Msm?

[ErikViking]

When MSM is used on this forum, what does it mean? I know what the abreviation stands for, but I don't know what you mean by it.

 

[Annie]

When MSM is used on this forum, what does it mean? I know what the abreviation stands for, but I don't know what you mean by it.

Most paper editions, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS (which are mostly newspaper writers), MSNBC, Most of the Weekly magazines.

That's what I mean, anyways.

 

[ErikViking]

Most paper editions, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS (which are mostly newspaper writers), MSNBC, Most of the Weekly magazines.

That's what I mean, anyways.

Okay... no wonder I didn't know then. I thoght it was a more general term, not a list of companies. But since you call them mainstream, are those the largest companies? Is there an equivalent in size not being mainstream?

I use to check out CNN.com daily to get some American input.

 

[Annie]

Okay... no wonder I didn't know then. I thoght it was a more general term, not a list of companies. But since you call them mainstream, are those the largest companies? Is there an equivalent in size not being mainstream?

I use to check out CNN.com daily to get some American input.

Mostly largest or longest established. Alternative media would be FOX, Some of the more local news dailies, some weeklies, blogs (got to be careful there), TCS, gotta look around.

 

[ErikViking]

Mostly largest or longest established. Alternative media would be FOX, Some of the more local news dailies, some weeklies, blogs (got to be careful there), TCS, gotta look around.

Thank you for a quick response!
I use to watch FOX too. Although to be honest, I haven't noticed a difference between CNN and FOX. Haven't been looking of course.

 

[Annie]

Thank you for a quick response!
I use to watch FOX too. Although to be honest, I haven't noticed a difference between CNN and FOX. Haven't been looking of course.

I'd say the biggest difference is how they cover the same events. I turn to CNN during commercials, I've yet NOT to find them in Lebanon. FOX has Lebanon covered too, but there is also coverage from Israel as often.

FOX puts on those that say they have been victimized, then follow up with an Israeli response. CNN puts on the victims, then someone from Human Rights Watch. Same sort of coverage happened during Katrina.

That's my take, anyways. Perhaps more importantly, several studies back that up.

 

[ErikViking]

I'd say the biggest difference is how they cover the same events. I turn to CNN during commercials, I've yet NOT to find them in Lebanon. FOX has Lebanon covered too, but there is also coverage from Israel as often.

FOX puts on those that say they have been victimized, then follow up with an Israeli response. CNN puts on the victims, then someone from Human Rights Watch. Same sort of coverage happened during Katrina.

That's my take, anyways. Perhaps more importantly, several studies back that up.

I know exacly what you mean by that. A "right" newspaper here will report more from Isrealian perspective and the otherway around. A few years ago the discussion ran about bias in media and now a days all media is more keen to pick up reports from "the other side" so to say. But no where near perfect and we don't call it "mainstream" and "alternative" rather someting like your "liberal" and "conservative".

I'll start to pay some more attention when reading from American sources now, that will be fun!

 

[Annie]

I know exacly what you mean by that. A "right" newspaper here will report more from Isrealian perspective and the otherway around. A few years ago the discussion ran about bias in media and now a days all media is more keen to pick up reports from "the other side" so to say. But no where near perfect and we don't call it "mainstream" and "alternative" rather someting like your "liberal" and "conservative".

I'll start to pay some more attention when reading from American sources now, that will be fun!

Oh I agree that we all carry our 'visions' around, including reporters. The difference is, they are supposed to be constantly aware of that and attempt to compensate for it. If I'm 'conservative' it's natural to want to read what I agree with, same for someone 'liberal.' Truth is, if I only take in from my chorus, I know I'll never see the complete the background I need to try and understand.

The media should be more aware and diligent than myself.

 

[ErikViking]

Oh I agree that we all carry our 'visions' around, including reporters. The difference is, they are supposed to be constantly aware of that and attempt to compensate for it. If I'm 'conservative' it's natural to want to read what I agree with, same for someone 'liberal.' Truth is, if I only take in from my chorus, I know I'll never see the complete the background I need to try and understand.

