So I found this article and I thought it brought up an interesting point: A New Book Details the Damage Done by the Right-Wing Media in 2016 It's kind of a default position to want to be charitable and assume that both sides are equally wrong or have equal value, when in fact that isn't the case. Of course on this site we're inevitably going to have someone chime in with the old 'think for yourself' line, which to me has always seemed about as ridiculous as saying 'just make up your own reality, I do!'. These are the same people who tend to latch onto any narrative that justifies their own paranoid worldview, and everything else is the enemy. To be honest, I have always blamed the right wing media for the state of the US today. Conservatives were so desperate to hear that what they believe is right that they didn't stop to ask themselves if maybe they're wrong... and it didn't matter anyways. You can still see this with all the denial surrounding Trump, reactions to mass shootings, climate change, etc. To me it seems blatantly obvious every time I find myself clicking through a right wing website that it's simply not reality. But the bigger problem is how to convince people who follow these sites that they are wrong. How do you reverse not just the damage done in 2016, but the damage that has been done going all the way back to Rush Limbaugh and Morton Downey Jr.? How do you fight back when the other side is willing to sink lower and has absolutely no reservations about doing whatever it takes to 'win'? This emphasis on giving certain people what they want to hear over giving people what they need to hear is what makes them seem stronger. Their consumers respond to confidence, cruelty and paranoia, not earnest attempts at presenting the facts objectively. It isn't a matter of them being sheep that are led by an all-powerful RW media-- it's that they have this character flaw that the RW media taps into and normalizes, mostly by studying and replicating their own internal voice.
It's true not every story has two sides, and sometimes when it does both sides shouldn't be given equal weight because one is demonstrably false.
I think it's impossible to reach most of them. I was shocked recently when, on this site, I posted a report of the court trial in which the parents of the Sandybrook school shootings are suing Alex Jones for saying the massacre was fake news and that the parents were actors--thereby subjecting the bereaved to death threats. One person replied: How do you know they weren't actors? (My reply was to let the court sort it out). Yes. And how do we know Pizzagate didn't really happen, and that those poor kids aren't really being held in dungeons in the basement of the Pizza parlor (that doesn't seem to have a basement) by a ring of pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton? People on these forums believed that. Or that the moon landings really happened, and weren't just staged on a back lot of Universal Studios? Or that our experiences aren't just some Matrix-style computer simulation run by aliens or robots (Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom believes that one). Fox & Friends doesn't even pretend to be news; it admits its entertainment, but millions of viewers treat it as the "go to" source for their information about the world. The National Enquirer still sells, with cover stories like these: Resistance is futile!
You lost my interest in the second paragraph whereby it states "Liberals want facts; conservatives want their biases reinforced." It should state nobody cares about the facts they just care about what reinforces their bias. That will apply to both sides. The media seems to have declined to tabloid type journalism. To comply with the dumbing down of America. Some people actually believed that Hillary Clinton was running a child pornography ring out of a Pizza Parlor. Who would even run that chyt if it wasn't proven to be at least somewhat credible? Yet they not only can run it, people are stupid enough to believe it. Here is true story: Three New Mexico suspects arrested for child abuse, fostering terrorism against America and however many other charges are now walking free. That by itself is a true statement of fact. Doesn't matter who states that , it isn't in dispute. Here is CNNs version: New Mexico compound: Charges dropped against 3 suspects - CNN The difference in what gets reported, is the rest of the story. How in the hell can a prosecutor miss a simple 10 day filing deadline? A German Shepard could be taught to deliver paperwork to the clerk of courts in time. How did these people get here? How did they acquire the guns? Do we consider them Muslim Extremist? If not why? Or simply Muslim Terrorist? Or maybe they will try and figure out how to not call them Muslim at all before the coverage is complete? What is their legal status? Why has the media been allowed to enter onto, trample around, and report from a crime scene before the suspects were even put on trial? Tainting a possible jury pool will be an obvious defense approach should they ever see trial now. Why has there been a court order rapidly carried out, to destroy the compound before this trial has even taken place? I would expect it be preserved for trial like normally takes place in a capitol case. There are a lot of things that have happened here that don't add up. It would not have been acceptable to do in any other case pending. Lets see what media decides, if any, on if this becomes important to someone besides me. And here is your opposing media position that pretty much makes the problem the opposite of the OPs source. Liberal News Media Bias Has a Serious Effect - NYTimes.com Here is a blatant lie embraced by the left leaners. How the Left Lost Its Mind - The Atlantic It all depends on what YOU want to listen to, support and use to form your bias. The media on both the left and the right knows this. And they have their agendas. You are never going to hear FOX give a redeeming report concerning the Democrats. The opposite holds true for CNN. Let's see how New Mexico votes after all of this. It may not matter to them. But I doubt CNN will offer up much coverage for them to question if something seems broken.
