I'm not clear why this is a problem. A corporation asked its broadcasters to make a statement on fake news. This statement sounds similar to others made by other corporate owned networks. Viewers are invited to comment on the website.
- a single corporation owns a fuckton of those local stations
- the same corporation writes a script to broadcast on every station
- media hosts or journalists can't say "no". Do the job or lose your job. They're not free to report news without bias
- you don't know everything about everything, so you're inclined to trust the news because they're supposed to be neutral and report facts
- ultimately you internalize a biased opinion that was poured down onto you by the will of a handful of shareholders
Why can't you see the problem?
There used to be actual regulations on the books that prevented this type of consolidation from happening. Then, sometime circa. the 1980's, those laws were tossed out, leading to today where one single corporate parent controls nearly 200 local broadcasters in a very direct way.
Standard advice is check multiple sources. This pretends to be "multiple sources" when really it's just one.
Sinclair is effectively and echo chamber on TV. Web standards, don't like it, navigate else where. TV Standards, change the channel, get the same stuff. See how that is much more dangerous?
I know I sound cynical, but does any thinking person actually believe that? That strikes me as incredibly naive.
You're taking this out of context. You come to know your local news reporters, learn their biases, and they build some kind of trust with them. You might even see them at events or having a meal with their family and have a personal relationship with them. As stated a few times in this thread, Sinclair bought this trust & is violating it.
they're supposed to be neutral and report facts
It's not naive to think this. News shows and publications generally have a clear divider between "reporting" and {"opinion"|"editorial"|"analysis"}. I'd also like to think most people can tell the difference, regardless, between and opinion, "immigrants are good for the country" and declarative statements, "Obama deported more illegal immigrants than any President before him".
Now, if the guy behind the desk on your 11 O'Clock news incorrectly reports that the the head of the local hospital personally leads a "death panel" that decides if your grandmother gets to live, you can easily march down there and sort it out yourself, hell you might even know the head of that hospital and know right off that this is factually false. Soon, you won't trust this lie peddling news outlet again, and they'll have to make some sort of change.
Of course, there are organizations out there that lie when making declarative statements, like the "death panel" example above, but those are generally on the national/Internet level, because someone in Jacksonville, FL can't reasonably verify a story about what's happening across the country or in DC like they can with a story about the Jaguars, so there's always some shadow of doubt...
The key here truly lies in buying up local news outlets.
It betrays that their indignation isn't so much over dangers to democracy as it is their loosening grip on the ability to frame the discussion of any given day.
You can't say Sinclair is "combating the national news broadcasters"; they themselves are a national news broadcaster. They just happen to like branding themselves with local faces.
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...
See, everyone can play this game in the Postmodernist world.
If you look globally, we don't have a Right/Left in the USA, we have an EXTREME right in power and a moderate left in minority. The GOP is the only party in the world whose stance is that climate change is a hoax. We withdrew from the Paris accord while Syria and North Korea have joined it. That is despicably anti-scientific. If you compare Obama's middle of the road left-ism to Trump's extreme right stances, its quite shocking. There can be no false equivalence between the R and L in this country, one is evidently far more extreme.
I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science.
Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field.
The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science.
Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2]
Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars.
I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology.
But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation.
[1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n...
[2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...
1 - https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2016/12/15/Photos/NS/M...
Was it voting rights? Is voting rights scary? Or perhaps universal health care? Is that scary? Or a public education? Wooow that's REALLY scary!
Come on.. scare us! We liberals love a good scary story!
Well, the problem with that narrative is that most of the center-left is quite happy to find a comprimise. It seems like arms dealers are too, actually. It's mostly the NRA unable to disengage its PR machine from collapsing the entire narrative to "you'll take our guns" vs "total gun freedom".
So that itself is a good thing to bring up: it's impossible to disassemble with facts because it's already counterfactual.
Similar things can be said of the freedom of association and freedom of religion arguments. They're currently fixed by a narrative of constant assault that most folks freely admit is poorly supported in their daily experience, but that they're convinced (by media groups coordinated by Sinclair) are just over the horizon coming from them.
It's certainly fair to claim left wing media has bias. We should always be watchful for bias and unfairness in our media. It's just that right now, unless you believe in hidden child porn rings in pizza shops being shut down by a secret Trump task force (the Storm, a literal extension of pizzagate), potential influence from demons/lizard people in the democratic party (Alex Jones pushes this narrative), or a global Jewish coordinated conspiracy that reaches down to the level of each individual life on the planet, and that ever Muslim is part of a coordinated global conspiracy to "end whitness"... Well you get the picture. Unless you believe in the output of this machine coordinated to spread this disinformation (and I say machine because we've got people freely admitting part of it is theirs, e.g., Cambridge Analytica), facts and uncharitable readings are sufficient from the left wing media.