This way internet is good. You can read subject-wise and get input from all kind of sources. Like here. Sorting is tough though. 50% of the information here for instance means nothing to me. Some international questions discussed here has a domestic background which isn't obvious at a first glance. The good thing here, compared to blogs or news sites is that it is dynamic.

The media should be more aware and diligent than myself.

Good point actually. I wonder why the situation is like this. Is it economical? Like "we aim for the liberal segment of readers" or are newspapers bound to a certain perspective which let them only to hire certain reporters?

 

[Annie]

This way internet is good. You can read subject-wise and get input from all kind of sources. Like here. Sorting is tough though. 50% of the information here for instance means nothing to me. Some international questions discussed here has a domestic background which isn't obvious at a first glance. The good thing here, compared to blogs or news sites is that it is dynamic.



Good point actually. I wonder why the situation is like this. Is it economical? Like "we aim for the liberal segment of readers" or are newspapers bound to a certain perspective which let them only to hire certain reporters?

No 'bound' about it. It's their choice. Different papers have different levels they carry their agenda to. Chicago Tribune used to be right of neandrathals. Not anymore. It's more balanced than the NY Times, but that's like saying John Kerry is more balanced than Howard Dean. Or Rush Limbaugh is more balanced than Pat Buchanan.

The WSJ is conservative in editorials, but not so much in news. WaPo is better than most, closer to balanced. Problem with all though is editorializing the news.

 

[nt250]

The main stream media is mostly the Associated Press.

Next time a big story breaks go to all the online news sites that have been mentioned on this thread and you will find the exact same article at every single one of them.

 

[dilloduck]

The MSM is referred to almost as a thing---let's not forget that the MSM is owned by people with an agenda. Convenient how they hide behind thier publications and corporations.

 

[Annie]

The main stream media is mostly the Associated Press.

Next time a big story breaks go to all the online news sites that have been mentioned on this thread and you will find the exact same article at every single one of them.

Most of the ones mentioned, have their own foreign news divisions. They all have National divisions. You're correct on AP and other wire services, though those that subscribe may edit and correct for bias. Check out the same articles printed by NY Times vs. some Denver or FL papers.

They all have editorial pages, check out which sydicated columnists they choose. Which side the local ones cover.

 

[Annie]

A sort of current day roundup of MSM coverage:

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjVlMmRjNDllNzhkZmE1OWM3NmE1OGQ4OGQxMDA1YjQ

August 02, 2006, 5:36 a.m.

Media Missiles
Working for the enemy.

By Tom Gross

Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are also actively fanning the flames of unrest.

The BBC World Service has a strong claim to be the number-one villain. It has come to sound like a virtual propaganda tool for Hezbollah. And as it desperately attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” it has introduced a new charge — one which I have heard several times on air in recent days.

The newscaster reads out carefully selected “audience comments.” Among these are invariably contained some version of the claim that “Israel’s attack on Lebanon” will serve as a “recruitment” drive for al Qaeda.

But if anything is going to win new recruits for the likes of Osama bin Laden, it will not be Israel’s defensive actions, which are far less damaging than Western TV stations would have us believe, but the inflammatory and hopelessly one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news organizations.

While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in the aftermath of World War II air raids. International television channels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been razed.

A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hezbollah command centers in the city’s southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used to ferry Hezbollah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.

From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia.

As it happens, Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civilians — even though this has proven extremely difficult and often tragically impossible, since members of Hezbollah, the self-styled “ Party of God,” have deliberately ensconced themselves in civilian homes. Nevertheless the civilian death toll has been mercifully low compared to other international conflicts in recent years.

A CNN MAN LETS SLIP
The BBC, which courtesy of the British taxpayer is the world’s biggest and most lavishly funded news organization, would of course never reveal how selective their reports are, since such a disclosure might spoil their campaign to demonize Israel and those who support her. But one senior British journalist, working for another company, last week let slip how the news media allows its Mideast coverage to be distorted.

CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hezbollah’s “press officer” and that Hezbollah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations.”

When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program Reliable Sources, Robertson acknowledged that Hezbollah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hezbollah “had control of the situation,” Robertson said. “They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath.”

Robertson added that Hezbollah has “very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access into those areas. You don’t get in there without their permission. We didn’t have enough time to see if perhaps there was somebody there who was, you know, a taxi driver by day, and a Hezbollah fighter by night.”

Yet Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.

Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern Lebanon, Time contributor Christopher Allbritton, casually mentioned in the middle of a posting: “To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.”

Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC’s Richard Engel, CBS’s Elizabeth Palmer, and a host of European and other networks, were also taken around the damaged areas by Hezbollah minders. Palmer commented on her report that “Hizbullah is also determined that outsiders will only see what it wants them to see.”

Palmer’s honesty is helpful. But it doesn’t prevent the damage being done by organizations such as the BBC. First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.

IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN
Indeed, the BBC’s coverage of the present war has been so extraordinary that even staunch BBC supporters in London seem rather embarrassed — in conversation, not on the air, unfortunately.

If the BBC were just a British problem that would be one thing, but it is not. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio, and online.

Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its worldview in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kinyarwanda and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn’t broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn’t concern itself with Kurdish rights or aspirations since they are persecuted by Muslim-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn’t hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured in March 2004 by President Assad’s regime.)

It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hezbollah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldn’t really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old grandson were killed by a Katyusha during a Friday-night Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.

You wouldn’t have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2,000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages, and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.

You wouldn’t really appreciate that Hezbollah, far from being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (UAVs that have flown over northern Israel, extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having already killed 114 people in Argentina during the 1990s.

The BBC and other media have carried report after report on the damaged Lebanese tourist industry, but none on the damaged Israeli one, even though at least one hotel in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, was hit by a Hezbollah rocket. There are reports on Lebanese children who don’t know where they will be going to school, but none on Israeli ones.

ET TU, TELEGRAPH?
The relentless broadcast attacks on Israel have led to some in the print media indulging in explicit anti-Semitism.

Many have grown accustomed to left-wing papers such as Britain’s Guardian allowing their Mideast coverage to spill over into something akin to anti-Semitism. For example, last month a cartoon by the Guardian’s Martin Rowson depicted Stars of David being used as knuckle dusters on a bloody fist.

Now the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph, Britain’s best-selling quality daily, and previously one of the only papers in Europe to give Israel a fair hearing, has got in on the act. The cartoon at the top of the Telegraph comment page last Saturday showed two identical scenes of devastation, exactly the same in every detail. One was labeled: “Warsaw 1943”; the other: “Tyre, 2006.”


A politician had already given the cue for this horrendous libel. Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was “colluding” with U.S. President George W. Bush in giving Israel the okay to wage a war crime “gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.”

Of course, there was no “Jewish quarter” of Warsaw. In case anyone need reminding (Sir Peter obviously does) the ghetto in the Polish capital, established in October 1940, constituted less than three square miles. Over 400,000 Jews were then crammed into it, about 30 percent of the population of Warsaw. 254,000 were sent to Treblinka where they were exterminated. Most of the rest were murdered in other ways. The ghetto was completely cleared of Jews by the end of May 1943.

ECHOING SCHINDLER’S LIST
The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Some British and European politicians, on both left and right, have been supportive of Israel. So have some magazines, such as Britain’s Spectator. So have a number of individual newspaper commentators.

But meanwhile anti-Semitic coverage and cartoons are spreading across the globe. Norway’s third largest paper, the Oslo daily Dagbladet, ran a cartoon comparing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the infamous Nazi commander SS Major Amon Goeth who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them from his balcony — as depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. (A month earlier Dagbladet published an article, “The Third Tower,” which questioned whether Muslims were really responsible for the September 11 attacks.)

Antonio Neri Licon of Mexico’s El Economista drew what appeared to be a Nazi soldier with — incredibly — stars of David on his uniform. The “soldier” was surrounded by eyes that he had apparently gouged out.

