Subject:
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Re: Iran: For peace in the region? No! For a piece *of* the region...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 7 Apr 2003 19:08:29 GMT
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Viewed:
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428 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Leonard Hoffman writes:
>
> > my opinion about Iran's democracy is based off a college course,
>
> Which of course has no bias...
**snip**
> But NPR is not biased toward the US, if anything, it's biased against, and
> has the same information, so what IF the Economist is biased in favor of
> economic systems that actually work and against ones that don't???
A careful distinction must be drawn here, because "bias" is a label thrown
around here somewhat indiscriminately lately. Is The Economist biased
against economic systems that don't work, or is The Economist biased against
economic systems that The Economist is interested in proclaiming not to
work? If the former, then it runs the risk of missing good information to
be mined even out of failed economic systems (like, for instance, how/why
privatization of Chile's healthcare didn't lead to affordable healthcare).
If the latter, then it runs the risk of omitting (intentionally or not)
those valid economic models that are simply in conflict with the
philosophies of The Economist.
Even having said that, I should underscore that it's simply not enough to
declare a source biased and therefore invalid; the claimant must demonstrate
the following:
1: The source is uniformly biased relative to the subject at large or the
source is specifically biased relative to the particular issue at hand
2: The source's bias causes the source to distort information regarding
the particular issue at hand to a degree sufficient to reduce or negate
the value of the source's input
3: That the source's bias is not merely a perceptual phenomenon based on
the biases of the claimant; i.e., "I'm a liberal, therefore Dubya is
biased in favor of the Far Right."
There are other cautionary criteria, to be sure, but those three are some of
the big ones. The prevailing philosophical leanings of a media source do
not validate or invalidate the material reported upon by that source, and it
goes both ways--someone claiming that NPR has an anti-American bias must
demonstrate each of the above before discarding NPR's reporting, just as
someone asserting a distortingly pro-US bias in The Economist must show that
this bias is materially relevant to the particular issue at hand. It's mere
ad hominem to call for the dismissal of a source as biased without
demonstrating the truth and relevance of that alleged bias.
Anyway, what's the specific anti-US bias of NPR? If anything, I'd say
that it's a welcome note of dissent in a sea of lockstep pro-war media
saturation, and dissent is the essence of democracy, which is in turn
nominally the essence of the US!
Dave!
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