A centrist or even a libertarian should have no problem picking their poison in the marketplace of ideas, unless they're genuinely bought into these increasingly absurd conspiracy theories that put 9/11-truther levels of weird to shame.
>Well, the problem with that narrative is that most of the center-left is quite happy to find a comprimise. It seems like arms dealers are too, actually. It's mostly the NRA unable to disengage its PR machine from collapsing the entire narrative to "you'll take our guns" vs "total gun freedom".
You too are collapsing the narrative to "NRA is evil." The power that the NRA has is that it can mobilize countless voters who support what the NRA does. Pretending that the NRA is a rogue organization that doesn't represent a huge segment of the population is disingenuous.
>A centrist or even a libertarian should have no problem picking their poison in the marketplace of ideas, unless they're genuinely bought into these increasingly absurd conspiracy theories that put 9/11-truther levels of weird to shame.
Tell me again how Trump is a fascist and neo-Nazis are taking over the country. And further that Trump who bombed the shit out of a major Russian ally (Syria) is under the thumb of Russia because of pee-pee tape in the same breath that you make fun of Trump for being a germaphobe (part of why he eats so much fast food).
I'm not sure if the NRA is evil or not. I don't think "evil" is a very good label for Atheists to use, and I count myself among that cohort.
I think the NRA's published position matches with my account. I do not think it's a helpful or reasonable position.
> Pretending that the NRA is a rogue organization that doesn't represent a huge segment of the population is disingenuous.
Quite the contrary, I think the NRA represents a rather small segment of the population. They're trying to broaden that segment with significant cash outlay and with very misleading arguments that turn things like, "Bans on modifications that allow semi-automatic weapons to achieve >2r/s sustained fire rates" into "They hate our freedom and they're coming for our guns and it's time to strike back." That's a chartiable reading of NRATV's current message.
> Tell me again how Trump is a fascist and neo-Nazis are taking over the country.
"Taking over" is certainly not the word. "Have always been here and are increasingly more exposed." Unless of course we ignore the continued defense of openly self-labeled neo-nazi groups right out of Trump's own mouth, this is a factual reading of the situation.
> is under the thumb of Russia because of pee-pee tape
Any president would fall prey to this rumor. It's hilarious. I wish Obama had a pee-pee tape scandal. It's quintessentially American.
What's I hope less so is the direct and numerous conflicts of interest that have been poorly handled by the Trump admin, the numerous (denied) allegations of campaign finance violations that were then not only proven, but plead guilty to by Trump's cohort.
Again: you're equivocating based on utterly meaningless and boring things. Sure, some leftits are dumb. For the most part, the center-left media ignores the majority of these stories after they come out (as has been pointed out in other places, Fox brings up the pee tape more over time than any other outlet). Nor have I actually ever even heard the phrase, "Trump is a germophobe" come up except as a refutation.
All this is smoke and mirrors, and an attempt to deflect from the truly frightening admissions that folk who ran the Trump campaign's media have made. They're literally suggesting the use of human trafficking to run a sex entrapment extortion game on politicans and you're like, "Well the libs believe in a peepee tape." I'm sure some libs believe in UFOs too, but this doesn't dismiss or excuse the facts at hand.
The NRA's position is no more unreasonable than forcing Christians to pay for what they believe to be child murder.
>Bans on modifications that allow semi-automatic weapons to achieve >2r/s sustained fire rates
Actually, after the Las Vegas shooting the NRA came out in favor of banning bump stocks. [0]
>"Have always been here and are increasingly more exposed." Unless of course we ignore the continued defense of openly self-labeled neo-nazi groups right out of Trump's own mouth, this is a factual reading of the situation.
Yep, they've always been there and while there's fluctuations the general trend is there are fewer and fewer of them. The largest neo-Nazi gathering in ages was a year or two ago and they managed to get a few hundred people to show up. The outsized media attention on these crazy people is to attempt to associate them with the approximate half of the country which happens to vote Republican. In contrast you can look at the media coverage of Antifa and other far left groups that have set fires and killed people over the last few years. It's very different and it's easy to understand why.
