Good Liberal News outlet?

[wacki]

Is there a good liberal news outlet? I like FNC but it is accused of being conservative. Is there a good news outlet that isn't hated by the far left like Fox is?

I don't trust these
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ABC
CBS
NEWSWEEK
CNN
NBC
LAT
WP
NYT -some good, some bad

[sameoldsht]

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Is there a good liberal news outlet?

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No.

[nicky g]

"Is there a good news outlet that isn't hated by the far left like Fox is? "

Lol. It's not just the "far left" that distrusts Fox.

"I don't trust these
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ABC "

Its work on questioning the documents CBS used isn't good enough to refute its "liberal bias"? (I've never seen ABC, so I have no idea what its covereage is like; but I;d have thought this was decent evidence against the "liberal" charge. Perhaps I will be told that politics is irrelvant when it come sto getting one over on a competitor).

From a UK-based perspective: I like the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) best. The Channel 4 News bulletin over here is extremely good (on a sidenote I've met its main anchor twice and he's avery nice, very generous guy) but you probably won't be able to get that in the states; it does have a website but I don't check it regularly and can't vouch for it. I like the Economist a lot; I would regard it as centrist to conservative but GWB accused it of being a liberal brainwashing rag because ot raised some questions about Bush's Presidency (despite for instance having supported his 2000 campaign and the Iraq war); some people are never pleased. I think the BBC news website is pretty good on breaking news (less so on analysis) but you have made it clear you don't agree. You guys would hate it over here; a study found that BBC coverage was the most likely of all UK TV news outlets to rely unquestioningly on government information during the war, but someone's sold you the line that it's anti-war central because of what one reporter said once on one of its umtpeen dozen (radio) outlets.

[wacki]

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Lol. It's not just the "far left" that distrusts Fox.


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Any more info on this?

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I think the BBC news website is pretty good on breaking news (less so on analysis) but you have made it clear you don't agree.

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I am wary of the BBC because of things I saw with my own eyes, and people I know who were involved in stories reported by the BBC during the Iraq invasion. It's a small section of time, and I wish I documented everything, but heres a bit more:

Huge:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_768569.html?menu=news.wariniraq

Googled this,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/005iqpvz.asp
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/710rcvzt.asp?pg=1

The weekly standard is right winged, and I ussually will only read William Kristol's articles as I really like what he has to say. His talks are better than his articles oddly enough.

Fox has it's faults. Beltway boys and Fox N Friends are horrible. O'reilly needs improvement but I think he is still useful. Shep Smith is awesome. Brit Hume is pretty good, boring but informative. Hannity haas right wing blinders on, but Colms and his guests keep him in check. William Kristol appears on Fox every now and then and he is fav. Honestly I don't understand why people have beef with fox.


Thanks for the other info.

[nicky g]

"Lol. It's not just the "far left" that distrusts Fox.



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Any more info on this?"

C'mon. There are plenty of mainstream Democrats, liberals, heck probably even a few consercatives who distrust Fox. I mean plenty of people on this board do, and not many of them could be described as radical socialists.

"The BBC suggested poor levels of maintenance played a hand in the deaths of seven fliers."

I don't see that as massively controversial. A localised dispute over a single incident hardly calls into question the entire BBC operation.

"Sailors also believe the news organisation places more faith in Iraqi reports than information coming from British or Allied sources""

I think that is silly. As I said, an independent study found that of all the TV channels over here (including Sky), the BBC was the most likely to rely on British government sources for info on the war. (By the way the head of Sky news made a complaint about coalition "spin" on the war).
Has it occurred to you that those soldiers might not have liked it precisely because it was objective? I mean, objective coverage of a war is always going to carry some news that soldiers will not see as supportive. Add the government attacks on the BBC and the fact that it is disliked by a lot of people because of the way it is funded, and you get people predisposed to object to its coverage. Its job is to present the news, not to cheer the troops.

"Fox has it's faults. Beltway boys and Fox N Friends are horrible. O'reilly needs improvement but I think he is still useful. Shep Smith is awesome. Brit Hume is pretty good, boring but informative. Hannity haas right wing blinders on, but Colms and his guests keep him in check. William Kristol appears on Fox every now and then and he is fav. Honestly I don't understand why people have beef with fox."

