đź‘Ź i wanted to drop this but you did it better than i woulda tbh
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There is no major Left Media outlet and that has to change
- Thread starter BWoog
- Start date
I honestly feel uncomfortable watching Fox. The American flag fluttering behind their hosts to tie them to nationalist sentiments, their constant mockery and dismissal of any criticism or opposition to the Republican party, the intentional demonization of key targets and stereotyping of Democrats in general, the word-for-word regurgitation of arguments against Republicans and for Democrats with the groups flipped. It strains belief to think that their hosts actually buy their own rhetoric rather than using words to manipulate motions and achieve their political goals with no thought to what they actually mean.
It's hard for me to even call something like that a news outlet. It's doing something fundamentally different from journalism for purposes that are fundamentally different than what journalism is supposed to do.
It's hard for me to even call something like that a news outlet. It's doing something fundamentally different from journalism for purposes that are fundamentally different than what journalism is supposed to do.
Normally I would say no! Terrible idea. But last year I conducted a study with a colleague on the development of the narratives around antifa and the conclusion we drew is that media sources that attempt to be objective (even if at times progressive leaning) end up inadvertently reinforcing alternative conservative narratives and there's no major outlet to balance things out.
So the research says: yeah, actually we do - but only to help erase the impact of Infowars, Breitbart, etc. if far-right outlets didn't have so much traction and reach, we wouldn't need it.
Source: am a researcher in rhetoric, conducted study on virality and reach, pub passed review and is forthcoming
So the research says: yeah, actually we do - but only to help erase the impact of Infowars, Breitbart, etc. if far-right outlets didn't have so much traction and reach, we wouldn't need it.
Source: am a researcher in rhetoric, conducted study on virality and reach, pub passed review and is forthcoming
They do, but they also did a lot to give him legitimacy that he didn't really deserve. Like, they deliberately brought in a bunch of people who had no job other than to come up with cheap defenses for everything that Trump said or did. It's the whole thing where Democrats and Republicans are treated like yin and yang, two opposing and equal forces that must always have a balance, rather than just two political parties that happen to be big enough to have a winning chance.
Would this not also be fixed simply by eliminating things like FOX News and Breitbart? If they are the issue, and I agree that they are, isn't the solution just to get rid of them and not emulate them? A lot of our issues are a result of Reagan deregulating things and opening the door to AM talk radio and things like FOX News, should we not just undo what he did?
Getting rid of a news outlet is way harder than it is to create one, is why some people advocate for a leftist counter to Breitbart.
It's the reality of capitalism + free speech culture/laws that competing is more viable than suppressing (unless you're the GOP).
That said I do feel it misses the point somewhat. TYT used to be moderately popular/oft-cited around this community and now they're near universally reviled. The left is not sympathetic to this kind of reporting, if it was it wouldn't be the left we know today.
It's the reality of capitalism + free speech culture/laws that competing is more viable than suppressing (unless you're the GOP).
That said I do feel it misses the point somewhat. TYT used to be moderately popular/oft-cited around this community and now they're near universally reviled. The left is not sympathetic to this kind of reporting, if it was it wouldn't be the left we know today.
Except then you've got both sides lying their asses off and muddying the waters even more than they were previously. That's not a solution, that'll just make it worse than it already is.
You want even more left-biased than CNN? At some point, a real news outlet has to report news even when it doesn't put their camp in the best of lights. Criticizing CNN for covering the "motherfucker" thing is really weird when they're also prominently covering defenses of that statement. I don't want CNN to become full-on propaganda. They already have a clear bias but they're still a real news outlet unlike Fox News.
The issue is that any solution requires a decent amount of leftist control over government that, uh.... it'd render the question pointless beyond simply reinforcement for the future. It's less a should/shouldn't and more a can/literally cannot in any practical way achieve right now.
Depends on what you mean by "solution". I see the reasoning behind it even if I don't agree with it. If you're interested in building a more informed, reasonable society, yes it's not the best thing to pursue. If you just want to win elections, it's possible it might help. LiberalEra + sympathists will constantly tell SocialistEra + sympathists about how they need to play "realpolitik" and care about winning elections instead of sticking to their values.
This is the other side of it. Sometimes there's lines you don't want to cross even in the pursuit of "realpolitik". Would you rather have a critical left that constantly holds the center-left to higher standards, or would you have an uncritical left that votes one particular way like the right wing zombies do? You'll probably win more elections, but you'll lose something ephemeral in the process.
There are enough liberals on this board that are willing to vote Biden in the primary because they think it's the surest way of beating Trump, because Biden can bring back those "white moderates" that flipped from Obama to Trump. And this is despite Biden's record of being pro-business, anti-integration, and vaguely a creepy uncle kind of politician. To them, beating Trump is the single most important thing and if you need to do some reality distortion to do it, isn't it worth it in the long run? This is a complicated moral question I don't have a clear answer to. I know which side I'm on but I cannot say with certainty that it's the "best" side, only the one I feel is the most just.