I think it's impossible for humans to have absolute knowledge of anything. It ultimately comes down to a bet, or as I prefer to say. "faith". But I like to make "educated" bets based on what I think is the best available evidence, logic, experience, and intuition--in other words, good judgement. All news is biased, consciously or unconsciously. The very act of selecting what events around the world deserve to be reported in a temporally limited news cycle requires value judgment. CNN and MSNBC have decided that the most important thing in the whole, entire world is Trump, what he's tweeting, what he'd doing, etc. In that sense, their worldview and his are in agreement. There was certainly a liberal bias in the network news coverage of the Vietnam war, and in Walter Cronkite's decision during the Carter administration to end every newscast with "And that's the way it is, this the (...Nth) day of captivity.' (or something like that. I read about it somewhere). But I have faith there's a difference between professional journalists and Alex Jones, and the difference isn't in Jones' favor. Professional journalists follow standards in corroborating stories instead of just making them up the way Jones does, and make some effort to distinguish fact from opinion. In this world of relative truth, I think I'm more likely to get it from professional journalists than from InfoWars, or Fox, or Breitbart. The best defense against media bias is to use a variety of sources, consider the professional credentials of the outlet, and take a critical view toward all of them. BTW, the New York Times and Atlantic, in which the articles critical of liberal bias in the media cited in NMRN's post supra, are themselves regarded by Trumpists as quintessentially "liberal" media. This presents the paradox raised long ago by Epimenides: Epimenides of Crete says all Cretans are liars."
In other words, organizations that are actually registered as news and not entertainment. Crazy lefty.
I knew it would lose you... I also disagree with your conclusion. Where did you get all of this madness from? So it's a conspiracy, not everyday incompetence? This is exactly the difference between the right and the left. So why do you think that journalists tend to lean left? Could it be because the right has gone so far into insanityville that everything left of it is simply not insanity? This is what I believe. It all comes back to the sides not being equal in terms of their need for facts. Also, don't you think it's interesting that you have a line like this: not only in a so-called 'leftist' news source, but in the very source being derided by the Opinion columnist? Almost makes you think there was a genuine interest in balance going on. BTW, the opinion columnist works for something called the American Enterprise Institute, which, while claiming to be nonpartisan, actually has this mission statement: "Founded in 1938, AEI's stated mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate"." This is probably why they are closely associated with conservatism and neoconservatism, and of course why they would pay people to write opinion columns like this. GREAT ARTICLE: So basically, the danger here is that the insanity that has already infected and changed the right could infect the left as well. I'd like to think the difference here is that the left is more ethical... and despite the election of Trump being a real threat and genuine cause for alarm, the left must not allow itself to stoop to the same level. Regardless of how many left-leaning conspiracy theorists are out there, that madness hasn't taken over the Dems to the same extent it has taken over the GOP. Whether or not it could do so in the near future is up for debate (I don't think so), but nothing in this article suggests that it has already happened. The difference is that FOX won't redeem the Democrats because of their political agenda, CNN won't favorably cover the GOP because it is genuinely dangerous. Equating both sides is another example of how you pretend your conspiracies are equal to other people's facts. It's also how people equate climate science with denialism and creationism with evolution, or stuff they pull out of their ass with eyewitness accounts. I honestly don't know how you keep falling for it.
Your credibility was lost when you state that the left leaning media is about the truth. I'm not surprised you buy whatever they're selling you. The dumbing down of Anerics is nearly complete.
Yeah I'm dumb because I take the time to prove my points and actually read the articles YOU posted, unlike you. And I didn't say it was about truth.
Worst thing about right-wing news is that because of their ties to the state and centerists, their white-supremacist conspiracy theories often make it into the MSM and even government fusion centers. "...most concerning is the direct overlap in rhetoric between the alt-right and establishment news sources like Fox. While Heat Street will soon be reorganized under Marketwatch, both of these entities are owned by News Corp, brainchild of Rupert Murdoch circa 1979. Along with these smaller properties, News Corp holds numerous international assets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Dow Jones & Company, and the UK’s Sun. Murdoch of course is also the CEO of Fox News, which lifted loosely-compiled bullshit from Heat Street and published it as fact. As a consequence, longtime conservative figures are introducing the spectre of “terroristic” antifascism to the daily news cycle, lending it the kind of legitimacy that fringe publications never could." - A Spectacle of Violence: Trump, Fascism, & the Media "An image of a fake antifa poster calling for the murder of white children was circulated so many times that Snopes had to produce a page debunking the obvious hoax. Jesse Watters of Fox News, proving just how little investigative capability it takes to be called a “journalist,” was tricked into hosting a troll posing as a member of Boston Antifa, another fake chapter. Heat Street fed a manufactured story about antifascist calls for indiscriminate violence directly to Fox News." - On Cryptofascism: The Fracturing of the Alt-Right & the GOP
I watch MSNBC at work. It remains unconvincing even with daily watching. It is less a news station than a Lefty rallying point that presents selective news stories.
