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The Fair and Unbiased [Media] Thread
Heffling
No PicEverRegistered User regular
No PicEverRegistered User regular
It feels like we really need a thread to talk about things going on in the media.
Like Fox News losing their lawsuit with Dominion for $780,000,000 USD.
Or how Fox News fired Tucker Carlson not for being a racist shitbag, misogynistic troll, or National Socialist, but for the high crime of costing rich people money.
Or we can talk about how CNN and other media companies keep giving Trump free advertising.
The Fourth Estate brought us Trump via reality TV, helped propel Trump to the front of the 2016 Primary, equivocated grabbing a woman's genitalia with the high crime of being a woman, downplayed his literal coup attempt, and continue to give him a loud speaker and soap box to preach from. They long ago went from reporting on the problem to being a part of it.
*Edit* Adding video on how the media is failing us as a nation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD-oTJ49nls
Like Fox News losing their lawsuit with Dominion for $780,000,000 USD.
Or how Fox News fired Tucker Carlson not for being a racist shitbag, misogynistic troll, or National Socialist, but for the high crime of costing rich people money.
Or we can talk about how CNN and other media companies keep giving Trump free advertising.
The Fourth Estate brought us Trump via reality TV, helped propel Trump to the front of the 2016 Primary, equivocated grabbing a woman's genitalia with the high crime of being a woman, downplayed his literal coup attempt, and continue to give him a loud speaker and soap box to preach from. They long ago went from reporting on the problem to being a part of it.
*Edit* Adding video on how the media is failing us as a nation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD-oTJ49nls Heffling on
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Why cant these people ever just not be given free publicity for their stupid grifts? Sigh.
A lot of what the media has become is just what the people want, now. I’m not excusing them, they’re still culpable for four years of Trump and may be culpable for four more. But we need to find a way to get people to value hard-hitting, thoughtful and important work again, or the perverse incentive to platform loud assholes will continue to exist, and I got nothing.
I think we are definitely being trained to have lower attention spans by the media environment around us. Delivering immediate dopamine hits makes the most money and all that.
But I also think there's a degree to which people are just able to disconnect more if they want to and what we are finding out is that a lot of people just don't want to have to give a shit about this stuff every day. Given the chance to not pay attention to the news, they will take it. Maybe tune in once every 4 years a week before the election to make a decision.
And part of the danger is that this doesn't leave people completely untouched by the information ecosystem. It just leaves them with opinions they don't even really understand or acknowledge the origin of because it's all just kind of absorbed via osmosis from random stuff that crosses their path.
I think the news most people end up seeing now is either whatever the algorithm throws up on facebook or their home screen or ads or whatever while they are looking at other stuff or whatever random bullshit they hear from the people in their lives, even just in passing.
The problem is that the government has to shift its investment now, but there is nothing reliable to shift it to.
I have experience working in several government systems, and I think I've found a common problem with all levels. Government agencies have great resources, opportunities, coordination, and funding, which are all underutilized. What is almost invariably poor? UI/UX. It is almost always a ton more difficult, unintuitive, and inefficient to to anything with any government system than any civilian system competent with modern acceptable standards. This reduces responsiveness and decreases engagement to an outsize degree. I desperately want people talented in making the communication experience just better than it was in the 90s to be in positions of power and responsibility in government, which I feel would make good returns in setting standards for mass communication and education.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Taken further, I think there is a significant undercurrent of willful blindness in the media consumer.
We’ve seen people literally argue that an article posted says the exact opposite of the written position because it disagrees with their preconceptions.
Can’t really fix that.
Also, I find the venn overlap of people complaining about CNN hosting Trump while they’re still using Twitter to be fascinating.
-A reliable coverage of events to help keep the public well informed does not play well with the capitalistic model. It either gets undermined by assholes that want to get the most money possible and that means getting the most eyeballs. So the boring stuff gets ignored, the most shocking shit gets blasted out to the masses and if they really lack ethics, they go full hyperbole. The other way it gets compromised in a capitalistic system, is that money has an outsized role and people that crave power are willing to shell out big bucks and/or access to control the narrative. Be that either directly bribing the new outlets off, outright buying them to dictate the story or using force to discourage honest journalists from digging into things.
