Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.
I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.
This is not me defending FOX. It's more of me railing against other forms of news that I also don't like but sometimes get a presumed pass. I see them as the opposite side of the coin.
EDIT: I know this is going to get down-voted. But if you disagree I'd really like to know why. I am someone who listens to others, and am curious why you disagree with this sentiment.
I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels?
Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage. They are only worth watching when a live, raw feed of a major event is occurring and I turn it off when the commentary starts.
Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways.
I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them more.
The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly.
For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.
Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm that).
Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other sources.
Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a decade and it may have changed a lot.
Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch out for.
I'll take a stab at it. I agree with you that Fox actually does have some decent news output at various points in the day (dearly departed Shep...), but I simply don't think that CNN has any equivalent to the Fox opinion programming. MSNBC comes closer but it still doesn't have hosts spouting outright disinformation on a regular basis.
What forms of disinformation have you found? And I'd like to classify disinformation as a situation you feel they are being purposeful about misinformation. I believe we're both going from the same definition but it's always good to be clear upfront.
One example is the remarkably-common “mistake” of putting a “(D)” after the name of an obscure congressman or senator caught committing some crime or other, when the person in question was a Republican.
Or the recent coronavirus coverage e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/media/4907...
For example. We have done more testing in the USA than in Italy, we also have more deaths than Italy. When you look at Per-Capita the opposite is true. When you mix and match you can say, no we do more daily testing but THEY have more per capita deaths.
All of this is when I looked a few days ago, it's possible that there will be a period that we have the highest per-capita in one and not the other etc. But all of that tells a story when you look at it holistically.
Fox seems to be instead trying to balance Economics with the health implications. Which is a very important thing for us to consider and we as a world do with things like the seasonal Flu etc.
Mislabeling is ridiculous. My frustration came from their treatment of Yang and Gabbard. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/476951-cnbc-uses-wrong-ph.... Yes I know CNBC not CNN, but I've spent 30 minutes writing this and I've seen similar things at CNN.
Anyway thanks for your reply.
1. Yup - the News Hour is where like 90% of the MSM consumers I know get their news now.
Another interesting albeit anecdotal thing I've notices is the progressive portion of the party moving so far left that they have started classifying some democrats as conservative. I don't think this has played out in the MSM yet but it's going to.
I can (as someone who now leans more left than right) say that if I had to pick I'd choose CNN over FOX/MSNBC. But I'd still have blindspots. If you listen to any of the networks in isolation you can't see the counterpoint. I'd also argue that our modern algorithms are more harmful in this way. If you watch one leaning show, it recommends that over others for a while.
In any case, I stopped watching broadcast TV a decade ago; especially news shows. The signal to noise ratio is just unacceptable to my brain these days. I get more information out of a 5 second glance at my news feed in the morning and magnitudes more information by doing that for a bit longer. They really dumb down everything on tv until even the most retarded vegetable still watching can grasp the basics and that apparently takes ages and endless repeating of things in 3 word sentences. People with a functioning brain stopped being part of the target audience ages ago.
In all fairness, people complaining about how retarded the news is is nothing new and was a popular pass time in 16th & 17th century British press as well as in Roman times even. People, like me, complaining about the quality of reporting is as old as the concept of publishing information in pretty much any form. Information is power and manipulating the masses through any of the channels information spreads is part of the game. And knowing that is the game has been the way to move up in society for just as long.
Also wasn't this the same channel that argued that they are allowed to present false news (or something similar)?
Remote voting for senators is an easy fix, probably (hopefully) temporary with a very low risk of foreign interference.
Remote voting for the general public is fraught with complexity due to voting being the jurisdiction of the states, as well as rife with opportunity for foreign governments to mess with the results.
I mean, we literally saw hacking attempts from the intelligence services of Russia on election reporting servers in 2016. Enabling remote voting for the general public needs EXTREME vetting before going live.
Not doable for 2020.
Electronic voting? Absolutely not. But it's hard to have cyberwarfare campaigns against paper trails.
Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.
How will we ever survive? /s
I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered generally distasteful to excessively advertise during campaigns and, while you'll certainly get lots of phone calls from Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP - it's for a short window and then you're done.
The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.
It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.
You might get downvoted for the snark but you're not wrong at all. I remain convinced that entertainment value is the most important qualifier for a President in modern times, and that probably goes back to JFK. Americans no longer trust government and don't believe in political leadership but they love celebrities and a good show.
> They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...
How many? Is it more than the number of people who can't vote in person on election day due to work or inability to travel to voting places? If it's not, vote-by-mail still wins in aggregate. If it is, then it sounds like there's a serious domestic abuse issue in the broader society that needs to be addressed.
It may be relatively easy to commit a single act of mail voting fraud, but if it's not scalable, it doesn't really matter.
You mention election reporting servers being hacked, but that has nothing to do with mail-in vs. in-person voting.
Sounds like FUD to me.
> Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony.
> It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore.
Which was deleted but raised some interesting points about the unification and cohesion of resistance movements and revolutions by my reading and I wanted to delve into movement fracturing even if that comment has been removed.
I don't think change movements are ever unified with the possible exception of those against hard force backed governments. Unless someone is literally beheading people to stay in power the revolution (or just political shift) will happen long before there is a unified and majority based embraced of the new order. Revolutions and resistance seemed eternally relegated to the fringe and exposed to excessive fracturing. This may possibly be due to the zealotry of those on the fringes or the academic origins of most political movements, but I'm quite uncertain as to the definite cause.
That said most political movements happen in stages where political ideals are embraced over time, in 2016 a 15$ minimum wage was decried as crazy and extremist and universal healthcare was viewed as an albatross, in this election round even Klobuchar had a plan that leaned toward universal healthcare.
Lastly, if by resistance movement you meant some sort of armed uprising - that's never going to happen in the US without it being a full blown coup which doesn't seem to fit the framing of "resistance movement" very much. The military far outclasses private individuals - even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive.
that didn't help against insurgents in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam
1. Use of women and children as weapon delivery systems, or shields. (Former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink once described a reoccurring situation whereby his team would be clearing homes in a contested territory and the families would act "strange" until they realized that one of the "family members" was not actually a family member at all.)
2. There are no laws. They can deploy whatever weapons and tactics they wish against both our forces and civilians alike. We are bound by rules of engagement (which aren't as obvious or straightforward as they might sound) which severely handicaps our ability to just "go get the bad guys" even if we know exactly where they are.
3. Extremism. Whether it is religiously motivated or not, extremism leads to predictable results. It's easy for propaganda to spread and to vilify anyone, but it's much easier when there's an actual "enemy" you can see. That effect is multiplied further when we inevitably make mistakes.
War is hell. War should always be the absolute last resort. Unfortunately, the people who decide when we go to war aren't the people who actually have to put their lives and limbs on the line to fight it.
[EDIT] my point being that resistance against one's own government, which has turned evil & brutal but still has the support of its military, is not exactly a case in which I'd expect private small arms per se to turn the tide of battle, or have much effect at all compared with other factors, really.