A cartoon in the South African Sunday Times depicted Ehud Olmert with a butcher’s knife covered in blood. In the leading Australian daily The Age, a cartoon showed a wine glass full of blood being drunk in a scene reminiscent of a medieval blood libel. In New Zealand, veteran cartoonist Tom Stott came up with a drawing which equated Israel with al Qaeda.

At least one leading European politician has also vented his prejudice through visual symbolism. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wore an Arab scarf during an event at which he condemned Israel, but not Hezbollah, who he presumably thinks should not be stopped from killing Israelis.

THE ASHES OF AUSCHWITZ
It’s entirely predictable that all this violent media distortion should lead to Jews being attacked and even murdered, as happened at a Seattle Jewish center last week.

When live Jews can’t be found, dead ones are targeted. In Belgium last week, the urn that contained ashes from Auschwitz was desecrated at the Brussels memorial to the 25,411 Belgian Jews deported to Nazi death camps. It was smashed and excrement smeared over it. The silence from Belgian leaders following this desecration was deafening.

Others Jews continued to be killed in Israel itself without it being mentioned in the media abroad. Last Thursday, for example, 60-year-old Dr. Daniel Ya’akovi was murdered by the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist group within Fatah that Yasser Arafat set up five years ago using European Union aid money.

But this is far from being an exclusively Jewish issue. Some international journalists seem to find it amusing or exciting to bait the Jews. They don’t understand yet that Hezbullah is part of a worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant ones, for all those — Moslem, Christian, Hindu and Jew — who don’t abide by its wishes.

 

[Annie]

Funny how one finds these topics on the same day:

Many links at site:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5730

You Can't Teach (Some) Old Media New Tricks
August 3rd, 2006

Jefferson Morley writes about the international online media for the Washington Post. He is sneering at conservative websites which dared to raise questions about the troubling inconsistencies in reports, and some very curious photographs that seem, well, posed to extract maximum outrage over the deaths of children in Qana. He throws around the phrase “conspiracy theory” and invokes a comparison to the 9/11-as-inside job theorists.

Sneering at conservatives would seem to come naturally to someone who has written for The American Prospect and The Nation. Self-identification as a liberal or leftist does not seem to come so easily, of course. He’s just identified as a staff writer for the Washington Post, so we can be certain he has no biases whatsoever.

Of course, Morley doesn’t always pooh-pooh the raising of questions about press reports. For example, here’s an ironic comment he made when he was pushing the Downing St Memo which was bandied about as evidence of Bush and Blair perfidy on the invasion of Iraq:

I think some combination of cynicism, complacency and insulation has stifled the instincts of very good reporters. I also think there is also a failure of leadership at the senior editorial level. The issues raised by the Downing Street minutes are very serious. To pursue them is to invite confrontation. This means that ‘beat’ reporters cannot realistically pursue the story. I say all this way of explanation, not rationalization. There are several natural follow up stories to the Downing Street memo that we should be pursuing right now….​

But that was then, this is now, and it was leftists who were demanding that questions be raised.

In his attempt at debunking the questions being raised about Qana, he doesn’t bother actually examining the evidence. Here’s as close as he comes:

That question has been definitively answered in the mainstream press. Almost all of the victims belonged to two extended families, the Hashems and the Shalhoubs, who lived in the area, according to the independent accounts of The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid and the Daily Star’s Nicholas Blanford.​

In the universe of the old media, that settles it. If the MSM reported it, then it is true. Just ask Dan Rather.

Of course, Morley evidences a shocking indifference to inconveient inconsistencies, claiming that “at least 57 Lebanese civilians” died, well after the figure has been revised downward. Even the very WaPo report he cites and links to as authoritative uses the revised total of 27 dead, though the Daily Star, under the thumb of Hezbollah, says at least 60.

Whatever.

Move on. No story here. What are you? Some kind of conspiracy nut?