-Then there is the issue where there isn't really any oversight. By all rights Fox News should have be dismantled long ago, but free speech abolitionists, along with the GOP, have ensured that companies like Fox have tons of way to peddle misinformation and rightwing propaganda as new and when they get caught, they can often get away with it. I'd argue that the only reason they got reamed in the dominion suite and likely the smartmatic one and the defamation one that started recently, is that they gotten so use to making such low efforts to cover their tracks, that they finally got too sloppy and complacent.
-Finally, this does come back to the state of education. We don't just fail to encourage students to strive to be informed about their world, we also don't give them the tools to do so. Throw in how shitty must news is because doom and gloom gets you the biggest profits and the corporate media doing a fantastic job of pissing away their credibility and you get a number of people that don't want to see the news out of mental health concerns or just not wanting to see more shit about celebrities they don't care about. If they do bother to seek out news, you run into the issue where they can easily get suckered by propagandists because they have been given zero tools to help them spot the lowest efforts of propaganda and then of course your have cases where the right has indoctrinated kids to seek out the rightwing trash and ignore anything that is not deem kosher by the right.
I'm not entirely sure what the best approach is to fixing these issues. Until they are addressed, we're just going to keep getting issues where things go to shit in regards to the media.
Part of the problem is it takes effort to be informed and knowledgeable, and that's even if you value that. Lots of folks don't. They're content to let their thinking be done for them and swallow whatever media fits them. If you do care, there's a lot of bullshit to wade through, due to varying degrees of incompetence and malice.
Part of the problem is in a hyper capitalist system everything must be for profit, and good journalism isn't profitable. News departments traditionally made no money, or even cost their networks more than they made. Nowadays it's all about clicks and views and adds and shit.
Part of the problem is our current reality is so very, very, very stupid and very, very, very evil that it beggars belief. Humans expect things to work like in stories. If we really were about face mass deaths due to climate change, if literal Nazis were taking over, if the bad guys were winning, people would do something. There would be rioting in the streets. Since there isn't, things aren't really that bad.
Realistically any news viewing population in the US will be about a third Republicans, a third non-committal, and a third Democrats. But news networks are like 1 or 2 for Republicans, several that at least claim to be unbiased for non-committal, and no major networks for Democrats. So everywhere shows Fox News because by user base it is the most common denomator.
Also Fox Appeals to the business owners the most.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/14/us/san-francisco-drugs-homeless-sidner-tws/index.html
So CNN is just posting poorly researched “OMG THE POORS ARE TAKING OVER OUR CITIES” pieces with conservative talking points as headlines on their main page now.
TLDR, the article is basically a lady who “used to be liberal but things went crazy” blaming the city of San Fransisco for her families drug problems. Which I have sympathy for. Bad shit happens and it sucks, I have had family members with drug problems. (Although they were in the rural south, who would have thought?). But the piece goes on to throw in every talking point they can about homelessness running rampant and city services “encouraging” it by providing shelters and safe areas, shoplifting sprees because the “city won’t enforce the laws”, etc.
But when you ask the greater statistical question of whether the drug problems in San Francisco and the Tenderloin area in particular are any worse than pre pandemic the answer is… not really? In fact it seems to be a bit better?
https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/how-serious-is-tenderloins-drug-problem-heres-what-city-data-says/#
Now I don’t mean to shut down one person telling their story or anything, but when something headlines a news site and is reported as a state of emergency maybe there should be a bit of effort to verify things with other sources and statistics? Rather than just reporting things like “some lady said she went into a city run facility and said they said that drugs are awesome and they could hook them up?” Whether true or not, at least someone could have maybe walked down to Tenderloin with a hidden camera and took some footage themselves or interviewed some city officials with a request for response or something?
I mean I am sure people will say something like “human interest focused peices are pretty common but I’ve never seen it to the fall to the level of something where they say “John smith from Pennsylvania said he went to the offices of Norfolk Southern and the receptionist told him he could fuck off and sprayed him with a spray bottle marked “vinyl chloride” without actually providing any context or greater evidence that such a thing actually happened.