CNN has a bias, but its damn sure not a leftist bias at all.
Which do you think is more likely to happen, though?
Deplatforming works. That would be a solution, yes. But Fox, while not as extreme as the others, definitely has a brainwashing style effect - also proven, repeatedly - and it's been going on for years. No action. In fact it's getting worse.
Bingo. People should realize that CNN and MSNBC are your frenemies. The former gave triple digit millions worth of free publicity to a man (and his minions) that they supposedly hate.
This is not actually necessary. Fox news decides what they want to push and this becomes reality for their viewers although this amount of influence was built up over decades and cannot be replicated in a short amount of time.
Also Koch, Murdoch etc.
Problem is you'd just be trading one problem for another with this solution. Do this and the truth becomes irrelevant, literally no one will want to hear it. They'll just go to what they agree with. Democracy doesn't work unless the people are properly informed. It's why we're having the problems we are, this solution would just be doubling those very same problems instead of solving them.
The only solution that gets us out of the spiral is the end of FOX, adding a left-wing version of it would just speed the spiral up. This wouldn't actually fix anything.
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I've never listen to them but I remember that when I found out that a group of nerdy looking american white guys are Chapo Trap House I thought that was max cringe and extremely embarrassing
People coming in here acting like it's actually possible to have journalism that's divorced from bias are being sadly naive. What you claim to be unbias/non-propagandist is simply journalism that reinforces your preconceived prejudice of reality, and doesn't question your already established worldview. Just as a novelist cannot write a story devoid of tone, a journalist cannot present news without filtering it through an ideological lens. That ideological lens bends toward the status quo for most, but is ideological and not objective because there is no objective; especially when reality itself is created by pursuing of so called "fantasy."
All major news outlets for example, approach reporting as fukuyamaist. Which I think is the real problem here. When we act like our current institutions are the best we can do and we can only make marginal tweaks to it, we get into the fucked situation we're in now where half the thread doesn't even know what the Left is.
All major news outlets for example, approach reporting as fukuyamaist. Which I think is the real problem here. When we act like our current institutions are the best we can do and we can only make marginal tweaks to it, we get into the fucked situation we're in now where half the thread doesn't even know what the Left is.
Because there's something really unfair in politics and that's the fact that right-wingers are disciplined and forgiving of their leaders.
A French left-wing party tried to launch its own media a year ago and it's been a trainwreck. Each time they tried to clarify their opinions, some people left. Same when managers step up in order to enforce the official line. And there's an ongoing conflict between defenders of secularism and multiculturalism, which is just a mirror of a debate that has been plaguing the French left for years.
I just think a vertical way of providing news doesn't work with the left. Maybe a decentralized environment of independant outlets, but collaborating between them, would be the way to go, but even then I can't be sure.
I think the Twittersphere roughly known as "rosetwitter", for the socialist rose, is a good example of this. Unfortunately their outreach is minimal and also they're ultimately beholden to Twitter, a bunch of center-right techno-libertarian dogs. We need to figure out the problem of platform control if we want to get anywhere.
I don't know that I agree. There have always been extreme sources; the middle, more objective were dominant because the extremes became more obvious. Now there aren't as many wildly swinging opposites; instead, we have the news and then the story that is more palatable to many, because it allows them to feel better/demonize, with the actual news reinforcing some of the more "palatable" aspects.
Probably the best solution is a combination of reducing/ending some of the more extreme outlets while also providing alternatives that swing the other direction.
Posters who are calling for fact-based news instead of punditry, I think that's a solid position, but you do realize that just reporting the facts can absolutely be done with a bias and an agenda? Mainstream news outlets do this all the time on certain issues.
What truth? What spiral? What I feel like your referring to is the degradation of the institutions of liberalism, but the thing is, what's destroying it is itself. Because it upholds capitalist ideology and profit motive, it becomes the fundamental root of FOX being FOX because it's financially rewarding for FOX to be what it is.
Part of why said reinforcing happens though is due to the right demonizing reporters and news outlets as left-wing for the last few decades, since Reagan opened pandora's box. Yes, there will always be bias, but the issue is how far that bias has been allowed to go. Creating a second extreme won't really help with that as you'd just create a place for people to go to that would feed into their biases.
I actually do agree with your best solution, but I would argue that there are already left wing sources out there to apply said pressure and that we just need to chop down the overgrowth that has been allowed to happen on the right.
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This is more what I was originally getting at. I know that a lot of the younger liberal folks are drawn to liberal outlets online and don't watch television and so on, but we don't make an attempt to counter Fox News for older generations that vote more.
