The mainstream media\media monopoly has two deeply engrained habits; one, the belief in distributing free news, two, in sensationalizing every story to maximize ad revenue.
Technology reduces cost, ergo, when costs reductions meet these two habitations, the net result is training the audience to accept sensationalisation itself as a brand and if they do so, you tend to polarize an audience in unpredictable ways as a consequence of operating your media empire.
Think about it this way. The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising, and to the advertisers, we are products the MSM is selling to them. What do you do with products once you are done with them? You throw them in the garbage. Once we're used up we become trashed.
It's the belief that sensationalism itself is trustworthy that creates this trashing, and I would encourage anyone to learn to detect sensationalism as the psychological baseline for stimulation has risen to such an extreme these days.
In this instance, the moment we refer to any kind of warfare operation as "whack a mole" is when you begin rolling your eyes as the author is not treating people with respect.
Good, accurate information is expensive. If you need proof of that, talk to a historian.
I'm pretty skeptical about that. The major media outlets have significant influence over the political ideas that circulate through the electorate. In a democracy, that means having a lot of influence over which candidates are viable in elections, which, given how powerful governments are, is worth quite a lot more than ad revenue.
Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue?
Stuff like this doesn't help the optics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGRnhBmHYN0
Nor does Zuckerberg spending $500 million on ballot harvesting initiatives and skirting the law where he could. The one thing this last election prooved is that when rich and powerful people feel threatened with losing power or fortune, they often decide to use whatever power they have and spend whatever fortune they've got to maintain what they have. We'll find out, as the forensic investigations drag on, exactly how compromised this election was. Suffice to say, an awful lot of people on the left are acting like they have nothing to lose which is a strong signal indictments and convictions are on the road ahead.
Look at the MSM's SEC 8k and 10k filings. https://investors.newscorp.com/node/10126/html
Free news is done to sell advertising, which also finds its way into their subscription businesses and even if you pay for WSJ, the articles are often paid for or done as political favors.
Certainly there are considerable numbers of people in this country that totally distrust the major media sources (for very good reason, in my opinion), but they still have considerable viewerships and therefore considerable influence over the thoughts and therefore votes of many.
Again, do you think Bezos was looking for the ad revenue? Or was he looking for political influence?
It's easy to look at someone and pass judgement. It's expensive to get to know someone, especially if they are very different than you are. Learning to judge someone by the content of their character is a difficult thing to ask of someone.
Imagine having to get to know Ed Gein. At the very least if you listened to the mans life, you'd be questioning if there really was a god or if nature really had any sanity, given the developmental trauma he experienced. It's way easier to see a guy wearing his mother's skin on his face and go "yep, crazy". It's harder to look beneath that and go "How the hell did society fail you?".
That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.
What did or didn't resonate well is not really the point of the discussion but now that you bring it up, you'll remember one of King's least popular positions was one of his least color-blind ones: worker quotas.
This is just incorrect. Bolt action and muzzleloaded rifles are both extremely common and not semiautomatic.
That being said, "semiautomatic" is usually a useless scare-word thrown in by people who have no clue what they're talking about.
That period was also heavily dominated by Islamophobia in the US with firebomb attacks on Islamic Centers and random brown people getting assaulted and called "terrorists".
Heck, a mere 4 days after 9/11 happened a Sikh was shot for being mistaken as an Arab Muslim due to his turban [1]. Which actually makes no sense but hate rarely does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memori...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
Are these people average Americans? [0]
No offense, but this sounds a lot like the argument how Trump supporters are allegedly just a "loud minority", a claim that's factually disproved not just by results from the public votes of two presidential elections, but the fact that he won one of them and only barely lost the other one.
Where does the "average American" fall in that context? Is there even an "average" when the only two valid political choices have become distilled down to a superficial "We are not the other party" forcing everybody to pick between two allegedly completely opposing sides?