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I think you could prove this by following the money. I suspect that none of the major news organizations make the majority of their cash flows from advertising. I would suspect that they are operated at huge losses or increasing debt funded by their ‘shadow customers’. My cursory search was unable to produce any transparent financials. Maybe somebody else can do better.

That seems extremely unlikely. They’re funded by advertisers.

Okay then why are they all going broke and being bought by huge conglomerates?

Operating at a loss is the same thing as being funded by someone else.

The big problem is media is greatly funded by clicks, which leads to picking a demographic and pandering to it.

Hence AT&T owning CNN & then coming up with the idea for a network like OAN to cater to a different demographic.

> Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).

You responded to me, but I 100% agree with you!

I remember in Marin county, my gym had hired a guy with down syndrome because they didn't have enough employees -- unemployment was so low. My local safeway had resorted to hiring extremely disabled people to help with checkout. There was at least one paralyzed lady doing checkout and a guy without hands as well. For those individuals, such an opportunity would be very difficult to come by (I know ADA exists.. but let's be honest).

> So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.

Absolutely. If we saw sustained real wage growth the way we were beginning to see with Trump, people wouldn't have to rely on debt to finance their lives, which would mean a reduction of asset opportunities for the upper class. They couldn't stand that.

> Populism is a political ideology which pits working class and low income common folks against the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful.

No it's not. It's a system whereby the powerful tell working class and low income common folk to be angry at things like immigrants, minorities, other countries, etc. so their anger goes elsewhere. A more modern alternate form involves convincing people to be angry at things that don't exist, like Satanic pedophiles harvesting adrenochrome or 5G chips in vaccines, so people expend their limited energy fighting windmills and diving down rabbit holes that lead nowhere.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are angry at someone about a condition such as high costs or unemployment, ask yourself if the people you are angry at have the power to act as decision makers in control of any of the decisions that led to that condition. If the answer is "no" you are angry at the wrong people.

That's not populism because it involves thinking, and populism is mindless.

Last I checked, populists don't care about anyone's race. They care about the rich and powerful aiding and abetting illegal immigration, because that increases labor supply and lowers the wage floor.

Hmm, but the news channels owned by the ultra wealthy, who get their advertising revenue from the ultra wealthy, and who are staffed by the ultra wealthy, all told me that those poor people who are upset about illegal immigration are a bunch of racists who are too stupid to understand labor economics.