When we're staring at television outlets that have reporting along the lines of "You know, President Trump lies hundreds of times a day, shoves children into concentration camps, and has currently taken the government hostage, but A DEMOCRAT SAID MOTHER FUCKER!" it's the most God damn frustrating thing in the world.
When you have these older generations, or people who just don't have access to the internet (they do exist, trust me), then the absolute best you can hope for is that they become centrists because we simply don't have major television and newspaper outlets that push actual leftwing talking points.
I'm not saying we have a version of Liberal Fox News that necessarily lies to everyone, but people should be really more scared about shit like climate change and what the administration is currently doing in general is all I'm saying. Break through some of this shitty complacency in our country.
There won't be a major cable news Network to rival Fox for the left. The medium has changed and the money is drying up for new ventures. Vice, Fusion and others have tried and run into the same problem of it just not being profitable. Radio has a similar problem.
Online is different though there are many solid ones there.
Big problem isnt enough outreach to outlier areas that aren't the coasts. Conservative media is everywhere in the south, mid West and between big citites on the east and west coast. While leftwing stuff doesn't have that blanket effect. It's impossible to not be told that liberals want to sell your kids to isis for weed if you're listening to the radio. Nothing equivalent for the left.
Online is different though there are many solid ones there.
Big problem isnt enough outreach to outlier areas that aren't the coasts. Conservative media is everywhere in the south, mid West and between big citites on the east and west coast. While leftwing stuff doesn't have that blanket effect. It's impossible to not be told that liberals want to sell your kids to isis for weed if you're listening to the radio. Nothing equivalent for the left.
Am I taking crazy pills? I read CNN daily and it's basically ResetEra but professional.
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A big fat NO to a liberal Fox News from me. There's more than enough propaganda to wade thru already.
This.
Truth has a liberal bias anyway. You don't need to outright lie to appear leftist in the US.
"The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programs have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings." This vox video is very relevant and true.
Gonna plug the Majority Report with Sam Seder.
Gonna plug the Majority Report with Sam Seder.
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There are, but they aren't in the same space - unless they could be spread as easily across Facebook. Some others in the thread have pointed out that older folks aren't accessing the further-left sources that are out there because they're online. It's not that. It's that progressive material isn't always as soundbite friendly or as easily memeable as ideas like THE IMMIGRANTS ARE GONNA GET YOU so it doesn't enjoy the same viral spread. The pieces that do are as untrue as many of the far-right pieces. There was one example of an article about crops dying because there was a clampdown on immigration, but if you read further, it was related to other issues, older policies, etc. But the headline made for an easy share. Leftist propaganda - let's call it that - doesn't lend itself to that. Or at least it can't be easily shared if the ground it needs to take root (empathy and need = fertile ground for Medicare for all, for instance). An outlet that was working to game the system or make itself available in similar ways could counteract. But that also takes a particular looseness with ethics that I think is less common on the left, but maybe I'm biased.
I don't think we really disagree here, just maybe have some differences on what's possible. I would really like to see pushback on these far-right outlets, but FREE SPEECH!!!! has been such a reinforced part of the American narrative, and so twisted, that I worry it's not possible any longer, not without other changes.
NPR is typically center, to slightly center right in terms of its news coverage. Over all its content may skew a bit left, but its news is pretty much straight down the middle.
Okay, guys, please point me to your preferred definition of the left online so I can read up on what I'm missing here.
Air America didn't really bomb as so much as get run out of town. At least in Metro Detroit. They had amazing rating compared to the conservative programs such as Rush and the like. A conservative place bought up some stations they were on and turned it to conservative radio, which bombed. I think its now just an auto play music station.
I mean... unrestrained capitalism and mega corps do contribute heavily to many of the bad things happening in the world. Having an advertisement doesn't contradict that.
Okay, I laughed at these coming one after another.
And also because they're both true.
I dunno, that sounds skewed a bit. According to Pew Research: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/
Leftists want to dismantle capitalism. Liberals want to keep capitalism.
Era is liberal
At face value, sure, liberals "want to keep" capitalism. But many liberals simply recognize that we have yet to achieve the technology that would afford us a better option than capitalism. I don't find that to be a particularly controversial opinion.
There are tons of online leftist outlets, which is where most people in the left get their news. A leftist TV network would bomb because it's audience doesn't watch TV. And beyond that, the left and right just aren't symmetrical. There isn't the same demand for an absolute loyalist media outlet on the left that there is on the right. You have very clearly liberal outlets like Vox, or leftist ones like The Intercept or Jacobin, all of which are much more willing to run some heterodox stuff, because left-leaning audiences engage with that in a way conservatives don't.
Here's a decent article about the difference between Liberal and Left.
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/socialism-liberalism-left-frase
Also note though, that the Left is not monolithic and there's a lot of splitting. So this might define them/us even better: