Yeah - Keith has problems with someone else's objectivity. Pot.. Kettle... etc. Next thing, someone will state that Bill "O, Really" is Fair and Balanced.
Headline: They're *all* full of shit. We're better off tuning in to the BBC for US News.
No, you are wrong. You accept the easy and false equivalency. It's wrong. If you could discuss the issues raitonally, you would not make that mistake.
But "Beck, Hannity and Olbermann, Maddow - they're the same, on opposite sides" is the easy lie for you.
And they win, when you do that. "Koppel and Saddam's spokemans, they're the same on opposite sides" - if you agreed with that, how accurate would you be about the issues?
And yet you do just that on a much more important part of the media today. One side is a paid propaganda organization, the other largely exposing the lies of the liars.
So if Saddam's spokesmans says a lie, and Koppel exposes it, "they're the same".
But how would you demonstrate the point to someone who has fallen for the 'false equivalency'? They are not looking at any reality-based comparison.
You can look at the "world is flat" and "world is round" groups a couple ways. One it to note which is correct, which is reasonable, and which is nuts and pushing a lie.
Another is to say "they are both theories, they each have their supporters, they each attack each other as liars - they're both the same and full of crap".
They DO have similarities at both having opinions on the issue - but they are not equivalent, any more than Beck/Hannity and Olbermann/Beck are.
The flat-worlders LOVE for you to not notice their flaws and to equate them with the other side; so do the propagandists. But there's no reasoning with people who fall for this.
It is a bit funny, though, that in contradiction to the right's ideology, even some of these people can recognize that the better quality news is to skip the private sector products of the more powerful economy in the world, the US market, and to go to the government-owned - COMMUNIST!!11!11!! - BBC. I guess "Pravda, BBC - they're all full of crap", eh?
You are a victim of money distorting the 'information market', that pays for lies to compete with honest products - and to gain a lot of followers.
Works with elections - where terrible candidates do much better with 'the big lie' repeating how good they are compared to a 'fair' comparison - works with global warming - and news.
If you really look at, say, the Washington Times versus the Washington Post - you would find the Post a somewhat conservative newspaper, to the point of often being wrong against liberals and practically at war with any 'far left' - but the radical right has the crazy Reverand Moon - I won't summarize how crazy here - found a fortune-losing propaganda newspaper for decades that loses in an honest evaluation, but has money force it on the market, that serves a useful purpose for the radical right - legitimizing lies.
The Washington Post, to simpletons, becomes not 'the lies', but 'one side' against the 'left', which the Post must be if it's the 'other side' - it can't be right or middle, it's 'liberal media'.
And sure enough, by the Washington Times saying radial right-wing things, why look, the Post says things to the left of them all the time that 'proves' their liberal bias.
The problem here isn't the Post being 'left-wing lies', it's people pretending the Washington Times is 'one side' instead of being right-wing lies.
If you make that mistake falling for the lie about the Washington Times, you are going to be wrong about the media. And it's the same about the 'Beck, Hannity - Olbermann Maddow' lie. And this is why the right gets so much value from the lies of monied interests backing lies on the right - and the danger is removing rational evaluation from the picks and letting 'the marketplace' replace any 'standards' for the information out there. If the rich can use their money to buy the media, too, then we turn into the new Pravda society.
And have no doubt - the right-wing media is a propaganda machine very aware of how to support one another as if they're at war with the rest of the media. To not hold each other accountable for almost any standards, but rather, always support one another against 'the enemy' right or wrong, much like Reagan's '#1 rule', 'Republicans never attack Republicans'.
When you have a machine of lies, calling them lies is not the same, the equivalent, of the liars. If you get able to have a rational discussion, then you can measure the 'two sides'.
And Koppel - he's not the Washington Times or Beck or Hannity, but he is the corporate creature of a 'never say a side is right' media standard, and you will find he is often 'wrong'.
As Olbermann pointed out one example, but Koppel is guilty of false equivalency frequently as well, not calliing a lie a lie. He sometimes did - like when he went to Vietnam and foung the location of a John Kerry battle and interviews eyewitnesses who totally debunked the 'Swift Boat' liars - people who contributed lies to the right-wing propaganda machine - and the resulting attacks on Koppel as a 'leftist' for doing this, saying how these peasants in Vietnam were lying because they're communists and therefore will lie to support Kerry, is a classic example of the craziness of the radical right akin to 'fluoride is a commie plot' and 'Eisenhower is a commie agent'. And millions of Americans fell for 'the big lie'.
But hey, the right-wing media repeating 'the big lie' Swift Boat claims, and Koppel debunking them - just the right and left partisans, both of them are crap. Right?
What is the difference between Koppel debunking Swift Boat-agreeing media, and Olbermann/Maddow debunking other lies by the same right-wing media? Not much.
You find the same thing over and over - propaganda sources who had their spot paid for by some ideological billionare on a short list - Scaife, Koch, Olin, Coors, initially.
Now, with enough backing early on, these outlets can sometimes build enough victims to fund them - like Fox, who had ot be the first cable channel to ever pay the cable companies to carry it, while the free market would have killed it - and sometimes, they don't and get continues 'welfare', like the Washington Times, or Murdoch's New York Post.
Or in another model, they might 'bundle' - as the Wall Street Journal does, bought for its excellent news section, and bundled with an irresponsible propaganda editorial section.
But for you, if Glenn Beck says the world is flat and Olbermann says he's wrong, that's just 'both sides are crap' to you.
That's what happens when a bad ideology - whether it's communism or pro-Saddam under his dictatorship or Chinese lies to their people or American right-wing ideology - takes hold.
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