Fungi Forums
Miscellaneous => General Chat => Not at the Dinner Table => Topic started by: dc804 on May 07, 2009, 03:07:05 PM
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W all watch the news or read the newspaper. But there is always that one news program, website or paper that ou like to stay as far away from and hate with all of your heart.
What new programs, channels or papers do you stay away from? I hate Good Morning America. All of their stories are stupid. I also try to stay away from Nancy Grace, FOX news, and The Daily Mail. I've never actually read The Daily Mail, but I have only heard bad things about it.
SO what about you?
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Yes: CNN, occasionally NBC, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Chocolate News (if it hadn't gotten cancelled)
No: Fox, Nancy Grace
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I LOATHE FOX NEWS. I stay far away from right-wing "journalists/commentators" like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'reilly.
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I really dislike all serious (not comedic) news programs, but I especially hate FOX News. I watch the Colbert Report occasionally.
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I avoid people whose only news sources are comedy programs not meant to be taken seriously.
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I avoid people who hate FOX news because it's conservative.
Well, obviously not really.
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I don't watch anything at all anymore. No matter what channel, CNN, NBC, Fox, left-wing, right-wing, there are always stupid stories.
The dog that can skateboard: not national news.
Hillary Clinton and Obama crying about a remembrance speech and nobody apparently gives one [dukar]: not national news.
18,000 people applying for the "best job in the world" with live updates of who will win: not national news.
Right-wings attacking left-wings, vice versa, with videos of each other so they can poke fun.: Not national news
i.e. When Bill O'Reilly does his "Liberal Translation" segment.
But most hated by me, is when the left-wing guys have a "body language expert" visit their show and have the fake (and also apparently liberal) "expert" decipher the right-wingers rant video while saying completely non-sensical bull[dukar], then at the end of the segment they say "HEY DUR IM NO EXPERTZ AAHA WE ALL HATE RIGHT WING PEOPLE SO WE HAD TO DO THIS LOL ISNT IT FUNNY???"
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What new programs, channels or papers do you stay away from? I hate Good Morning America. All of their stories are stupid. I also try to stay away from Nancy Grace, FOX news, and The Daily Mail. I've never actually read The Daily Mail, but I have only heard bad things about it.
When you say Daily Mail, I take it that you are refering to the British newspaper of the same name? It's just that my house gets it and it seems to be alright (well..it's a better read than The Sun or The Mirror, both of which contain hardly any 'real' news).
Anyway, for some reason I don't trust the news on ITV at all... I always have to check on Ceefax on the BBC to make sure that they aren't making stuff up.
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I have zero interest in politics, so I don't watch anything. My home page is Yahoo, so if there's any sub-major news tidbits there that interest me (which isn't often), I can pick them up. Otherwise, I cooly proceed to whatever website I was going to.
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Being mildly conservative, I find myself caught between being emberassed by Bill O'Reilly's extremist rants or infuriated by Stephen Colbert's liberal antics. Bluh.
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I detest: Fox NEWS becasue of they are evil right-wing. Channel 11 NEWS because they have blogs and entertainment which news isn't about. DAILY NEWS, TMZ, ET, EXTRA and the Internet newspaper in general.
I can withstand: CNN, NBC, 110 Winds, NEWSDAY, some blogs. Buzzdash, QJ.
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I stay away from Hannity. I usually agree with his positions, actually, but he makes them sound dumb. Glenn Beck is usually pretty good, and I'd watch Lou Dobbs a lot more often if he wasn't on during Jeopardy. Red Eye is fun, though I really shouldn't be staying up until 4 to watch it (the debate about whether or not they hate Canada should have been settled a long time ago by everyone just watching this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCkLyOMsWNA) and realizing what kind of a show it is. Stewart gets out of saying much worse stuff by hiding behind the "I'm just a comedian" card, and he's not even as good a comedian as Greg).
I used to be able to laugh at Colbert, but it seems like he and Stewart have just been throwing the ratio of humor to liberal talking points way out of balance in the last couple of years. I don't trust anything NBC says about the environment because they're owned by GE (it's the equivalent of Fox turning American Idol stuff into news, except it actually matters), but I don't watch NBC other than Heroes and The Apprentice anyway. I don't watch ABC news that much, but when I do, I like Jake Tapper.
Fox News is a lot more bearable if you see it like an AM newstalk station -- the hosts are opinionated commentators, and there's news between them. And also if you agree with their opinions.
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Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs both **** me off, although Dobbs moreso than Beck.
