Kakki wrote: > > The Guardian - hmmmmmm. I've been reading the Guardian's pieces since this > began and if you can say with a straight face that they are not > anti-American, than I don't know what more to say.
I'd say they are quite critical about everything, including the US. I've seen their > colimnists repeat the same lies about us that other have long disproven. > They leap at comment on the negative about the U.S. I never see an > objective, balanced view from them. Well, no, and you never will. The Guardian is a left-wing paper and doesn't claim to give an objective view. There are mainstream papers that do aim for objectivity, such as the Christian Science Monitor, NY Newsday, NY Times and the Washington Post (although right-wingers would probably disagree about the last two), and then there are others that don't. I know before looking at anything in the right-wing NY Post, which is almost a tabloid it's so trashy but it does have "news" stories, that it will never have anything positive in there about Democrats. So, it's up to the reader to be aware of each paper's bias. And all rules of objectivity are off when it comes to editorials or specific columnists. Those writers are trying to convince, which right away means they're not telling the whole story. The good thing about reading biased papers, whether they're left- or right-wing, is that they'll bring up topics that the mainstream press doesn't usually pay as much attention to. I know there will always be an article in the left-wing Village Voice, for example, about the current erosion of our civil liberties, and not just a factual piece, but an "I'm outraged" type of article. I know exactly what I'm supposed to think after reading one of those articles, and exactly what I'm supposed to think after reading something from a right-wing website such as CNSNews, but I don't know exactly what to think after reading an article in the NYTimes, which is why I consider that a more objective paper (or at least one that aims for objectivity). It's important to get information from many different sources and always to keep in mind where the information is coming from. Just a couple of other things: Mike, most definitely Hollywood will be involved in a propaganda campaign, along with the Madison Avenue advertising executive that was just hired by the Bush administration. I'm glad there's some attempt being made to counter bin Laden's propaganda. He's very good at it, very persuasive. The fact that so many people believe the US is trying to kill all Muslims shows just how good a media man he is. All this talk about Marxism lately... it seems there's some confusion about Marxism as an economic theory and that theory as attempted in communist countries, which have ended up corrupting the theory. Marxism is such an extreme and idealistic theory it may never work well anywhere since it lends itself to so much government involvement that totalitarian regimes can make easy use of it. It's interesting to me that its opposite on the political spectrum, fascism, leads to totalitarianism, too. Anyway, I think there are valuable lessons to be learned from Marxist theory, not to be unthinkingly swallowed whole, but not seen as something so scary it's completely dismissed either. Debra Shea
