the sad part is, that sounds like an improvement over the U.S. mainstream media

I think it takes way more work to discover which outlets in the US are biased in which ways. And if people don't know they have to do that work?

Where does BBC fall on the scale, ita?

Where does BBC fall on the scale, ita?

Their "News for Wombats" is pretty liberal....

I know I now prefer BBC News to any US news other than The Daily Show.

At the time, though, I couldn't have told you about the bias. BBC and ITV seemed to have about the same sort of coverage -- my parents balanced this out themselves, since there weren't any other TV stations to do so.

I suspect that is much different now.

What's also odd is I have a friend who has no clue who Terri Schaivo is (was?). Hubby and I were talking about it, and he looked utterly blank. He doesn't watch much TV, but he goes on the internet and there are always newspaper and magazine displays about. I'm amazed at the level of inattention one has to have to avoid things like this.

I expect the bias varies by department within a newspaper, rather than the whole newspaper. The Wall Street Journal tends to have very good, fair investigative reporters, and an incredibly right-wing Op-Ed page. The Times's political coverage can sometimes be laughably timid, just as Krugman and Herbert are ranting wildly in the Op-Eds.

I do think that the real problems tend to be laziness and timidity; outright bias is obvious and avowed and is easy to take into account. Although outright bias is no excuse for promulgating lies.

With the Terri Schiavo case, it's just a more dramatic headline to speak of "saving" her and of her "desperate hours" and stuff like that. I can see the appeal, from a newspaper-selling standpoint. But it sets a biased tone, even among people who would swear ferociously that they're not biased.

when did we and they start buying the idea that "he said/she said" is an adequate substitute for an evaluation of the merits of the claims on both sides?

One of the blogs I read recently the sports page as the last bastion of reality-based journalism.

Imagine trying to update your brackets for the NCAAs if your only source of information were, say, members of the White House Press Corps: "Texas Tech supporters were claiming victory Sunday after their regional quarterfinal game against Gonzaga. In Spokane, however, proponents of Gonzaga disputed this claim, noting that their team's point total was equal to that of Kentucky's and greater than that of Utah's, and that both of these teams are advancing to the next round."

Oh, brave new world. [link]

I like the Sith-Style Mouse Pad. I wanna get one - then I can say, "I'm mousin' Sith-Style." Or is Sith-Style something that one can possess independent of mousing?

I got Sith class and I got Sith style.

Last night on some news channel (I don't watch them and can't tell them apart) Pat Buchanan was arguing with a woman and a man over Terri Schiavo. Pat was yelling over them and spewing lies and ignoring him. The woman asked point blank "what about the hundreds of people whose feeding tubes are removed every day?" I'm not sure how accurate that number is. Pat yelled right over her about something else. Then she repeated the question and he got mad and told her he wasn't talking about ventilators but feeding tubes and she should know it's different. She looked like she was about to smack him and corrected him "I said feeding tubes, not life support, feeding tubes, what about those ---" and Pat cut her off and started yelling at her again. She tried to bring it up again but he yelled over her and never answered.

I flipped through the channels some and when I came back they were still arguing but about something different. Pat kept trying to say that he and she agreed on some point and she'd cut him off with "we do not agree. Don't speak for me, you can't speak for me." and then he'd try to put words in her mouth and she'd stop him again.

It was frustrating to watch. And yesterday I checked out the book "Attack Poodles" and tried to read some but it was just too depressingly real and it was written before the election so there was lots of "if the unthinkable happens and Bush is re-elected." to make it even more depressing.