I only saw Fox properly a few times, during the war. My problem wasn;t with its talk shows, which I didn;t watch; it was with its actual rolling news coverage, which I thought was horribly horribly unobjective and prone to editorialising interjections from anchors and reporters. Admittedly it was a small "sample size" in unusual circumstances.

I'll try to read the WS articles later, thanks.

[nicky g]

From the first article:

"Outside critics were even blunter: They revived the nickname "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation," a coinage from the first Gulf War, when BBC broadcasts from the Iraqi capital were censored by Saddam's government without viewers' being notified."

That was true of several major news organisations that made the judgement call that it was better to have correspondents there hindered in there reproting than to have noone there at all.

""What makes the BBC's behavior particularly heinous," noted Douglas Davis, the London correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, "is the relentless indulgence of its penchant for what might be politely termed 'moral equivalence' at a time when Britain is at war with a brutal enemy and its servicemen are dying on the battlefield." "

I don't think the BBC has to take any lessons in objectivity from the Jerusalem Post of all outlets. Regardless, it isn't a case of moral equivalence; it's a case of not moralising at all, but reporting the facts.

"Mark Damazer, the deputy director of BBC News, did nothing to dispel that kind of criticism when he said (in a speech to Media Workers Against the War, no less) that it would be a "mistake" for BBC journalists to use the word "liberate" when referring to areas now under coalition control. Stephen Whittle, the BBC's controller of editorial policy, piled on, telling his journalists to refer to the armed forces as "British troops" and not "our" troops. "

Both these decisions are correct. Not only does "liberate" imply freeing from a foreign or illegal occupier when they were being taken by an occupying force from the legal government of the country, it also implies a value judgement, which again it is not the news business to report.

"Two days later, on April

5, Gilligan reported, "I'm in the center of Baghdad, and I don't see anything. But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements." At roughly the same time, CNN was broadcasting pictures of the 3rd Infantry driving through the center of Baghdad. By April 11, even the intrepid Gilligan could no longer maintain that the coalition was not in control of Baghdad. So instead he argued that Baghdadis were experiencing their "first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before"--that is, that they felt less safe than they had under Saddam. The prime minister's office shot back, "Try telling that to people put in shredders or getting their tongues cut out." "

Thre were numnerous conflicting reports of the US being both in and out of Baghdad in early April; the fact probably was that they were in control of or present in some parts and not in others. Also, Gilligan was not by any strech the most prominent BBC journalist in Baghdad (that was Rageh Omar), never mind the only one. As for the danger in the early days of the occupation, he was right. (and noone has managed to find any physical evidence that the shredding machine ever existeed since the fall of Saddam).

"For instance, on May 15, John Kampfner filed a story in which he called the April 1 rescue of POW Jessica Lynch "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived." The U.S. Special Forces troops who rescued her "knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital." The Pentagon, he claimed, "had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies" to the extent that the troops had actually gone in firing blanks to make the rescue more dramatic on tape. "

Kamfner isn;t a BBC journalist or employee, he's the the New Statesman magazine, and I imagine this came from some sort of commentary or special report section he was commissioned to do. That said, his description the Jessica Lynch scenario has been borne out by events.

"Of course, BBC spin usually comes in more subtle forms. The use of scare quotes on the BBC website, for example, often betrays a remarkable contempt for the coalition. When Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed by U.S. troops last month, the website blared, "Saddam sons 'dead'" and "Iraq 'deaths' will have huge effect." The next day, having come to terms with the fact of these deaths, the BBC moved on to questioning their value: "U.S. celebrates 'good' Iraq news." "

What's the problem here? If it's the quotation marks, the BBC and many news organisations routinely use them to distance themselves from value judgements being made by others that they're reporting.

", as Christopher Hitchens noted in a perceptive Slate essay, you can no longer depend on BBC journalists even for proper pronunciation. The Beeb's announcers habitually mangle Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's last name (pronounced exactly as it looks) to make it more Jewish-sounding: Vulfervitz.

