CuriousNotion wrote:
I recently watched RussiaToday on youtube. I found the news station biased against the USA and NATO to the point where they wouldnt just create one sided stories (especially of the libyan war , Kosovo war and Georgian war) but they sometimes ignore crimes commited by the side they supported , lie or exagerate statistics and 'accidently' get translations incorrect.
Fox news can also be condemed for there biased views and shows like the O'reilly factor which has absolutely given false information!
A news channel , in my opinion should never be biased , Its solely supposed to tell the news without any political agenda.
I am not even a huge fan of Americas foreign policy but the portrait that russiatoday has portrayed stinks of propaganda. RT will never be seen reporting of the wrong doings of the russian government , probably because RT is funded by the Russian Government.
Russia Today IS outrageously biased in its coverage of Libya.
The fact that Im not sure if I support us getting involved in Libya is all the more reason that I want unbiased coverage of the war there- so their bias is quite irritatting.
To save money I dtiched cable and set up that digital antennae thing that we all got from the government that was collecting dust in the house so I can get digital TV off the air.
From the air in my area it turns out that you can get five stations on the MHz network ( a collection of international networks). Five MHz international stations are next to each other on my dial. My two favorites are right next to each other - AL Jeezera, and Russia Today (or RT).
Both give an interesting non-america POV on the news.
But Al Jazeera is surprisingly unbiased (more like the BBC than Fox), but RT is something else.
ON RT the written copy in front of the latest footage from Libya will say things like "Nato drops 'humanitarian' bombs on Tripoli". Opiniated sarcasm right on the front page-long before they even get to the Op-ed section!
They report flimsy rumors about libyan rebels "torturing prisoners" without mentioning more substantiated reports of atrocities commited by Khaddafi loyalists.
We viewers know that its a nasty civil war, but gimmie a break! Were not so dumb that we are going to buy into believing that ONLY the rebels and nato forces are evil and that Khaddaffi is poor innocent victimized version of father christmas.
I surfed to the neighboring Al Jeezera during one of these anti-nato hatchet stories about Libya on RT and- as luck had it -Jazeera also had a newsstory about LIbya. Al Jeezera's story was about how Libyan graffiti and cartoon artists were now excercising their new found freedom to draw and lampoon Khaddaffi. Freedom made possible by the rebellion.
You would have thought that the two networks were talking about countries on two different planets instead of both being about Libya!
RT in America has some interesting alternative american news shows, and it can do that because it is free of american corporate advertisers. If you imbibe in Fox and then want to see the left wing equivelent as an antidote, skip MSNBC, go to RT. MSNBC, despite having Rachel Maddow, is actually quite corporate and quite namby pamby. RT is the true equivalent of Fox's bareknuckled bias.
But - this is my theory- RT seems to be connected to the Russian governemnt and thus (on some issues) it apparently acts as a mouth piece for Putin.
That would explain their anti-nato bias in covering Libya. Russia and China both oppose the Nato intervention there.
So RT is more free than american media in some ways and less free in others. Which is all the more reason( when you think about it) to watch it to counter balance the bias of american news.
25 Jun 2011, 1:42 pm
