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Comment by andyxor | Hacker News Reader

The media leftist bias is real, I guess it’s hard to notice from inside the bubble

I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.

I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.

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Don't be surprised. Our journalists grew up on Cold War propaganda. They don't hire people from the 'other' team. I don't see the Western public ever breaking free from their IC narratives. Imagine a news report on the good deeds Russia/Iran/China do, automatic label of foreign state propaganda.

'Otherwise reasonable' does not negate ignorance and we are overflowing with ignorance thanks to our journalism(propaganda). Logic is some math term which automatically gets trashed because lolol im no good at math who needs that stuff amirite?.

I didn't claim it's not. I just meant to point out that people on the right have been told, consistently and repeatedly, that it exists since at least the early 90s, by people whose opinions they sure seem to take seriously, so it'd be unsurprising that many wouldn't trust the media even if it weren't true. The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results.

So you'd predict that without Fox and talk radio telling those people that almost everyone working in national mainstream media falls somewhere on the spectrum of "has no respect for you" and "likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture", most of them wouldn't be able to independently observe that fact with their own eyes and ears?

Actually, I would. It's a priming effect; by focusing on the notion that the rest of the media hates you, you're priming your audience to look at that media specifically to find examples of where it hates you, and indeed to specifically interpret it in a way that finds that the media hates you. The actual truth of that statement is rather less self-evident, and I suspect that far fewer people would agree that it is true without that priming effect.

To give a salient example: I read an article this morning about the ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan, clearly something that has no respect for those people. Except... it actually has a lot of respect for them, far more than I think they deserve. It treats the request for an audit as nothing more than a request for the audit; there's no questioning on what purpose it could serve other than overturning the election results. There's also this quote: "Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol." What it doesn't go on to explain is that the "affidavits" are actually foisted contracts that say in effect "if you don't agree to my demands in X days, you are in violation of the law," which has 0 legal effect whatsoever. Does it really "have no respect for [them]"?

Not every article -- not even most articles, really -- need go out of its way reflect the author's and editor's ideology for it to be quite clear that most national news media organizations lean heavily in the same direction and aren't afraid to let that determine what they report on and how they frame it.

Just curious, can I see the article?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michigan-2020-electi... is the article in question.

But note also that there is a distinction to be drawn towards a media source being biased versus "on the spectrum of 'has no respect for you' and 'likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture'."

I claimed that almost everyone working for these organizations (or to be more pedantic but more accurate, almost everyone involved in content for these organizations) is well-described by the latter, not that almost every article will reflect that perspective in an obvious way or even at all. For someone who tends to see the world differently from the average journalist or editor, the question then becomes: why take even the articles that aren't obviously biased at face value when you have a good idea of how the individuals involved feel about your culture and your priorities?

Really, if someone suggests that such a push would not be effective at convincing a lot of people, regardless of the truth of what's being promoted, then I'm not sure why they care whether media is biased.

Yes, media's biased. Yes, media lie a lot, often about serious things. Yes, some outlets on some topics tend to slant "left" pretty consistently. It's also true that, in the early days of post-fairness-doctrine right-wing broadcast media, there was a concerted and deliberate effort to promote the notion of the "left wing media" to a much greater degree than it was actually true, at least at the time that effort began, and that it was highly effective.

... but, if it's not possible that suddenly emphasizing the notion of a "left-wing media" may have significantly affected public perception of same, including possibly even if it wasn't true or was being grossly exaggerated, then I suppose we don't need to care about any of that. Right?

I don't think the media abruptly changed at exactly the same time right-wing personalities started talking a ton about media bias, no. Yet I'm sure perceptions did. So yes, I think deliberate promotion of a view to a huge audience, whether it's correct or not, will result in more people believing it's true than people's "own eyes and ears".

Let me be more precise: I think your claim that "The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results" is obviously very wrong. The truth of it does have a lot to do with this perception, especially given 1. the rather more "sincere" journalistic norms we see even in the paper of record in 2021 compared to a few decades ago and 2. the fact that social media makes it easy for people to organically show each other the most egregious examples of this stuff, and I would even go so far as to say that it probably matters more than whatever Fox and talk radio are telling their audiences. Obviously that does also matter somewhat even now, and perhaps it was even more important than the truth of the matter when these right-wing news outlets were first making this claim decades ago, but to think that this widespread perception is "merely accidentally" correct and mainly a result of propaganda is to give the typical right-leaning American far too little credit.

I'm not sure "cherry-picking while removing context has been crowd-sourced" is a great argument for the victory of truth (of the idea of media bias, presumably) over propaganda, but I take your point that the initial drive over a few relatively-centralized media to promote and categorize a "left-wing media" is no longer the main source from which people are receiving that message.

(FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)

I think it's obvious and I haven't spent a second of my life voluntarily consuming any mainstream right-leaning news, but maybe I'm just way, way smarter than all those rubes who you believe have basically no connection with reality outside of when their propaganda happens to be accurate. shrug!!!

[EDIT] removed mean sarcasm—poster engaging sincerely elsewhere and I felt this was unwarranted. Sorry.

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