But the fact remains that when the vaunted mainstream press publishes conflicting stories which are of great propaganda value to one side in a conflict, the smart thing to do is to raise questions.

Sigh. It is all so familiar. Recall that the New York Times ran a photograph that had to be staged making US forces look bad. Finally, after this was conclusively proven, it eventually airily dismissed the photo fakery as a mere captioning error and blamed the news agency supplyingthe photo.

The fact is that there is a long and dishonorable tradition of staging photographs in the Middle East to make Israel look bad. Israeli drones captured pictures of a phony funeral procession undone when the man pretending to be a corpse kept falling off the stretcher and getting back in. Follow the link and watch the vidoe, if you need a laugh.

As for the willingness of mainstream media to play along, at least Nick Robertson of CNN had the good grace to admit that he played along giving an uncritical forum for the terrorist group Hezbollah to spout unverifiable anti-Israeli propaganda.

The well-document phenomenon of “Pallywood” wherein Palestinians stage fake events is now being joined by “Hezbollywood.” But on Planet Morley one would have to be a wingnut to doubt the version put forth by drive-by media reports produced under the thimb of the bloodthirsty liars of Hezbollah.

Some members of the print media are not quite as trusting of Hezbollah as Morley. David Waren of the Ottawa Citizen wrote:

What happened at Qana was, almost certainly, what happened at Jenin in 2002, what happened on a beach in Gaza a few weeks ago, and what has happened on innumerable other occasions. The Israelis are instantaneously accused and convicted of a monstrous and perhaps intentional act of butchery, by people quite incurious about the facts. Their pathological hatred of “Zionism” is all the proof they need. These are people who seldom bother to shed even crocodile tears when Jews are blown to pieces by suicide bombers, or rockets are fired indiscriminately into their homes; but become tremendously excited when the news breaks that some Israeli retaliation may have gone wrong. [....]

I have no idea what actually happened. But in the absence of a credible investigation, nobody else has, either; and the dramatic media presentation of the story “as told by Hezbollah” must be assigned to the annals of anti-Israeli propaganda, not journalism.
​

The wesbites at which Morley sneers continue to investigate, uncovering further inconsistencies, while answering earlier questions. Sadly, the readers of the Washington Post are left with the kind of ignorance George Orwell called bliss.

Hat tips: Clarice Feldman and Richard Baehr



Thomas Lifson

 

[Mr.Conley]

I'd also like to ask what IMO means.

 

[OCA]

I'd also like to ask what IMO means.

In my opinion.

 

[ErikViking]

Okay, this mornings reading. (I'll use the words MSN and Alternative)

MSM reports of Isrealian attacks mainly.
Alternative of another 100 rockets and threats about Tel Aviv.

As further proving a media bias, nothing new, I have to reflect on another thing:
We are supposed to read about the success for the side NOT supported by the newspaper. That is shrewd since people generally sympahize with the underdog. A plain propaganda would have done the opposite. In other words it is not about reporting events but to influence me in this or that way - ugly!

 

[Annie]

Okay, this mornings reading. (I'll use the words MSN and Alternative)

MSM reports of Isrealian attacks mainly.
Alternative of another 100 rockets and threats about Tel Aviv.

As further proving a media bias, nothing new, I have to reflect on another thing:
We are supposed to read about the success for the side NOT supported by the newspaper. That is shrewd since people generally sympahize with the underdog. A plain propaganda would have done the opposite. In other words it is not about reporting events but to influence me in this or that way - ugly!

Yep. I sometimes worry about people that really only use say the 6 o'clock news to keep informed. At least in the US, fewer are turning to say the daily news, which is too bad, in spite of bias. With the newspaper it's inevitable that when you read the headline and the first few paragraphs, your brain figures 'here's what comes next', when it doesn't and instead you pick up a few facts that fly in the face of all that came before, there's a 'what???' moment, you go back, thinking 'I must have missed something...' Nope, then you are left to wonder.

Doesn't happen with TV so much or talk radio, those images and rants just keep coming at ya, usually when you are also doing something else.