JackRiddler wrote:AlicetheKurious wrote:8bitagent wrote:I like Democracy Now, Glenn Greenwald, Rawstory, etc.
These are not news organizations, with correspondents in the field. RT, CNN, BBC, France24, Al-Jazeera, etc., break the news stories, gather the raw data and often carry live coverage, which makes them irreplaceable. The very fact that they have competing and sometimes mutually exclusive agendas means that they often fill in each other's blanks, covering stories that the others wouldn't. IOW, while each one by itself provides only a piece of the puzzle, taken together they provide a far more complete picture than you could ever get otherwise.
In contrast, DemocracyNow and the others mostly have analysts on, to interpret the news from a particular point of view.
The point about live coverage and correspondents is taken. However Democracy Now! has correspondents in the field. They've had an Egyptian-American reporter in Cairo since the beginning of the revolution and easily had the best field reporting from Egypt of any American source. They were covering the anti-SCAF protests daily last fall, when no other American source was bothering any more with Egypt. They have thoughtful, long-form interviews with newsmakers and some original reporting pretty much every day. Amy Goodman was on the plane with Zelaya when he succeeded in returning to Honduras! From listening to the live broadcast most mornings (it wakes me up) I'd say at least one-half of DN is DN-produced. (About three minutes a day seems to consist of flubs and tech failures.)
It very much matters what you choose to cover, of course you know that, and DN definitely gives more substantive and truthful coverage of more stories (albeit at least half second-hand) that matter than the once-mighty CNN, which fills 24 hours times 3 channels a day. But about 22 on each channel seem to be repeats, or Anderson Cooper, or the really disgusting Wolf Blitzer doing non-stop palaver about the usual bullshit, or celebrity porn. I don't watch CNN but it is always on at work and they have six hours a day of Republican primary bullshit, almost all of it in-studio palaver about the two or three politician soundbites of the day, just like FOX or MS-NBC. Plus six hours of murder-of-the-month (they're very slow about rotating the murder, it really is one a month). They've broken some ground in the Pathetic Department by getting heavily into Twitter commentary, FFS! They have cat video segments! The same applies to most of these networks. Consider also the common use of VNNs by the US networks, they just lift the footage as provided by corporations or the government.
In short, your point is relative. Are we talking about inside the G8 pig-out or the protest outside? Because BBC is only going to properly cover the inside. And NBC often as not is going to use someone else's footage. The best live and on-the-scene coverage of the Occupy protests, for example, has been provided by the Occupy movement. Hands down, and 99 percent. CNN gets the footage of pepper-spraying incidents off Youtube. Finally, although it gives a satanic amount of hours to the imperialists and cutthroats of AEI, I'd have to say the three C-SPAN channels produce an enormous amount of on-scene material just by pointing a camera.
Very good points. "Relative" really is the thing. We cannot get around that. Heck, every one of us has an agenda, so to speak, insofar as just about any individual of discerning taste will put effort into crafting their stated opinions carefully, so as to mesh with their own worldview.
That said, one cannot discount the level to which a Westerner's opinion about RT is shaped by a lifetime of American television and print media. It seems to me that everyone on this thread agrees that a grain of salt is always in order. That's already healthy. But if I read the OP correctly, the argument is being made that one should not share that news even with a grain of salt. In other words: Under no circumstances get caught taking anything on RT seriously. If you do watch it, don't tell anybody unless you're ridiculing it, otherwise the baddies will paint you red (or something). I can't share that attitude. F the baddies, I say.
As regards Democracy Now!, I am not one to take Amy Goodman to task, for she has put her ass on the line, literally, many times. She walks the walk. But I will suggest, gently, that that particular station is not averse to tacit cries for intervention "here, instead of there" ("there" being wherever the US/NATO weapons happen to be doing indiscriminate damage at the time).
My use of the word "station" reminds me: Not having watched television, as it were, for quite some time: All of my exposure to these media are via links to the sundry toobs around the web. Does RT also actively promote the Russian regime?
