Newspaper Endorses the Candidate It's Suing Over Copyright 166
An anonymous reader writes "Remember Righthaven? The copyright troll owned by the owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal? You may remember, then, that Righthaven had sued Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting LVRJ stories on her site. At the same time, LVRJ has been having its execs talk about how copyright infringement is no different than garden variety theft. So ... doesn't it seem a bit odd that the LVRJ is endorsing the very same candidate that it sued for such 'theft'?"
Corporations (Score:5, Insightful)
. So ... doesn't it seem a bit odd
Corporations aren't just immortals, they're schizophrenic immortals. With 'human' rights.
Try to keep this straight.
Nothing odd about it (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not odd, that's how it's supposed to work. The editorial staff should be independent from the business side of the business. It's only after being exposed to Murdoch-media for too long that you think the owner should be the only one deciding the newspaper's opinions.
It's also possible that the owner is - shock! - able to disagree with someone on one issue but agrees on others. Or maybe he doesn't put his own interest ahead of what he thinks is good for society. OF course if you want to be cynical, maybe he wants the candidate to win so she can pay whatever he's suing for.
Not Odd (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a statement on how bad the opposing candidate is.
Newspapers? Pshaw. (Score:3, Insightful)
I only read newspapers for the hilarity of their inaccuracy and the absurdity of what they leave in and what they leave out.
About twenty years ago when my children were small and we lived in a bad neighborhood, there was a gang war right down the street. Probably more than 50 rounds were fired; it sounded similar to strings of firecrackers going off (the timbre was different, of course). An innocent bystander was shot and crippled as he tried to get his kids inside. I watched a police car go airborne as it crossed the railroad tracks ate a very high rate of speed. Two days later the crack house the gangsters lived in "mysteriously" burned to the ground.
Not a word of this made the paper, [sj-r.com] although "news" of petty vandalism and burglaries and so forth were.
A few weeks ago a school bus carrying fifteen kids ran a red light and was hit by an SUV, and missed being hit by inches by another vehicle. This happened less than two minutes before I walked into the bar at that intersection. Several police cars showed up, then another school bus came by, parked in the biker bar's* [google.com] parking lot and the kids got on it and left. There were no injuries, but the SUV's air bags deployed and it was damaged pretty severely.
The next day's paper carried stories about fender benders, petty vandalism, and residential burglaries. Not a word about the school bus wreck or the school bus driver running a red light with kids on board.
And they wonder why their circulation continues to drop.
* Google maps is out of date; the place is called "Scooter's" now.
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:4, Insightful)
. It's only after being exposed to Murdoch-media for too long that you think the owner should be the only one deciding the newspaper's opinions.
Randolph Hearst predates him by a century, Ben Franklin when he was publishing stuck his nose into things and every other newspaper owner before them.
It's obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
The alternative would be to endorse Harry Reid. Given those choices, it doesn't matter what Angle stole, she still looks like the better candidate.
Re:Newspapers? Pshaw. (Score:2, Insightful)
why do you guys use "rate of speed" when "speed" would suffice ? to sound more seriouser ?
It has to be this way! (Score:1, Insightful)
Politics is about greed, corruption, power, influence, and nepotism.
And there is never anything we, the people can do about it, right?
It is just too bad we have to sit here and take it like serfs/slaves/peasants/rabble while our betters scheme and do the mysterious things they do in their castles.
If only there were a better way. [metagovernment.org]
Oh well.
Re:Not Odd (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Odd (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe Senator Reid hasn't been playing ball with them lately.
Re:Ideally (Score:2, Insightful)
Ideally, the newspaper should be reporting the news and not endorsing anybody.
Re:welcome to modern politics (Score:1, Insightful)
What recession? If you're one of the rich people funding this "Tea Party" astroturf campaign you couldn't be happier: your company is making record profits, and sinking the country into a deflationary death spiral will make the billions you sucked off the government teat over the past decade worth even more than it already is. Sure, you'll have to move to Austrailia or Canada when the Republican's 2011 budget causes unemployment to jump to 15 percent, just like when they passed an austerity measure in 1937, but that doesn't really matter because none of your money is invested in the US economy anyway.
Re:Not Odd (Score:0, Insightful)
"He declared the Iraq war "lost" in 2007, and that the surge would be a failure."
The war was lost, and is lost. We achieved none of our goals we had in starting the war, unless you think turning Iraq into a satellite of Iran was the whole point of the war, in which case, Mission Accomplished!
