— Donald

But you can say without a doubt Fox News is biased?

Donald: “That said, when I was in a situation when Fox was on display, I was appalled by the naked jingoism on display.”

Ahhhh.. so the opinion is based on what, 30 minutes of viewing? A few hours maybe? What program did you see, a “talk show” type hosted by an admitted conservative? That would be Foxs’ conservative version of a Larry King. Liberals think a conservative talk show format is “jingoism” whereas a liberal version is journalism.

On the other hand I watched ABC, CBS and NBC news broadcasts for 20 years before I gave them up as hopeless.

So why did you insert ABM into the discussion in the first place?

Never mind…

Actually, I don’t like either one. I don’t own a television. There is _always_ something better to do and / or a better source of information, especially in this Internet-enabled world.

That said, when I was in a situation when Fox was on display, I was appalled by the naked jingoism on display. If that is “unbiased” news, then yes I want nothing to do with it.

— Donald

Who told you that North Korea has no “decoy capacity”? What military has ever had trouble making decoys?

And yeah, the government should never reward pathetic, inexcusable failure with guaranteed funding.

Fox has as good a grasp on facts vs bias as does CBS/CNN. Of course you’re not going to gore CBS/CNN’s ox since they are toing YOUR line.

You mean like, say, Fox Television?

— Donald

You’re skipping around a bit so let me sort this out; I’ll start with the ground based system. I think we’ve already agreed that it has not as yet worked as well as we would like.

Now you say, “the Naval system hasn’t been shown to work well” and site that it has failed only one of six tests as proof of that assertion. By most accounts 83% success is pretty good for a test program, and when you consider that the failure was in 2003 and that the root cause of the failure was identified and corrected that one failure carries less weight that it would if it were unexplained or more recent.

As far as not using decoys, well I’m not sure what you expect. It is a developing program and decoy discrimination IS planned. For the time being this is a very good system, better than no system for sure, to deal with a low launch rate situation by a country like North Korea that doesn’t have any decoy capacity anyway.

Kuperberg: “Not that it really matters, because they are still funding both systems. As Taylor Dinerman explained it in the Space Review, missile defense is an unstoppable success — politically.”

A good thing too. I take it that your response to a failure in a program would be to just give up?

Kuperberg: “And what is your take on it? That the reputations of these colossal government programs might suffer at the hands of privately owned newspapers. Which one spends your tax money, NASA or the New York Times? Which one has a bigger budget?”

You must have a very low opinion of the power of the press. The NYT and any other national news media have the power to mold public opinion, and they know it. For many media outlets that has become their mission; not to report the news as it should be. My take is that the media should report the facts, ALL the facts and not just the ones that agree with their agenda.