Hitchens isn't the only one who has noticed something not quite kosher in the BBC's treatment of Jews. The Israeli government, responding to a persistent demonization which it says "verges on the anti-Semitic"--including a documentary which erroneously claimed that the Israeli army uses nerve gas on the Palestinians--recently announced that it would no longer cooperate with the BBC in any way. Israel does not impose similar sanctions on any other news organization. "

Bollocks. The current chairman (Michael Grade) is Jewish. (On a sidenote, I used to have to occasionally deal with his long-term PA and she was the most fervently Zionist, anti-Palestinan racist I have ever had the displeasure to meet). The Sharon govenment denounces any criticism of Israeli actions as anti-semitism.

"What a contrast to the bravery of the BBC! But as sometime BBC commentator Janet Daley wrote in the Telegraph, "BBC staff often say proudly that it is their responsibility to oppose whatever government is in power. Well, actually, it isn't. . . . Examination and analysis are the business of tax-funded journalism. Opposition is the business of mandated politicians." "

The BBC does not routinely oppose the government. In fact Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke, the respective chairman and chief executive of the BBC who resigned after Hutton, were respectively a close personal friend of Gordon Brown and prominent Labour supporter, and a registered Labour donor. If anyting they were too close to the government.

"Defense, saying that he had met with Gilligan to discuss his experiences in Iraq, not the government's dossier. He "did not even consider" that he could have been Gilligan's source until a colleague pointed out that some of the things Gilligan's source told him sounded like things Kelly regularly said. But, Kelly's memo continued, "the description of that meeting in small part matches my interaction with him, especially my personal evaluation of Iraq's capability, but the overall character is quite different. I can only conclude one of three things. Gilligan has considerably embellished my meeting with him; he has met other individuals who truly were intimately associated with the dossier; or he has assembled comments from both multiple direct and indirect sources for his articles." "

Yah, except what Kelly told Newsnight reporter SUsan Kelly on tape contradicted much of what he later said and backed up much of what Gilligan claimed he had said, including that Alistair Campbell was involved in the 45 min claim and strengthening the tone of the documetn against the wishes of many in intelligence. Gilligan initially said that his source had claimed the government knew the 45-minute claim was wrong. Throughout the rest of the programme, he changed this to unreliable, which he said over and over throughout the rest of the programme. He retracted and apologised for the "wrong" later on (before Hutton reported). What Kelly says to Watts on tape makes it clear that he thought the claim was indeed unreliable:


Watts/Kelly conversation (http://news1.thdo.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/03/hutton_inquiry/documents/pdf/appendix03.pdf) (it won't let me paste; but he repeatedly refers to the Number 10 press office/Campbell, and to the fact that many in intelligence were unhappy with the claim, that it was single sourced - as we now know, from Ayad Awalli! - and that the report was misleading).

"Kelly told the committee that he did not believe he was the main source for Gilligan's story. "

From what we now know about what he said to others, it's pretty clear he was either lying or deceiving himself.

"The next day, the government announced that an investigation into the affair would be conducted by Lord Hutton, one of Britain's most senior and respected judges."

Or to put it another way, a conservative judge hand-picked by Tony Blair (nice to be able to choose the referre, no?) involved in several other notorious whitewashes that wrongly exonnerated the government, such as the Bloody Sunday enquiry.

"With the Hutton inquiry now ongoing, there are at least three major questions facing the BBC. First, and most obviously, did Kelly say what Gilligan claims he said? The BBC put out word that Kelly had similar conversations with two other BBC journalists, Gavin Hewitt and Susan Watts. But the reports filed by Hewitt and Watts are much closer to what the Foreign Affairs Committee eventually concluded--that the prime minister's office was guilty, at worst, of overemphasizing certain intelligence--than they are to Gilligan's claim that intelligence was included in the dossier "against [the] wishes" of the intelligence agencies. "

Kelly specifically says in his conversation with Watts that people in the intelligence community were unhappy about the way intelligence was presented in the document (and several senior intelligence figures have confirmed this eg Brian Jones of the Defence Intelligence Service), and that Campbell was involved in strengthening it.

"Second, why was Kelly persistently misidentified? Gilligan called him a "British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier," which was misleading, as Kelly was not involved in the preparation of that part of the dossier that Gilligan went on to discuss. Other BBC journalists then referred to Kelly as an "intelligence source," which he was not, and the BBC Board of Governors called him a "senior intelligence source," which he emphatically was not."

This is nit-picking; Kely wasn;t an employee of MI5 or MI6 but he was one of Britain's most senior weapons experts and deeply deeply involved with the intelligence community and the government assessment of Iraqi WMD.

"Finally, even if Gilligan did correctly report Kelly's claims, why was such an explosive story run based on a single, incorrectly identified, anonymous source, without giving the government a chance to comment?"

This is a fair point. The single source accusation is less interesting - Gilligan made that clear (unlike the government in reference to the 45 minute claim); but he should have asked for comment first. He doesn;t work for the BBC anymore.

"Most disgracefully, John Kampfner--the same BBC reporter who filed the bogus story about Jessica Lynch's rescuers shooting blanks--took to the New Statesman to hint that Kelly may not have committed suicide. (Another article in the same issue of the same magazine speculates on who might have wanted Kelly dead.) "

This is totally irrelevant as it had nothing to do with the BBC, and Kampfner is not a BBC reporter. But on the subject, several prominent UK surgeons wrote an open letter saying that the reported steps Kelly took to kill himslef could not possibly have killed him. There was never a proper inquiry into his death.

"In April, columnist Barbara Amiel joked in the Telegraph that "About the only thing in Saddam's favor was that you could get the death penalty for listening to the BBC." "

Says it all really. Shame for poor old Barbara that she and her husband (also the publisher of the aforementioned Jerusalem Post) are now in deep trouble for taking Hollinger for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The BBC isn't perfect. It's a huge organisation, the biggest news organisation in the world, and it is bound to make mistakes. But the idea that it has some kind of pervasisve left-wing bias or that exaggerated problems relating to one story on one outlet invalidate its entire news coverage are ridiculous.

NB I don;t have time to edit this, so apologise for typos in advance.

[andyfox]

Not sure if they qualify as liberal (I'll leave that assessment to others), but I think NPR does a good job, as does Jim Lehrer on the News Hour.

[wacki]

Damn nicky g, very thorough. I appreciate it. The BBC is huge, but there are big news outlets that are biased like the NYP and the LAT. They are very bad.

I admit that I only had a small sampling of the BBC, and didn't like what I saw. Which could happen on any news outlet, even fox. The Ark Royal incident was what really got me though. But you have a valid point against that as well. I will take another look at the BBC. Do you suggest any reporters/shows? I read the weekly standard, but only really pay attention to Bill Kristol. I also read the NYT but only pay attention to Thomas Friedman as there are alot of reporters there that are biased. I prefer the opt in method for my news, it seems to be the safer way to go. Any suggestions?

[nicky g]

"I will take another look at the BBC. Do you suggest any reporters/shows?"

To be honset not really; after all that I will admit that I am not a particular devotee; I mainly use its website for up-to-date news. Newsnight is OK theough gimmicky. THe World Tonight on Radio 4 is very good. As I said for in-depth news and analysis I prefer the Guardian, Channel 4 and the Economist. My defence of it isn't particularly out of a great love for its shows, more because of how inaccurate and unfair many of the attacks on it have been.

[superleeds]

Why do you want a 'Good LIBERAL News outlet? What's wrong with just a plain old Good News Outlet? The BBC is the closest thing to what I think you want. I read your reply to Nicky G explaining you had problems with it and I grant you it does have it's faults and is aimed at a British audience and therefore not internationaly friendly but as a mainstream News Organisation it is the most unbiased and fair IMHO.

You could subscribe to The Associated Press or Reuters if you want bear facts.

[wacki]

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Why do you want a 'Good LIBERAL News outlet? What's wrong with just a plain old Good News Outlet?

You could subscribe to The Associated Press or Reuters if you want bear facts.

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I like rueters alot.

What I meant by good Liberal news outlets is that I often see people attacking other people for watching only FNC and reading drudge. I just want to be able to say that I get my news from a wide variety of news outlets thats all.