Iran's News Agency Picks Up Onion Story 118
J053 writes "FARS, the Iranian news agency, ran a story about a Gallup poll which showed that 'the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. president Barack Obama.' '"I like him better," said West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski, who, along with 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters, confirmed he would much rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad.' Only problem was, it was a story from The Onion. Not only that, they took credit for it! The Onion responded by stating that 'Fars is a subsidiary and has been our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s.'"
Re:Some background (Score:5, Insightful)
anounced Ahmadinejad's "victory" 3 hours before the polls were over...
So it is similar to our fox news?
Re:For sure! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news than FARS is claiming to be doing in Iran. (and If you want 'breaking news' try TMZ). If Fox were so serious about actually reporting news, they wouldn't fill all their prime-time, most-profitable hours with pundit shock-jocks like Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck.
Know your trademarks. Or psuedo-trademarks, or whatever. Better yet, try to understand the media industry that claims to be reporting news.
Re:For sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news
If Fox News was reliably bad, you could simply take their headlines and invert them to find out the truth. In order to be completely useless it actually has to get things right occasionally.
Well, it's the same here... (Score:2, Insightful)
...except that Fox News doesn't quote the Onion, but rather like the Onion, they make stuff up out of whole cloth, based on what they expect their viewers to believe.
They even went to court in Florida as an amicus to defend the practice.
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BMO
Simple rule for bias (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a simple rule for determining if a news agency is biased or not. Do they agree with your point of view? Then they are unbiased. Do they disagree with your point of view? Then they are biased.
Check this for yourself, why do you think the BBC has changed? There are plenty of reports of them doing the states bidding decades before the cases you mention, like their reporting on the miners strikes.
So... why did you consider them unbiased before? Before they said what you wanted to hear? Could it be that this biased BBC is also biased on subjects where you agree with the tone of their reporting. Nah, of course not. That would mean you are biased too. And that could never be the case could it?
The Onion is having fun with credit though (Score:4, Insightful)
They have added a link saying "For more on this story: Please visit our Iranian subsidiary organization, Fars." with a link so a screen cap of the story on Fars.
I always love it when a real news organization gets punked by the Onion :).
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of what happens in the U.S. appears to be satire. I along with a lot of people got taken in by the Romney airplane window thing. We've heard so many odd things from senior politicians and candidates that it's really not easy to discern the poes from the nutters. The U.S. has elected officials wasting time trying to push creationism in to the science class, obsession with abstinence only education, and this odd idea that universal health care is synonymous with Bolshevism.
Not saying we're perfect though. We have homeopathy and other crazy shit coming out of our earholes. We have vaccine denialism, denial of climate change, people who function daily in a modern society while still believing that an invisible guy in the sky is listening to their heaven-sent words, and organic/natural products being fetishised.
We have a Daily Mail led army of middle aged white guys, simultaneously angry and despondent, because immigrants and queers are giving their houses cancer. Had a discussion the other night with a long-term Daily Mail reader, and it was a Gish gallop of nonsense and generalisations. Not a good sign when someone hurls vitriol at a group called "them", without taking the time to clarify membership of this group (i.e. "pakis"), it's pretty clear that the Mail is strong in them. Fun fact: The reason why crime is running out of control in the UK (despite statistics showing a long trend of decline), is that police recruitment is focussing too much on gays and women, and should instead only have tall straight men (presumably white) on the beat.
A lot of this stuff doesn't really surface in public debate. A politician in the UK claiming that pregnancy resulting from rape probably isn't legitimate rape would be retiring to spend time with the family. The UK is generally secular, and religion tends to be more a personal and understated thing, so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter. In the U.S. there seems to be more support available for the extreme views. I'm writing as an outside, so do please correct me if I'm wrong here.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's next? (Score:2, Insightful)
Polls show those who watch John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are more properly and successfully informed than those who watch the rest of this political hocome. I myself enjoy a laugh or two while realizing we're all fucked.