I always have to laugh at these kind of articles, it's the same shit as the famed Ohio diner interview during the presidential campaign season. As you point out, the scourge of drugs and addiction can and does happen throughout the US, and Fentanyl in particular has hollowed many smaller cities in the midwest, Appalachians, and etc., out. Instead of talking about that though, let's write stories about crime in Chicago (lower per capita murder rate than multiple southern conservative cities) and drugs/homeless in San Francisco, which, as the article points out, have always been an issue in the city. But of course, it's definitely the city's fault her son fell into addiction. It certainly couldn't have anything to do with this woman's marriage blowing up.
What this article is actually saying is that as the breakdown of government services continues, and corporate greed continues to destroy the middle class, Americans that used to be able to live fine, buy a house, retire, etc, are now struggling just to survive. And poverty is encroaching on areas that used to be protected. And all of that continues to destroy the family unit.
NPR is just as bad as all the others when it's reporting on DC politics. They're great on the culture side and give a lot airtime to voices that don't normally get it especially on weekends, but when it's time to give the day's national news they fall in to the same trap the mainstream networks do. They speak as if both sides are equally credible and sincere while also holding conservatives to a way lower standard than everyone else. They don't reframe Republican/Conservative incoherence on the same level as the New York Times, but they are as bad as the Sunday shows about giving airtime to right wing ideologues to spew their bullshit in response to an actual expert giving a report on a given field.
I used to really like NPR’s politics podcast. I thought it was good information and called BS on a lot of the conservative’s bullshit.
Last May they aired a lengthy interview with McConnell where they failed to question any of the usual bullshit he spews (he was allowed to lament the politicization of the Supreme Court with his own role in that never questioned and claim that he always reaches across the aisle).
I haven’t had the stomach to listen to them since.
It's a personal bugbear of mine that Steve Inskeep keeps inviting Jonah "Liberal Fascism"* Goldberg on semi-frequently to launder some more lies into NPR's audience's ears. Inskeep refers to Goldberg as a "friend of the show". It . drives . me . nuts.
* arguing that "ackshually, fascist-movements are left-wing".
I did notice though that during Trumps reign of terror, many of the hosts stopped kowtowing so much and began every so slowly calling conservative guests out on their shows.
Yeah, I lasted 20 minutes or so the first time I listened to one and then had to turn it off. It's pure DC balance brain reporting.
The guy appointed by the guy who was investigated said he shouldn't have been.
This is the headline.
I'm almost as mad at Garland, who released it with a statement about how he was releasing it without edit or comment to respect integrity.
We're 7 years into this, and we still don't know who we're up against here. Oh, great, you want to respect the normal process? Great. Turn your back to the murderer in the duel for the ten paces and be surprised when they shoot you in the back of the head on step one. It's. Not. Normal. And it is going to end up fucking everything.
I really feel like I did going into 2016 lately. Just dark shit.
You want the DoJ to start editing reports?
The problem here is clearly CNN, specifically the headline writer i this case
I mean, they also have Jake Tapper going out there and saying it's "devastating to the FBI" and totally clears the president, thank you "to some degrees exonerates Donald Trump"
I want people to figure out you're always going to die in an honorable duel to a guy who hires a sniper.
EDIT: And yes, media is the problem. What thread is this again?
Start?
But the media falls all over themselves to launder the latest Republican propaganda, and then when it turns out it’s, predictably, just another smokescreen nothingburger, the mea culpas are just as predictably nowhere to be found.
Garland should have fired Durham’s ass on day one and anybody who reports on this thing should be laughed out of journalism so hard they get tinnitus.
I don't know how they can't possibly justify not mentioning that Trump appointed this idiot with the specific purpose of showing that a deep state plot against him existed. Like, this wasn't a useful review. This is intellectual rigor on the order of the praise hallmark gives in a mother's day card.
Later in the day Laura Ingraham had to air the correction that the entire story was made up.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-stoked-outrage-over-migrants-displacing-homeless-vets-it-was-a-hoax
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I had also forgotten that CNN hired Chris Wallace last year as part of their brilliant plan to be the new Fair and Balanced network. Here's how well that's going.
The sad thing is all the major news network's failing is boosting Newsmax, but they still have to face the dreaded voting machine lawsuits and its nice to see CNN eat shit for trying to carry more water for the hard right than it already does. Maybe they'll finally learn when their ratings averages drop below Animal Planet.