Al Jazeera is producing some of the finest global news coverage in the world today. I became a regular viewer recently so I could keep up on political debates with my family based in South Africa who have AJ on satellite.
Watching AJ reminds me how human-interest and emotion-centric the local news has become. The Egyptian coverage on CNN is nauseating. Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings.
This starts off well but then he damns them with faint praise. What is wrong with thinking the weak are right because they are weak? It is far better than everyone else's heuristic that might right. And if covering the viewpoints of those who have no power is AlJazeera's "despotism" then its employees should feel nothing but pride.
Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings
What's nauseating is knowing they broadcast that because they show what people want to see.
It's not on snopes yet, but it seems unlikely that Fox's cartographers would be that incompetent (especially since they probably buy their map imagery from a third party); this is most likely a photoshop job. And while it's amusing, I'd rather stick to disliking Fox and News Corp. for their blatant partisanship and pandering than feeling superior to them over something that's entirely fiction.
> It's not on snopes yet, but it seems unlikely that Fox's cartographers would be that incompetent (especially since they probably buy their map imagery from a third party)
Not really. There have been a number of instances of that from US domestic news services in the last ~10 years (Czech Republic labelled as Switzerland, Spain labelled as France, …).
No, it's because they were given a huge budget and told to spend it to hire and resource the best journalists. This started with the exodus of Arab journalists from the BBC world service, who downsized (Blair should have severely regretted this for what it unleashed in factual reporting on his fantasy dossiers) and continued with a deliberate attempt to hire the troublemakers from around the world - real journalists who cared about injustice rather than ratings.
The disregard for ratings is of course possible because they are funded by an oil rich dictator. He is not benign - no such dictator exist - but if the only good thing he ever did was create AlJazeera, then I would still be forever grateful.
Of course, in the true spirit of Make Something People Want, the disregard for simple ratings is what is causing AJ's growth in viewers around the world. A good chunk of people want real news, and these were the same people who propelled CNN to dominance, back when they had invested in news.
I'm guessing you haven't argued with very many feminists. Thatcher isn't exactly a feminist icon (WP: "Many British feminists regarded her as "an enemy".") and a lot of feminists I've encountered consider rationalism and emotional reserve to be artifacts of patriarchal oppression. adscft is overstating the case, perhaps, but his point isn't entirely baseless (and your response is quite the non-sequitur).
Had feminism not prevailed in the West, the West would be a male-dominated society, and things like the news would be controlled exclusively by men. Additionally, men would have continued to abide by traditional gender roles (which would have not been questioned or undergone change[1]), and the traditional male gender role is less overtly emotional. Hence, the news would be less overtly emotional.
That's a perfectly reasonable and straightforward argument which raises eyebrows only because it hints at the idea that feminism had some negative effects.
The comparison to Al-Jazeera might not be sound, however--masculine emotional reserve is a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Northern European culture, not necessarily Arabic culture.
[1] Feminism, as a natural consequence of advancing the position of women in society, questions gender roles by necessity. This is what makes the reference to Thatcher so inept--Thatcher advanced in a male-dominated profession by following a masculine gender role; Thatcher's Britain was willing to accept a woman PM, but only so long as she governed like a man. This is a far cry from what feminists would like to see.
In a male-dominated society, the news is still controlled not by men or women but by money, in the form of advertising revenue.
In a male-dominated society women are stay at home housewives, with time to flip through the channels and shop for household goods, making them a very important consumer demographic and a prime target for advertisers.
Therefore, television news would be 'emotional' and targeted to women.
I don't see how my argument is any less baseless conjecture than yours.
That's a decent argument, but my point isn't that feminism did lead to emotional news reporting, it's that the idea is something reasonable people might believe.
Plus, your counterargument is still pretty flawed--under traditional gender roles, most news is of no interest to women, and wouldn't be targeted to them, which is why news was traditionally aired during evenings, and nights when men were home, while soap operas and talk shows were aired during the day when housewives were home alone. (Come to think of it, your local network affiliate schedule still looks a lot like that.)
I don't know much about feminism as an intellectual movement, but there are definitely a lot casual feminists who consider Silicon Valley style entrepreneurship to be discriminatory because it requires reading non-fiction books in order to be successful.
The basic argument, if I undertand it correctly, is that women should be able to achieve success in any given field by doing things that women are stereotypically interested in. So, for example, they would consider Silicon Valley to be patriarchal because there isn't any role for women who only read People and US Weekly.
I know someone will accuse me of being sexist, but this was actually the consensus from the Women and Entrepreneurship class I took in college, albeit it wasn't phrased in exactly this way.
A straw man is a type of logical fallacy. I'm not making any argument; rather, I'm merely reporting a (possibly flawed) observation, so I don't really see how logical fallacies are relevant.
One tends to hear mention of logical fallacies in any intellectually-focused forum, not only HN. HN happens to be intellectually-focused, so the straw man and other fallacies will see frequent mention here.
However, this is unrelated to the grandparent comment, which was (perhaps facetiously) primarily discussing feminism and political correctness, not logical fallacies.
"The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things."
Excuse me while I die laughing. I haven't read that in a while. There is the inkling of a valid point there, but it's all thrown away by shit like describing PM as a 'rape manual.'
Just remember: these people are not representative of modern feminist thought!
EDIT: oh shit i forgot about this paragraph:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
How exactly do you define feminists? If you define feminists as a few hundred radicals who work in universities, you'll get one answer, but if you define feminists as the few hundred million people who believe that woman should have the same legal and social rights and privileges as men, you'll get a very different answer.
I mean, my wife and mother are both feminists. And they both have (or are getting) graduate degrees in electrical engineering. And they're both masters of "rationalism and emotional reserve" -- so in a very glaring way, your argument here contradicts my experience.
Watching AJ reminds me how human-interest and emotion-centric the local news has become. The Egyptian coverage on CNN is nauseating. Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings.