Edit: See https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i... for an example.
This was before Fox News became so powerful, and media became more explicitly ideologically divided. I sometimes wonder how much it has changed since.
But given how any left-wining news outlets Rupert Murdoch owns, probably there remains a lot of truth to the observation.
so peculiar that while existing in a 4d space, we are so prone to believing that politicians only operate on a 1d vector.
I'm a fun example. Of the major candidates in the last election, preference list read (best to worst) Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, (big gap) John Kasich, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton. This does not fit with ANYONE's idea of the political spectrum.
Why that order, and how do the most oppositely polarized candidates wind up on top? My top issue is NSA surveillance. Ted Cruz opposed NSA surveillance and has publicly voted and taken a stand on it. Sanders has questioned it and been luke-warm against it. Kaisich at least made some comforting noises about controls. The only good thing to hope for about Trump is that he will be incompetent. The remaining two are strongly pro-NSA and bureaucratically competent enough that they would have been able to push the NSA agenda forward.
That said, people like me are weird. As survey data shows, the parties are polarizing along the traditional left/right divide. See https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizati... for data showing that now over 90% of Democrats/Republicans are farther left/right than the average Republican/Democrat. While back in the mid-90s, there was a much, much larger overlap of views.
Look at Reagan's last election - he was hugely popular, and won by a massive margin in the electoral and popular votes. A big chunk of the country was happy voting for a democrat before Reagan, and went back to voting for one after him. I can't imagine a scenario like that these days.
Fake News is propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes. Nothing mentioned mention here falls into a category of Fake News. Fake News creates cognitive dissonance and distrust. More subtler methods work differently.
"But mainstream media also does Fake News" arguments are whataboutism.
Trump supporters found themselves more strongly associated with such stories than the Democrats (not surprising given his support among right-wing social media,) so they attempted to reframe "fake news" as, itself, a fake phenomenon invented by the left to discredit alternative media out of fear of the threat it presented to the leftist media establishment status quo.
This to further the narrative that the mainstream media was little more than a propaganda wing of the DNC and its globalist masters, and that any Trump-critical stories from the MSM were likely to be fabrications and thus not to be trusted (but you could trust those stories on your Facebook feed about HRC having Parkinsons' disease or running a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor.)
And then Trump himself picked up on it somehow and now likes to label anything and anyone that criticizes him as fake news.
Ironically, the least likely thing to be called fake news nowadays is news that is actually fake.
If FOX news runs front-page mugshots non stop every time an immigrant commits a crime, that shows a massive bias and leads its readership to an incorrect worldview, but it's not "fake". If Honest Truth Online runs a story that a missing girl was murdered by an immigrant based on miniscule to no evidence, that's fake news.
https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1142442971922653184
I've been following the Andrew Yang campaign since his appearance on the Joe Rogan show and so far as I can tell MSNBC has been at it for months now.
The gall still astonishes me: 20 candidates qualified for the debates, he now polls in the top 8 and betting markets even place him in the top five, and they substitute someone who did not even qualify for the debate for him.
He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good. I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.
What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.
Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.
What the hell?
> He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good.
I respectfully disagree with your assessment because it misses the context of these numbers. Top 8 in a field of 24 candidates, most of whom established career politicians with national platforms, is huge for someone who was virtually unknown until only a few months ago. The Rogan podcast in February put him or his ideas on the radar of many people and his twitter acct went from less than 40k to over 400k followers. He qualified for the debate stage earlier than most of the field, and the "paltry" 2% polling (a criterion for the later debate stages) beats many national politicians like Gillibrand etc. It should also be viewed in context with his still very low name recognition. 2% national polling when most Americans still don't even know you exist is remarkable. It means there is huge potential.
>I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.
I was blown away by the sheer amount of sense and rationality when I first heard him speak. It is so unlike a politician, and of course it should be because he isn't one. More than this almost, I was blown away by the responses of other people across the political spectrum. Specifically, it made me see that I had a completely wrong image of Trump voters. He seems exactly what America needs -- a uniter around ideas, not identities -- and I mean this as an outsider who wishes America well (but is deeply concerned about what you are doing to yourself). I really, really hope that more Americans will hear him out and listen with an open mind.
This was a targeted attack at one of the most interesting candidates this primary so far and it only serves to suppress a viable alternative to establishment candidates that are featured regularly on the network.
That's a pretty incredible claim, and requires some pretty serious proof if you expect anyone here to believe that. As a counterpoint, they give plenty of air time to a candidate who is literally running as an independent, who the party machine specifically, systematically disadvantaged last time. Why would they cut Yang if he got ratings?
I think the truth is more that news goes for what sells, and a candidate who hasn't yet proven they can sell ads is not worth covering by their metrics. See: the $2b+ plus free press Trump got.[1] He was a known quantity no one expected to win, so covering that spectacle was easy and safe ad money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...
It's also worth noting that while MSNBC is the 2nd or 3rd most watched network (depending on the month) there are only about 1.6 million people regularly watching and that number is down 14% year over year. So even if they snub your candidate, it may not matter much at all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/17/which-can...
Edit, fixed AMP version.
What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.
Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.
Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6grXCooL3-M
Listen to Bill Clinton in the 90's basically laying down the Trump line on 'illegal aliens':
On what issues have the Republicans shifted to the right since, say, 1985?
I recently read that in 1970, Republicans still supported Basic Income.
The left today is a caricature of the left in the 60s and early 70s.
No it doesn't [1], using data from [2] and [3].
Maybe double check information you get from youtube pundits, especially those with an egregious agenda.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Vital-S...
[3] https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizati...
I mean, seriously?
Moreover, they ignored everything since 2012, when the social justice movement really gto going only in 2013 [0]. Which means they're not even really addressing the meaningful recent leftward lurch. This is exactly the kind of obvious manipulation I'm talking about. Leaving out 7 years of data that are the core of the entire argument.
[0] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.
The study was published in 2014, and it's not uncommon to have no finalized data for the year prior on all sources you want to aggregate. There is no grand conspiracy.
> The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.
Again, no it doesn't. And how could it if it was published in 2014, going by your assertion?
Poole used congress voting records, and racism isn't the only (do I even need to state this?) conservative metric.
Regarding your link I don't know what you think it means. That terms and concepts that come into the discourse are discussed more? I'm not shocked.
If aliens invaded earth tomorrow and the local news decided to go with the story of someone's Aunt Mary who just won a cobbler bake-off for the third straight year, you'd be shouting "WTF" at your TV. But the subtler ones just go right past your filters.
At first it is often very annoying to confront yourself with the different viewpoints and opposite spin.
But you train yourself to read everything more critically, recognize how easy it is for your preferred media outlets to blur your "vision", and discover that the truth usually is somewhere in the middle.
Anything critical of the current administration is not left-leaning either. In the past, most of these organizations have been critical of the Obama administration, but they weren't considered right-leaning then.
"Our Media Bias Ratings represent the average judgment of Americans. They are based on blind surveys of people across the political spectrum, multi-partisan analysis and other in-depth analyses as well as tens of thousands of user ratings. Our scientifically-generated ratings are fluid and subject to change over time as new information is gathered and biases change.
Unless otherwise noted as editorial content, all bias ratings are based on online versions of news coverage, not TV, print, or radio content."
Link: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
You can also see that they differentiate between fox's online news and opinion pieces, with the latter classified as being on the political Right.
Edit: I do think the separation of their opinion pieces from their regular news reporting is a little bit of a cop-out though.
Politically, Fox does not stay put. To maximize market share, they always want to be just barely to the right of their main competition. Since that competition has gone quite a bit left in recent years, Fox has followed. By some measurements Fox is now even slightly to the left of the average American. Fox will immediately move back to the right if the competition moves right, because Fox can't risk crossing over.
It's hard to imagine a mindset where you see media treatment of Obama as comparable to that of Trump. It's night and day in every possible respect. And the donation and poll numbers from these organizations, which are generally 90-95% Democratic-leaning, confirm that.
It's supposed to mean, would you treat blue-team or the red-team better for the same behavior?
> drone strikes
This was heavily covered. This was probably the number one thing that Obama was criticized for. I think most people agree that this is bad (for various reasons), though technically it is protecting American soldiers lives. Oddly, we don't hear much about the fact that Trump administration has relaxed rules and is performing more drone strikes [1][2].
> tear gas at the border
I also remember his immigration policies being heavily criticized. Yet, if you look at the policies of the current administration, they are objectively far worse. If the policies are far worse, it is consistent with a neutral position to be more critical of the current administration's policies than the previous administration's.
> gunwalker scandals
While they tried to pin Gunwalker on Obama, Gunwalker was really a Bush administration scandal that wasn't discovered until Obama [3][4]. That was an attempted political hit during an election year, equivalent to Benghazi. Despite that, it was covered even by the crazy "leftist" CNN [5][6].
If Obama had been meeting secretly with the Kenyan government to gather dirt on his political opponents, defending them every chance he got when it was discovered that they spent significant effort to influence our elections, and trying to remove sanctions against them, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this would be heavily criticized and covered by both CNN and MSNBC. I do believe MSNBC leans left.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-admin-ups-drone-s...
[2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/7/donald-trump...
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/us/ap-exclusive-second-bush-era-gun-...
[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/01/05/144761413...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/28/politics/holder-contempt/inde...
[6] https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/world/americas/operation-fast...
Google also rarely[1] promotes Chinese and North Korean state-sponsored media sources as 'top news', or Marxist-Leninist publications, or the moral and political degenerates behind New Trotskyism[2], but for some reason, that analysis doesn't take issue with this lack of 'balanced reporting'. It's only upset that a very particular, very narrow political spectrum of ideas isn't getting 50/50 coverage.
[1] Never?
[2] Isn't it obvious that we'd be better off without listening to them? /s
You don't even have to turn to foreign news for that. There's no shortage of diverse domestic ideas, that for some unfathomable reason aren't being promoted.
There can be more than one bad thing happening at once, and it's not necessary that everything address all of them.
Or is there not some objective standard for determining that?
I used that example because it's the only one I have on hand. That's the trouble with biased story choice - it takes a lot of work and statistical analysis to reveal.