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Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

The "conservative media ecosystem" in the USA is detached from reality. That was vividly illustrated by the shock at Fox News when Obama won in 2012. They evidently believed enough of their own lies that they couldn't handle the truth.

If Fox News had actually reported the truth all the way through the campaign, they would not have been surprised.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2012/nov/07/barack-oba...

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The ironic part about your statement is the fact that the Republicans took back both houses of congress in the mid-terms.

Even if they were detached from reality, I'd say that was a huge punch in the nuts for the Democrats after re-electing their president to a second term, and holding a super majority for 2 years.

You wanna know why Donald Trump has swept the Republican establishment? Because after all the promises by the Republicans about what they were going to do after being elected, they've done almost nothing they promised and their constituents are pissed and sending a message - time for the establishment to go.

It doesn't matter if Trump wins or not. The message has been sent, and if the "establishment Republicans" don't get it, and get in line, then they might as well hand the Presidency back over to the Clinton political machine.

Not ironic at all, it's a common occurrence in mid-terms for the party opposing the president to do better.

You seem to be calling holding a majority in the House and Senate a "super majority," that's not what a super majority is. Generally in the U.S. federal government a supermajority requires 2/3rds in the respective body (e.g. a party holding 67 seats in the Senate would have a supermajority there) [0]. Senate rules also make 60 seats a magic number to reach on many votes but one party hasn't held that many seats since 1979.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#Federal_governme... [1] http://www.senate.gov/history/partydiv.htm

I was referencing the fact they held both houses of congress as well as the presidency.

The whole media ecosystem in the USA is out of whack. The lefties crap on Fox, righties crap on MSDNC, but both could better be thought of as news organs of the same establishment, with emphasis on opinion shaping, and de-emphasis on truth. Each target a different population segment. Facebook targets yet another segment, and the question is, will it become annexed to the same establishment?

> Facebook targets yet another segment

Facebook doesn't target a different population segment or a different political segment of the US, or even the US. It wants everybody to be on Facebook (if they're over the age of 13). That's how it got to $1.65bn users.

As a conduit of political news dissemination, it services a different segment: namely, the segment of people who predominantly get news online.

But that's a self-selecting audience. Facebook users can either look at tending news or ignore it. It's not a political demographic, or if it is, that's incidental.

It's a segment of the populus who have thus far been uniquely positioned to make up their own mind. That has political implications in a democracy that relies on media to shape the electorate's consensus. As Milo Yiannopoulous recently commented on the 2016 primaries: "If the lying mainstream media ever had the power to shape elections, those days are gone." Will that baton be simply picked up by the new media?

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