[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

I'm a bit disappointed with this whole thread. Sure, I imagined I had found some kind of legitimate proof of my position that fit my perceptions quite snugly, but I've been proven wrong before. That bothers me, but in a typical way.

It bothers me more that we seem to have disproven the existence of "common sense." I cannot concede that so easily. Maybe this is just reactionary denial on my part, but I don't believe so.

I developed my own little theory a couple of years ago that we live in a post-objective world (TM) . The very idea of objectivity has become quaint, if not antiquated. Facts no longer matter--maybe they never did, and I was being naive on that front to start with.

It started last century, perhaps, with math and physics--Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Godle's Incompleteness Theorem and Chaos Theory. In the quantum world it seems that nothing is as it seems, the base of matter is made up of probability clouds, the universe is teeming with "virtual particles" that lie between existence and non-existence.

I saw the post-objective age become manifest in the global warming debate. The Greenhouse Effect can be demonstrated given the equipment in any high school lab. It's physics are fairly well understood. And yet, people didn't believe. Simply didn't believe it. I can understand being skeptical about the response of the complex/chaotic ecosystem to a change in the radiation balance (eg global warming writ large), sure. But to deny that the Greenhouse Effect was real just floored me.

I see it with the dramatic rise in conspiracy theorists. Who says we landed on the moon? 9/11 was a false-flag operation.

Facts, in these debates, have no bearing at all. Facts cannot withstand rhetoric. And when that's the case, common sense is bound to go out the window.

Zipperfish wrote:

Okay, technically they were separating sources that call themselves as "news reporting" from sources that call themselves editorializing. All the flaws of self-identification apply, but it's pathetically easy to separate the newspaper section that says Op/Ed at the top from the sections that don't.

True enough. I guess I was referring to the fact that talk radio was not including, though almost completely concerned with current events and (given the ratings) overwhelmingly right wing.

Quote:

Maybe you're right and the study suffered from such intrinsic bias as to be meaningless. But at least consider it on it's actual traits and internal logic rather than the cultural environment in which it exists.

I think I have. I don't agree with their methodology. I don't accept citations of think tanks by news agencies to be a valid proxy for bias. I'm not sure how I would go about it myself. I suppose I might get a very large representative study study group, stick them in a room and present them articles or transcripts of various media, but hiding the source. And then I'd ask them to rate the stories on a left/right spectrum. That way you get away from having to define a "center."