Also, there were no WMD. Democracy in Iraq is a sham. We enabled ethnic cleansing of the Sunni by the Shia. Shall I go on?
Also too the surge was a failure, except as a PR exercise to get the MSM to stop talking about Iraq. The surge has not cured the endemic violence and chaos in Iraq. Levels of violence went down BEFORE the surge, thanks to the simple expedient of paying the Sunni insurgents not to fight us - a simple bribe that could have saved a lot of lives had we taken that course in 2004 instead of waiting three long and bloody years - and also cooperating with them against Al Qaeda in Iraq, which the Sunni insurgents had wanted to do back in 2004 but were rebuffed by the Bush administration neo-cons who preferred to force the Iraqis to fight us, rather than compromise and work with them. Levels of violence also went down because there were no more people to ethnically cleanse - the Sunni populations had already been driven out of Shia areas before the Surge; the Surge did not prevent this ethnic cleansing, but the Bush administration cynically credited resulting lower levels of violence to the surge and the MSM went along with the lie.
"He made prejudiced statements about President Obama."
Boo-f-ing-hoo. On war, foreign policy, torture, civil liberties, etc., Obama is no different than Bush.
Leverage (Score:3, Insightful)
Their lawsuit gives them leverage over her.
If she wins, she gets power.
It's good for business to have leverage over people in power.
Re:Ideally (Score:3, Insightful)
As opposed to when their partiality is more subtle? You just take their news at face value then?
Always be suspicious of the reporting. Always. It's all done by partial observers. All of it.
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't It Seem a Bit Odd? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't you realize that Murdoch is "right wing extremism" and that is bad, but people like Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr are okay because he's left wing?
When people troll on about "Faux News" and Murdock I simply point to the problems with other "news" organizations that don't report certain news stories because it doesn't fit the narrative of the left. Which is why people should get the news raw and and unfiltered.
And the internet provides a very broad voice for news accounts of important events and stories. Some are slanted left, others right, and somewhere there is the truth. It is out there, you just have to learn to filter out the bias.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is editorial independence such a foreign concept to you 'mericans ?
Possibly so. Thank goodness you're here to explain it to us.
Making blanket statements about other nationalities, however, is a concept we're very familiar with.
Re:slightly better version (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to have misspelled fascist.
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:4, Insightful)
>>When people troll on about "Faux News" and Murdock I simply point to the problems with other "news" organizations that don't report certain news stories because it doesn't fit the narrative of the left. Which is why people should get the news raw and and unfiltered.
Shush! Next you'll be asking people to think for themselves!
I honestly think the best way to read news is to read *everything*, from Mother Jones to The Blaze, from NPR to Fox News, and when you find points of disagreement in their narratives, dig into it and figure it out for yourself. Too much work for most people, but if you just listen to one news source, due to the gatekeeper effect, you'll have a very biased idea of what is happening in our world.
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Take the newspaper. They have editorials. They are labeled as such and only two pages out of 50. But a news channel with more editorial than news and nothing differentiating them isn't a news channel. When even their name is lying to me, it's hard to be a fan.
And no, "the other guys do it too" doesn't excuse unethical behavior. If everyone else in your class cheated, I'd still expect you to not cheat. If you did, even if everyone else did it too, I'd still expel you.
Re:Nothing odd about it (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not a partisan issue. Murdoch isn't worse than Sulzberger because he's conservative and Sulzberger is liberal. Murdoch is worse than Sulzberger because he doesn't care about journalism. Not one little bit.
Other than the various business news organizations News Corp. owns (also probably a lot of local papers which I'm not familiar with) most of his newspapers and TV channels are complete tabloid trash. Fox News devotes 7 hours a day to news (even being generous and counting Shephard Smith and Matt Braier as completely non-editorial) and 17 hours to opinion, which on Fox means a carefully selected batch of stories that reinforce a hard conservative viewpoint served with an extra helping of indignity and anger. Just because he's talking about current events does not make Bill O'Reilly a journalist. And how often does the New York Post or The Sun break a significant news story that has nothing to do with sports or entertainment?
Murdoch is certainly the more successful businessman. But he actively manipulates the popular dialog in order to achieve his own political gains, and he does this all over the world. As soon as you have evidence of a Sulzberger-run news organization manipulating or avoiding a story because it might affect The New York Times Company's bottom line, then you will have a legitimate comparison.