Dobbs phrases his polls like ridiculous ultimatums to get people to agree with him ("Do you want illegal immigrants to flood this country with swine flu and Columbian drugs?" Yes - 99% No - 1%). His views always err on the side of "Why don't we just kick all the foreign people out of the country it will solve all our problems!!!".
Glenn Beck is a tad more tolerable, though he acts like a nonfunny, overly sarcastic ******** to everyone even when his opinions make absolute sense.
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If you think Glenn Beck makes absolute sense you probably haven't listened to his radio show. When he first came on CNN I liked him, but then I listened to his radio show and realized he was crazy. I think CNN must have reined him in a lot, but radio, and to a lesser degree, Fox let him run wild.
I don't like most of the talking heads on TV today. I'd rather they tell the news in detail. Headline News is okay, but they skim too much and repeat about every fifteen minutes. No to mention their gossip shows. I want real news that effects/affects my live or could change the world. I don't care which celebrity got drunk or who had sex with which football star. Much of TV news is not even news. It's people arguing some point or in many cases just arguing. Fox News does this a lot. Hannity and O'Reilly are bad about cutting people off when if they aren't saying something they disagree with. Also, why does science get only one percent of the coverage on the major TV and Cable news networks?
I guess my favorite news shows are on NPR or BBC.
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Well, one man's clinically insane is another man's passionate undignified guy who loudly says things you don't always agree with. There's a fine line.
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Also, why does science get only one percent of the coverage on the major TV and Cable news networks?
Beer drinking, cheeto munching coach potatoes (otherwise known as the majority of the United States) are far more interested in gossip/celebrities who get drunk and have sex with football stars than science.
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No, the american government media is much more interested in cultivating a race of pliable couch potatoes. Thus they do as much as possible to make you sit in front of your TV getting fat with diabetes, distracted enough by non-news drivel not to notice.
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I hate how news shows spend more time repeatedly telling you about an upcoming story then they actually spend telling you the story.
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I hate how news shows spend more time repeatedly telling you about an upcoming story then they actually spend telling you the story.
Comment of the year.
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I find it disturbing how many people flat out hate Fox News. In terms of actual news coverage, it's the least biased news on television. I find it even more disturbing how the same people have never actually watched Fox News and as such have no idea what they're talking about. Simply because it's earned the reputation of RARGH VAST RIGHTWING CONSPIRACY OMG they instantly, blindly hate it.
In other fun news, a recent poll following Walter Cronkite's death showed that the majority of people polled consider Jon Stewart their most trusted man in "journalism". Ew. Just... just ew.
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Part of the issue is that Fox has become synonymous with its most, err, "outstanding" journalists, folks to the likes of O'Reilly and Coulter who should be fired in the sake of human decency. For instance, the former newscaster's labelling of 4chan as the "Internet Hate Machine" and its users as "Hacker on Steroids" exemplifies an unfounded sense of stubbornness. Anyway, I would argue that the degree of liberalism considered the norm in today's society has warped our concept of neutrality. While Fox is indeed indisputably somewhat right-of-centre, if viewed in perspective, its conservativity is far less than many other stations' degree of liberalism.
On your second note, FG, did that poll directly regard Cronkite? Jon Stewart is more of a political commentator than a news anchor, so the two are hardly comparable.
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This is the only news I watch. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bduQaCRkgg4)
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Ann Coulter isn't a journalist, and she doesn't have a job at Fox. Occasionally she makes guest appearences on Hannity and stuff, but she doesn't have a show. And honestly, I have no problem with O'Reilly.
Up and down the lineup, they've got all straight news during the day, and then at 3pm Sheppard Smith is on, who's actually a democrat. After him is Neil Cavuto who deals more with economic stuff, and isn't all that opinionated. Glenn Beck is on at 5pm, and he's not a conservative, he's actually a libertarian. 6pm is just generic news without any commentary, then 7pm has Sheppard Smith again. 8pm is O'Reilly who, contrary to popular belief is insanely fair if you watch him on a regular basis. Hannity at 9pm who's just... blatantly right-wing. Finally, 10pm has Greta Van Sustren who's not only whose views are somewhat to the left, but is also a Scientologist.
Honestly, the only thing that officially ties them to the conservative/republican side of the spectrum would be Hannity. I can't stand Hannity anymore though... after Colmes left the show, it's just detrimented into an hour of Hannity whining about Obama. He's essentially turned himself into the right-wing equivalent of Keith Olberman. Hannity really has just become a stereotype of himself, giving fodder to people on the left, just playing country music and tossing around the word "liberal" like he gets $100 everytime he says it.
