Does the media distort the news?

Question

America is 70% against the war in Iraq. America bases its opinion on the media. Is the media telling people the truth?

The following was received from a friend...

My niece stationed at Baluud, Iraq was assigned to escort/guard Martha Raddatz , reporter for ABC News

when she accompanied John McCain's on his trip to Iraq.

Katelyn stood directly behind Raddatz as she asked soldiers about the up coming elections. Ms Raddatz asked 60 GI's who they planned to vote for in November. 54 said John McCain, 4 for Obama and 2 for Hillary.

Katelyn called home and told her family to watch ABC news because she was standing directly behind Raddatz and maybe they'd see her on TV. The family all watched and got a h**l of a view of skewed news.

ABC News showed 5 GI's being asked by Raddatz how they were going to vote in November: 3 for Obama and 2 for Clinton. No mention of the 54 votes for McCain.

And you trust the safety of America to these reporters??

Answer 1

In response to your initial question, may I answer with  questions of my own?

Is the Pope Catholic?

Does a bear live in the woods?

Do skunks stink?

Does the media lie?

DUH!

Your nieces perspective on things is no doubt accurate and the media hates it.  

They want the war to look as bad as possible in order to bash Bush and keep McCain out.  

No Surprise there!!!

I don't trust the media, never have!  I don't recommend that anyone believes a word they say, they're liars!

Answer 2

****! Your a fool if you watch the news! Whoever owns the tv station your watching, those are the views you'll see. Rupert Murdock of FOX tv is a n**i! Down with the establishment!

Answer 3

Theres a simple reason for that, McCain locked up his nomination early therefore no one would really care who was a McCain supporter Just as it would have been a moot point if there were 20 soldiers who wanted to vote for Huckabee. But i'm sure this footage was probably shot more towards the end of the democratic race which at the time was news and by default they skewed the footage and streamlined it to fit the current events of the day.

Answer 4

The media tries to do its job of reporting  on what is going on in Iraq and if there is distortion this is due to misinformation

Answer 5

the media distorts EVERY single fact they present! without exception. also everything is EXTREMELY over dramatized.

Answer 6

The TV news media plays to its audience (demographics), its all about ratings, so they tend to "s*x" things up for their audience.

Answer 7

The mainstream media lies from one end to the other.

That's why I get my news from the blogosphere - They link to regular news with analysis and commentary and usually links to the people who MADE the original news stories. I've been able to read the story written by the people the MSM wrote about and learned that the MSM's presentation was completely false.

Time, after time, after time. The Dan Rather episode was one. The media stating flat out that they intended to influence the presidential election is another...the list goes on.

If you believe anything from AP, Reuters, CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, or the rest you're a fool.

Orion

Answer 8

Yes, the media distorts the news. If you follow a political-economy approach, that shows us that whoever owns the media, makes the news. Their viewpoint and theirs alone makes it onto the news.

People are turning more and more to comedy news skits for information because at least the bias there is obvious and parodied, and not hidden or manipulative!

Answer 9

Sad but true.The enemy fights on despite our overwhelming kill ratio...why? they hope for a political victory and the liberal media feeds anti war folks all the bad news and little of the good.Partisan politics is an ugly fact, people who hate our president do not support anything the administration does so they ignorantly resort to sedition, so yes you liberals have a hand in killing our troops.Flat fact they fight on because they know the American public does not have the  will to fight a long war...you are all yellow cowards.

Answer 10

A few comments:

(1) If you google Raddatz, ABC news, Iraq, you will see that Kyle is wrong.  McCain was simply ignored.  Now that the nominations are set, there will be new polls.

(2) The MSM is making up for their earlier bias.  On one of its 2003 pre-invasion editions, the WaPost printed about 30,000 words supporting Bush on the first few pages and three lines of Sen. Kennedy's dissent on page 16.

(3) Half of all adults have below-average IQs.

(4) In order to boost enlistments, the educational standard of recruitment have been excessively lowered.  The services wouldn't dare publish the mean IQ of enlisted men.  In the 2000 election, when the mean IQ was considerably higher, the GI vote was a landslide for Bush.  Does that tell you something?