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Comment by Qwertious | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.

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I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering.

CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.

Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.

Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes.

So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.

Fox News has been doing this literally for decades, to the point where they have zero journalistic credibility anymore. CNN is rather tame by comparison.

Sure, but their goal has always been to simply appeal to their base rather than to evangelize the gospel of the GOP. They're far too partisan an institution to be attempting a shot like that.

The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.

What can the media do when people would rather read a literal propaganda piece on facebook, watch some quack on fox news, listen to conspiracy theories on AM radio, or hear their preacher spew bigoted nonsense every sunday? We aren't taught how to continually educate ourselves about the world after school, so we would rather lean into things that confirm our biases rather than expand our perspective.

You can't expect a private sector media organization to "do the right thing." It's the old hoping for behavior B while rewarding behavior A. The only way to get a media organization that serves the public is to fund it with public money and make it an independent institution just like the judiciary and the central bank (and sometimes the statistics organization).

That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.

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