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From what I've seen, O'Reilly is pretty fair, though I might be biased because he has the same last name as my best friend. Overall, I agree with myself when I said that most of the programming on Fox, like most of the programming on CNN and MSNBC, is formatted like a newstalk station, with opinionated commentators/personalities taking up most of the time and occasionally being interrupted by brief news headlines. The main difference is that Fox mostly has conservative/libertarian commentators, with a couple of exceptions that FG pointed out, and the other two have mostly liberal/progressive commentators (there's probably some exceptions there too, but I don't watch them, so the only one I know of is Lou Dobbs); for me, the question is which ones you think are right. Personally, I like how Fox seems to embrace the opinionation of their opinionated guys. Yes, their slogan is 'fair and balanced,' which might seem to contradict that, but the other networks imply the same promise, not in so many words, and are just as opinionated, just more subversively. The opinion on Fox shows is so over-the-top that you can't miss it, while CNN's opinions look enough like objectivity that you might miss them. MSNBC is a bit closer to the over-the-top end, especially Olbermann, who's pretty much insane. Also, Weegee is right, Fox's bias stands out more because conservative biases are less common on news stations. CNN and MSNBC and HLN and most newspapers and lots of school textbooks sound the same as each other, while Fox sounds different, so they're more noticeable.
I think on principle I prefer more opinionated news, maybe in a kind of pragmatic way. I don't think we can ever be truly objective, so I'd prefer it if they're unobjective in a way that people will notice. Walter Cronkite certainly wasn't neutral, and though he didn't show his opinion outright as often as the average Fox or MSNBC host, he showed it enough to be very influential. Since everyone lets their opinions slip into their reporting whether they try to or not, I'd rather have news guys that people instantly recognize as being opinionated, so they can critically think about whether they're right or wrong instead of just outright accepting it.
Ann Coulter can be pretty funny if you don't take her too seriously, but she usually can't hold a candle to the cast of Red Eye (3 AM EDT on Fox News). If you're going to do conservative shock comedy, you might as well go all the way. It's basically like the Daily Show, except conservative, more open-ended, and pronouncedly edgier (into CrossesTheLineTwice (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrossesTheLineTwice)/RefugeInAudacity (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RefugeInAudacity) territory).
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Man you guys who think Fox News (or any corporate news source) is "fair" crack me up. Also, most of the stuff on those networks is ridiculous quasi-philosophical debates about stuff that if you were smart you would have made your own determination about and gone on with your life instead of sitting there watching TV.
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Man you guys who think Fox News (or any corporate news source) is "fair" crack me up.
I agree. Fox News and "fair" do not belong in the same sentence.
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As long as a human being is collecting and announcing the news, it will never truly be "fair." And then they just make it worse by commenting on it.
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Well, yeah, there's always going to be a bias and you'd be a fool for thinking otherwise. Still, who's up for robots reading the news?
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How about aliens? I'm all up for Morbo taking O'Reilly's place.
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coach potatoes
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(https://themushroomkingdom.net/board/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi26.tinypic.com%2Fiy37kn.jpg&hash=57fc892803df6f0bd3753bbadd158566)
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I'd hit that.
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HURR HURR HURR IM SO SMRT CUZ I DONT WATC TV NEWZ LMFAO. If it's the case that no human being can be fair, then why bother reading any news for that matter? Fox News is as fair as any tv syndication I've seen in my entire life. O'Reilly himself is obnoxiously fair. I say obnoxiously, because I can attest for it firsthand. My father, a notorious conservative, informs me on many occasions how he doesn't like Bill O'Reilly because he tries to hide his political stances behind the "fair and balance" curtain. My uncle does the same. My friend too. And all of them are big time right-wing fascist types. How can a man who is supposed to be blatantly unbiased to the right frustrate what would be his biggest fans for not being conservative enough?
And most of the stuff is not discussion. The only political commentary programs on the weekday schedule are O'Reilly, Beck, Hannity, Greta Van Sustren, and Neil Cavuto. Three of those are repeated during the day, meaning that it brings the total up to 8 hours. 8 hours is not the majority of the day. Have any of you bawwing about it ever actually watched Fox News when it wasn't Hannity or O'Reilly?
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So you're sitting around watching it in the middle of the day? And that makes it better?
Also, O'Reilly's sneering knowitallitude alone is enough to make me want to punch him in the face.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tJjNVVwRCY
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To be honest, I usually don't watch television period. But when I'm eating lunch, my mother usually leaves it on in the background (It's either that or food network). I'm not going to throw a hissyfit, get up and leave the room. It's not like I wake up religiously to watch it like when I was 8 and had to get up for saturday morning cartoons.
O'Reilly is a smartass and a know-it-all, and a giant ******bag. I'm not arguing against that. I'm simply saying when he does cover stories he does it very fairly. That clip cracks me up everytime, PaperLuigi.
Oh and before I forget, I hate Ann Coulter and wish she would cease to exist. Who's idea was it to call her hot anyway?
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Along with O'Reilly's meltdown, I believe the remix of it makes it 10 times funnier.
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"...Glenn Beck is not at all a hypocritical lunatic (http://www.indecisionforever.com/2009/08/14/jon-stewart-owns-glenn-beck-on-healthcare-hypocrisy/)."
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Eww, Comedy Central.
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While I don't particularly care for Jon Stewart, that video was funny. Glenn Beck is entertaining but that's it. He's just entertaining. Nothing more.
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I didn't watch much of the video since apparently no one other than YouTube knows how to make a decent video player anymore, but it looks like it was mainly about how Beck says we have the best health care in the world but then when he was in the hospital it sucked for him. It sounded like Stewart was basically going to make the same old mistake of equivocating the whole concept of health care reform with this specific bill right now -- that if you're opposed to Obamacare, you don't want to fix healthcare at all. This line of reasoning, of course, ignores the fact that Obama voted against every health care reform bill proposed by Republicans while he was a U.S. Senator. Was Obama just being an anti-reform obstructionist in denial, or did he believe, as Beck does (though in a different direction), that health care is screwed up but that's not the right way to fix it?
Again, I could be totally wrong because I didn't have the patience to wait three seconds for every second of video to stream.
Also, I kinda wish Stewart would move to MSNBC or CNN. He shouldn't get all the privileges of being a serious political commentator and still be able to hide behind the shield of being "just a comedian," especially since he's not even that funny anymore (if that Time Traveler's Wife joke is any indication).
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98% of Comedy's Central's material doesn't make me laugh.
I just have NEVER been able to get into stereotypical humor that "everyone is into and thinks is funny" right now.
I can't buy into any type of young adult humor or idiots portraying the roles.
I can't get into 90% of these romantic comedies...as if we haven't seen an assload of those since 2005.
I can't really get into jack*** at all. I've seen both, but still, the dudes are too "personal" with each other, if you know where I'm going with this.
Etc. etc. etc.
I'm more traditional, I guess. For example, I like Looney Tunes-type humor. Music and exaggerated motions/etc. largely convey emotion and are often hilariously done, which is why I also love shows such as Rocko's Modern Life, Ed, Edd & Eddy, Dexter's Lab, and Spongebob, to name just a few.
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In a Journalism course I took last year, the professor pointed out a survey he conducted at various colleges which included the question "Who is your favorite journalist?"
The most popular response was Jon Stewart (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A).
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All television news channels are at least somewhat biased, so I happen to listen to what the radio has to say. I feel It is much less prejudice.
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(https://themushroomkingdom.net/board/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twolia.com%2Fblogs%2Fzoboxrox%2Ffiles%2F2009%2F03%2Frush_limbaugh.jpg&hash=6f3848e272bfb8c3e76ee61d6d405886)
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I'm used to hearing about him blowing smoke out the other end, but hey.
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I'm used to hearing him talk sense, unlike so many other TV/Radio personalities, but hey.
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I agree with him pretty often, but he can be a bit of a jerk. Not nearly as often as he's caricatured as being, though.
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I like listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I'll listen to Glenn Beck if he's on and while I agree with him politically I do think he comes off the wrong way sometimes. I don't like Michael Savage because of the comments he made towards people with disabilities (a field of psychology I have studied extensively, especially people with disabilities in an academic environment).
As far as TV, I don't really watch TV news much but I do like Fox News. Of the "big three" networks I'd pick NBC mostly because I like Brian Williams and find it to be less biased, especially when compared to Katie Couric's CBS broadcast. I don't watch CNN or C-Span and I don't read the major news magazines (Time, US News, Newsweek). I subscribe to the city's conservative newspaper and prefer that over everything else so I can pick and choose my stories--I don't care about celebrities or anything like that and usually want more business news than what the TV provides, plus I like to read my sports section.
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Rush Limbaugh is the man. I can't ignore the fact he once was a borderline obese drug addict, but he isn't anymore (as far as I know) so I can safely say he is currently the man. Both literally and figuratively. Mark Levin is pretty okay.
Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough are whiney, and Glenn Beck is just plain insane.