It's also important to look at the big picture here. Rather than condemning the alt-right he said there were "good people" on both sides of a rally where someone was killed and one of those sides was the alt-right. But do you know what that allowed him to do? He was in a position where he was able to go to Congress with a position supporting a path to citizenship for dreamers in exchange for increased funding for border control and some stupid wall funding. And there was hardly any push back from the far right. Giving them a tongue lashing might have made you feel better, but it likely would not have helped the country in any way.
>All this is smoke and mirrors, and an attempt to deflect from the truly frightening admissions that folk who ran the Trump campaign's media have made. They're literally suggesting the use of human trafficking to run a sex entrapment extortion game on politicans and you're like, "Well the libs believe in a peepee tape." I'm sure some libs believe in UFOs too, but this doesn't dismiss or excuse the facts at hand.
Some crazy right wingers have some crazy conspiracy theories like 9-11 truthers and pizzagate. Some crazy left wingers have some crazy conspiracy theories about GMOs, alternative medicine, vaccines, etc. But this isn't a discussion about who has the craziest crazies, this discussion is about how the mainstream media biases when reporting on all issues including the crazies.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/top-house-republica...
This "Trump is playing 4d hyperchess and can see externalities that by the way didn't actually pan out because not only did DACA not go through, but Trump took it off the table spitefully because he couldn't secure wall funding" argument? Unconvincing at best. I don't believe it because I don't see evidence of it. But I certainly don't think that the desire to appease conservative Americans includes calling people who publicly state their goal is to establish a white ethnostate in the ashes of American democracy "good people." They're literally opposing the institutions and laws he swore to uphold.
> Some crazy right wingers have some crazy conspiracy theories like 9-11 truthers and pizzagate. Some crazy left wingers have some crazy conspiracy theories about GMOs, alternative medicine, vaccines, etc. But this isn't a discussion about who has the craziest crazies, this discussion is about how the mainstream media biases when reporting on all issues including the crazies.
And yet you're seemingly unwilling to quote, engage, or even acknowledge that side of the conversation?
I find that side of the discussion much more interesting.
Whether or not Trump's behavior is intentional or accidental, the outcome is the same.
>And yet you're seemingly unwilling to quote, engage, or even acknowledge that side of the conversation?
As I acknowledged multiple times in this thread, I'm not even arguing my own position. I'm pointing out that there are other ways of seeing the world, other axioms that can be accepted which make the mainstream media look very biased. I don't need to engage in an argument about whether neo-Nazis are worse than Antifa because it's irrelevant to our conversation. The topics I brought up were pretty mainstream things like abortion, gun rights, etc. You have brought the conversation to the fringe. But this isn't about the fringe. It's about the middle. Of course the bias is expressed in how the media talks about the fringe too, but again that's irrelevant. We probably agree on many if not most of these issues, but conservatives are not crazy in seeing that the mass media doesn't represent them fairly, or in many cases doesn't represent them at all.
I'm uninterested in continuing with you in any capacity. Thank you for your time, but we won't speak again while you use this name. Goodbye.
>It's easy if you just blindly accept the axioms of one of the groups. You accept the axioms of left wingers, so it doesn't seem scary to you. I'm not a right winger but they could just as easily say: murdering millions of unborn children, robbing us of our right to defend ourselves, denying the right to freedom of association, infringing on our freedom of speech, infringing on our freedom of religion, etc. Those are all pretty scary.
The whole point of the discussion is to point out that the world looks differently if you accept different axioms. I'm sorry if it bothered you that I wasn't willing to debate the merits of your views vs the views of the imaginary third party I described, but I think my intentions were clear here.
Or that they're pushing government to limit your rights to free speech or religion.
Where did Disney & CNN say government should limit your rights to free speech & religion?
The major media companies including CNN heavily toed the government line that religious groups do not have the right to avoid paying for child murder on religious grounds.
Government funded public universities regularly hassle, cancel, and provide insufficient security for conservative speakers. This is government funded censorship and the media has carefully avoided putting it in those terms because they support the position of censoring conservatives.
Disney is now left wing. Yep.
Questioning authority is absolutely the most appropriate task for the free press. IMO at least this part is not "anti-american".
Let's further the discussion -- take a look at http://lite.cnn.io/en -- there's about 40-50 stories there. Please pick the top five or ten and help illustrate which among those demonstrate the bias you refer to. Or if the problem is less widespread, please indicate which among the 40-50 there illustrate the bias.
Would you call reporting on, say, The Mai Lai Massacre or the Kent State shootings "anti-american"? How about Monica Lewinsky or Watergate?