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> Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred

This is why a lot of countries have state-sponsored media with an obligation to report objectively, but without the pressure to be profitable. With news anchors and journalists that can build up trust and integrity over decades, without the need to sensationalize everything for the sake of viewer numbers. Obviously not a silver bullet either; if there are government officials breathing down their necks instead of shareholders it's probably not much of an improvement, but if enough independence can be maintained it seems to definitely help keeping the discussion civilized.

Speaking as someone from a country where we have a state funded broadcaster, the BBC, which is supposed to be neutral and objective: in practice the definition of neutral and objective is politicized and the leadership of the broadcaster is also politicized.

Similar story with the ABC in Australia. Also, as a non-profit entity that entirely depends on government funding, the typical staff member is more left wing than the population, and this inevitably skews some of the content.

The U.S. has NPR and PBS, but, to put it politely, they have variable amounts of trust depending on one's position on the political spectrum. They also indeed have government officials "breathing down their neck" at least in a budgetary sense.

Their closer-to-neutral stance and low-frills style also don't draw in the audiences that the major news outlets do. The American public is too conditioned for sensationalism and sexy graphics to watch PBS NewsHour with the late Jim Lehrer.

You can even argue social media decelerated. I knew some people who tried to claim the riots were peaceful, until video evidence showed that wasn’t true. It’s a lot harder to brush abuses under the rug when half the people in the crowd have a cell phone

There's definitely been a less reported but positive side to the proliferation of technology and everyone now having a video camera in their pocket.

I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news.

Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out.

If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.

> I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause.

There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making:

Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s.

A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.”

The full piece is here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html

1. Opinion piece 2. Blaming one side of politics 3. Amplified by being shared on social media (here and probably elsewhere)

This piece is a perfect example of what raiyu was pointing out.

The deliberate practice of revving up the Republican “base” with increasingly extreme, sometimes fabricated issues also started in the 80s (abortion was one of the first divisive issues to be used for this), and steadily increased to the point we’re at now. Trump was a sudden inflection point in that practice, but the “facts don’t matter” groundwork was already set. So when he went nuclear with misinformation, the leadership couldn’t do anything but follow along even when they didn’t like where he was going. Social media is a great accelerator for this process.