eamonman's Journal: Neutral TV Programming

I'm not normally a political person. But after watching enough of the Middle east War/One Sided beatdown (what was that quote, you can't havea rivalry if one side always wins... that applies here) going on right now... I mean, when you hear about the stats, 200+ people dead, thousands wounded, with a near complete arterial infrastructure destroyed on one side while we have like 10+ people dead, with some holes in buildings and roads... tt doesn't really sound like a fair fight. And no one seems to be quetioning that; they just start blaming the original kidnappings and the seemingly logical retaliation. It sounds so ludicrous; it's like chastising a kid with a black eye for kicking the bully in the shoe.

Sadly I only really noticed this when looking through the Daily Show archives (Acutally originally looking for clips of the hilarious John Hodgman) and seeing some of the current videos that were implicitly making fun of the situation.

This led to the casual surfing of YouTube; but instead of looking for the next stupid video (i.e. 720 dunk, zindane headbutt remixes), I found a lot of the videos made by people there in the middle east. While some of the personal videos taken by regular people does scare you on the empathy level:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lv0iwbRFEQ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-Pzgs7KNY

I mean, I would be scared out of my mind if bombs starting landing near me.

But basiically the news reports that are related to those stories were interesting. These other ones were taken from the Lebanese perspective. Just having that new side was really informative. One person linked to
LinkTV, an independent news station which is making daily news segments of news reports taken from various Middle Eastern countries (both pro arab and pro israeli). These give a nice balance to this situation. After watching a few of them, it's really apparent how unbalanced it is here in America.

Its sad; I used to think that I knew where the news stations stood. I at least knew that FOX News had the conservative bias (basically only can trust the sports and the weather reports); but it seems that CNN isn't really different either, Maybe it's a little more liberal/moderate, but you'll never hear a commentator knocking the president.

Oh well; I guess I could use some precious TIVO space and get BBCA's BBC World news.