February 24, 2010

• (politics) Two Cable News Debates on Torture and Global Warming.

  Intro:

  I've recently seen two interesting debates on cable news.  In the first we have Bill O'Reilly hosting a debate on climate change (global warming) between Bill Nye the Science Guy and a meteorologist named Joe (didn't catch his last name).  In the second we have Joe Scarborough hosting a debate between Daniel Freedman and Marc Thiessen debating about whether enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) are actually effective at producing reliable intelligence (aside from moral issues).
  

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  Pros and Cons
  
  What I like is that both the O'Reilly Factor and Morning Joe actually put these things on.  It represents that people want to see a fair debate even if experts on both issues have long resolved the conclusion (humans are contributing to global warming and torture doesn't produce reliable intelligence whereas other methods reliably do).  That doesn't help all the doubting Thomas' at home who can't sort political theater from scientific fact. 

  What I don't like is how frantic these debates are and how it doesn't seem like we have a clean up crew to carefully sort out the facts and arguments being disputed for everyone who is not an expert and can't hope to follow along.  Here's the list of facts both parties agree on.  Here's the few facts they disagree on.  Now let's have an even more focused debate on each of those contested facts.  If you don't do something like that, it seems to me people will leave with the same prejudices they walked in with.  Even O'Reilly says at the conclusion of the climate change debate, "I'd flunk both your classes." 

  If it were up to me, we'd actually have a straight up national debate channel rather than these hit and runs to consistently sort out the facts and arguments of every important national issue.  
  

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  I only have a link for the first:

  Bill Nye in No Spin Zone

  Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to embed a video from FOX news.  However the MSNBC setup is incredibly easy to figure out and even has a beginning and end point setter built right in the coding for you. 

  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

  
  

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  Outro:

  Oh, and if you'd like to see atheist, John Loftus lose to Dinesh D'Souza, that debate is now on youtube.  I was there in person.  *facepalm*  To be fair, D'Souza probably lost in terms of drops.  You can't just smear the opening statement and then pretend like it didn't address anything you were about to talk about.  Fortunately later that week, Richard Carrier clobbered Mike Licona yet again (click here for their first debate).  I'm not sure if that was recorded or not (I was in person there, too), but if I find it, I'll be sure to post it.

  Ben

  • 9:24 am
  • 1 Comment