Also i'm pretty sure Keith Olbermann is the biggest ******bag on the face of the earth. He's a classic example of a giant tool in his 50s who insistently tries to appeal to the young'ins because he can't accept the fact he's almost dead.
Juan Williams on Fox News is awesome though. I like him because he's a democrat but he's a fair democrat and actually thinks intelligently about his own opinions rather than blindly following the dogma of his political affiliation.
Mann Coulter is possibly the most ignorant person in history. She respresents everything wrong with right-wingers, and the fact people consider her some sort of beautiful, conservative goddess... ughhh... it makes me want to vomit a little. I think it's been proven she has a penis.
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So my dad turns on Fox yesterday and I catch like twenty minutes of Glenn Beck saying that atheists and all non-Christian religions are the root of all the world's problems. He specifically mentioned the economy and inner-city violence as being the result of people not turning their lives over to God.
I swear, Beck gets exponentially stupider every time I see him. He's gone from a vaguely funny guy I vaguely disagreed with, to an obnoxiously right-wing guy I rarely ever agreed with, to a street corner fire-and-brimstone doomsday preacher. Ten bucks says next time I tune in he'll be raving about how the Jews caused all the world's wars.
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If anything religion is the cause of society's problems.
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Define "society".
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How about...creationism (AKA Glenn Beck's ideology) is a major hindrance to scientific advances and progressive policies aimed at providing civil liberties to women and gays. Also, many creationists (like Beck) believe Jesus will return in their lifetime which is not conducive to long-term governmental policies.
"Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and institutions."
I probably shouldn't have said "religion is the cause of society's problems" because many religions influence culture and/or institutions in a positive way.
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I don't think its fair to blame religion for the problems of the world, considering these conflicts arise due to man's ignorance and inability to practice their faiths correctly. It's like the old saying with firearms... Guns don't kill people, criminals do.
Of course, that doesn't really help my point if you're pro-gun-control...
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Well, I am pro-gun-control, but your point is still valid. Religion, on its own, is a wonderful thing. It allows people to feel safer about the reasonably-terrible world we live in, thinking that everything is part of a big plan or whatnot. If anything, I would love to be able to convince myself to earnestly hop on the religion train; I honestly have no idea how I'll handle myself when I'm about to die.
So, yeah, it's unfair to blame religion for pretty much any problem. It's the people who interpret religion in hateful or destructive ways, or justify immoral actions with religion, or try to impose their religion on others (tl;dr: Glenn Beck), that cause problems.
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Rush Limbaugh compared George Bush to Jesus--my ass, he's talking sense.
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Rush Limbaugh compared George Bush to Jesus--my ass, he's talking sense.
Source.
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There was some book on him I saw at the library. One quote from him cited was something along the lines of "All I'm saying is George Bush is doing what Jesus would've done."
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Sorry, but Rush is arrogant enough to say that. It's completely believable.
Oh yeah, he's "the man" alright. What an upstanding citizen he is. Here's a nice little video of him taunting Michael J. Fox for "exaggerating" his illness. (http://politicalhumor.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=politicalhumor&cdn=entertainment&tm=13&f=00&su=p504.3.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.crooksandliars.com/2006/10/25/olbermann-gives-us-the-visual-to-limbaughs-attack-on-michael-j-fox/)
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Personally I found that hysterical, PaperLuigi. Hence what I meant before. He's both 'the man' figuratively since I think he's awesome, and he'a also literally "the man" in that he's the stereotypical angry, white, conservative *******.
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What do you like about Rush Limbaugh? What makes him awesome to you?
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awesome
angry, white, conservative *******
How is this possible? About the only explanation I can come up with is the quasi-ironic "******bag"-worship mentality that's been innundating pop culture for about the last five years or so. Of course, that applies more to guys in their late twenties with soul patches who drink a lot, so I'll admit that maybe the comparison is off...
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I dunno, I just have a lot of respect for people who can pull off being total jerkoffs while still being incredibly smart as well.
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I don't. I figure that there's enough smart people in the world that there's nothing special about just being smart.
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I just have a lot of respect for people who can pull off being total jerkoffs while still being incredibly smart as well.
Incredibly smart? Elaborate.
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"After years of research, I've determined that you're a ********."
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Incredibly smart? Elaborate.
Well, if you listen to what he has to say, he knows what he's talking about. He's a dick, but he still makes compelling arguments and backs it up with evidence and statistics.
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Well, if you listen to what he has to say, he knows what he's talking about.
I'll tell you what. I'll start listening to his radio show. Epoché can be applied to politics too.