can't be an ideologue on every single issue and get anything accomplished, after all). Anyway, I'll be curious to hear from some of the rest of you on what you think of this. Hopefully it didn't turn into too much of a ramble...

The news problem is a big part of the issue, have you and (i'll assume you have) actually listened to a politician make a speech then instantly the news spends three times longer the the speech was to tell us what it was the politician said or what they really meant; and as usual Thank God for the news crew as we are all idiots because it never is what we actually heard the politician say.
Nothing but Spin news. And there aren't many news sources that do anything but SPIN. MSNBC, FOX, CNN, most of the Network evening news, and locals regurgitate the networks.

You Tube for the win.

I agree. I do find that of the big three "news" stations, CNN is far more balanced than the other two, but then that's why they're dipping in the ratings and why Fox, who sells a particular narrative is doing very well (at least in comparison).

I especially hate when the talking heads take particular lines out of context of a larger point in a speech and focus on that and, as you said, pretty much tell us what the speech actually meant based on their own remix of the speech.

For instance, the Mitt Romney "I like to fire people" thing was completely ridiculous. I also saw a video clip of my former representative who was asked about the health care package and when asked about whether it was constitutional, he answered "I'm not worried about that" (in context, it was clear he wasn't worried about it being declared unconstitutional, because he felt it WAS constitutional), but the Republican Party around here villified him as being anti-constitutional because of the statement, and in the full version of the video, the person taping it even says something afterwards that is caught on the camera that shows that it was a "gotcha" question to try to get him to say something that could be taken out of context.

As great as the politicians themselves are very good at spinning things, I feel all these pundits that just take in front of a camera go far beyond that.

I do not care for any of the networks news service. I wind up watching the hour long BBC news report.
the worse thing for politics was when the supreme court overrulled campaign finance reform. now any group can fricken say anything they want over and over and over.

I live in wisc. and it has been non stop non sequiter ads by lots and lots of outside infulence.
it used to be money talks and bullfluff walks but now its
money talks and also bullfluffs.

if you want a fair and balanced look at actual news in the u.s. you have to watch the bbc as they report without opinion... unless i am being fooled. seems the brits don't get so wound up over american politics.

yes, the BBC is better, but they also have taken a step down a bit over the years also.

I prefer watching Jon Stewart/Colbert for political news tbh.

Stewart/Colbert normally provide good coverage of a single issue each; or atleast a limited number of issues, but I guess most of the networks do that too. I will say Stewart and colbert atleast do cover the story more then recreationism that the networks are doing.

One thing I very much appreciate about Stewart and Colbert is that they're very obvious about what their bias is and they attack anything they think is bullfluff. Obviously most of the time the targets are Republican/conservative, but they'll go after a Democrat who deserves it from their worldview as well.

It's better than Fox News, who claims to be "fair and balanced" while pushing an obviously conservative narrative.

Fox is no more Biased Conservative then MSNBC is biased liberal.

but you have to hunt hard to then find the amount of other conservative biased news sources to offset the CNN's, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS. as well as most newspapers, magazines, etc.

I agree about Fox vs. MSNBC, but MSNBC doesn't claim to be "fair and balanced."

And I'd argue that CNN is fairly centrist and the other stations are really about reporting what will get them ratings. The organizations don't seem to be that liberal to me, just the individual journalists (who admittedly, are more often than not, liberal).

But regardless, if MSNBC claimed to be "fair and balanced," I'm sure you'd be pretty annoyed by that.

i don't really pay much attention to the news, but BBC caught my attention when i was using my PSP to surf. don't know if it's fair or balanced, but it seems to give me access to related info decently.

the balanced part of fox is balancing the media back toward centratist... msnbc don't have to make some logo claim they have rev. al , why not just balance it with David Dukes or something then it might be interesting.
Or just make it clear and more fun and put Obummer neighbor Louis farrakhan with Tom Metzger

No, no, you've got it all wrong. The REAL problem with politics today is FM radio. The music format abandoned AM for it a long time ago, and since then AM's been infested with political ideologues. Furthermore, it was only relatively recently that automakers stopped equipping pickup trucks exclusively with AM radios.

Oceana: That last argument is total BS and from how you've posted in the past, I imagine you know it is.

When you claim your station is "fair and balanced," you're not claiming to be balancing out the overall spectrum. You're claiming that your station is a straight-shooting, down-the-middle station that tries strip any obvious bias out of their coverage.

No I don't claim they are down- the middle anything I would content no matter how far right they go it would not bring overall news media to a Balance.

I would say they balance Msnbc though. As MSNBC is as ridiculously biased to the left as FOX is to the right.
So if you want a balance hour of news watch each for 1/2 hour.

Hmmm