Congress is Trying to Mess with the Internet, AGAIN
(From: sowingdoubt )
May232012
May72012
What EVERYONE should know about the secretive group trying to swift boat Barack Obama
MORE FACTS AT THE LINK about the group’s attempt to do to Barack Obama what the Swift Boat Veterans did to Kerry’s 2004 campaign.
In four days, the first ad by Veterans For A Strong America garnered almost 1 million view on Youtube. [YouTube, 5/1/12]
The group’s sole employee and founder is coordinating with key Islamophobic figures on the far-right.[ThinkProgress,2/12/12;For The Common Defense; New York Times,3/4/05]
The group’s founder helped promote a documentary advocating war with Iran. [Flier; ThinkProgress, 11/3/11]
Veterans for A Strong American is fully endorsed by Karl Rove. The man known as “Bush’s Brain” tweeted his support of their first web ad. [Twitter,5/3/12]
The group’s founder — posing as a “journalist” — organized and participated in a taxpayer subsidized propaganda trip to Iraq in 2008. [Charleston Gazette, 8/28/08]
May42012
The Fireman And The Arsonist
(Source: questionall)
12PM
Democrats always have to clean up the crap that Republicans leave behind.
May32012
Maddow explains the conservative media model: ‘Everybody else is out to get you’ | The Raw Story
Conservative media outlets encourage their audiences to keep viewing only their content by demonizing other news sources, according to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
“If I am trying to get across a point of view, I have to persuade and not assert,” she said in April at The Castro Theater in San Francisco. “Because I can’t assume that everybody is already agreeing with me when I start to make the funny voice. I can’t assume that I’m not going to offend somebody that thinks that person shouldn’t be made fun of. So, I try to be sort of ecumenical. I try not to imagine my audience being people who already agree with me. I, in fact, try to imagine a Republican audience.”
“I think the conservative media model involves this one really important step that liberals don’t use,” Maddow continued, “which is, ‘listen to me, I am the light and the truth and the way, you have to believe what I say and everybody else is out to get you and you can’t listen to anybody else, don’t change the channel, they’re trying to kill you.’ Liberals don’t say that. Conservatives tell their audience that.”
12PM
Gibbs: Romney’s Message Is ‘You Didn’t Clean Up Our Mess Fast Enough’
~~~
Top Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs said on Meet the Press Sunday that the “biggest idea” of Obama’s reelection campaign would be a message of continuing “moving in the right direction of fixing this economy.”
“We know this about Mitt Romney,” Gibbs said, “he’s not a job creator. When he was governor of Massachusetts, they were 47th out of 50 in job creation. His experiences in downsizing and outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies and walking away with a lot of money for himself. His economic ideas are the failed economic ideas that we tried for eight years.”
Gibbs responded to another question about women voters and the economy, saying, “David, their message is: You didn’t clean up our mess fast enough.”
April222012
“The Republicans love to say that the Democratic Party is ruled by ‘special interests.’ But when pressed to name these ‘special interests,’ the usual reply is women, blacks, teachers, and unions. Together they comprise the majority of Americans. What about the ‘special interests’ that dominate the Republican Party, the oil companies, the banks, the gun lobby, and the apostles of religious intolerance?”
Geraldine Ferraro (via foulmouthedliberty)
April172012
(Source: one-angry-liberal, via liberallyinclined)
April112012
The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed
In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are indeed this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.
At the same time, it’s important to note that they’re also disinclined to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren’t worth watching—it’s just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling’s annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.
And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study, giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.
In other words Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.
But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.
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