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Comment by JohnDeHope | Hacker News Reader

A joint venture with Fox News where every 15min they switch between liberal and conservative pundits would have been interesting. Imagine the drama when folks get up for a drink, come back, and sit down to somebody saying the polar opposite of what the person before had been saying. I'd pay to watch people watch that, just to see their heads explode.

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It would be funny, but I think this "one foot in a bucket of ice, the other in a bucket of lava" approach to neutrality is part of why political reporting has become so incredibly polarizing. It leads to increasingly extreme outliers being given a platform when they probably would have just been ignored before.

it parallels the US court room. each side going all-in and leaving it to the judge / jury to measure the relevance of whats being said.

Only the news channels dont interact directly in front of the viewer so it's like a courtroom where you only listen to one lawyer talk. You have to go to a different room to hear the other lawyer talk, and they are probably talking about the topics in a different order and with a different kind of focus

This analogy perfectly describes our news outlets.

And then we wonder why people are so ill-informed and lacking nuance in their understanding of issues.

That form of neutrality was mandated by law up until 1987 under the fairness doctrine, so it's unlikely it's responsible for any new trends.

The fairness doctrine produced a lot less polarization, or at least that's the widespread belief.

Jon Stewart wasn't a fan of this style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

It's painful to see how sharp he was back then and then see his current show. Something happened.

AS Jon Stewart points out, a debate show could be great. But that format is not a debate show.

Turns out people don't actually want a debate show. Hard to imagine how any for profit company that tries this ends up with anything different.

Has anyone ever tried a debate show, you know before claiming it couldn't work.

Many news programs do a great job at having a civilized debate between the conservative and progressive views on current issues. I'm partial to the PBS newshour. Unfortunately, their ratings are in the gutter, even without ads.

Certainly, PBS and CSPAN host such shows but they don't tend to pull in a ton of viewership.

This made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that. Perhaps Mike Judge could produce it? Something in the article seems to support just how fungible the CNN and Fox cable news-tainment duopoly is. They increasingly appear to be just two sides of the same news-tainment coin:

>"CNN wooed big-name talent, including Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, to join the service."

In a NYTimes profile from last year Chis Wallace stated:

>"I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox."[1].

It's worth noting that he was at Fox for 18 years. It's amusing to think that his move to the CNN streaming service just happened to coincide with his breaking point after almost two decades. I believe CNN also made an offer to Megan Fox after she exited Fox News.

My impression of CNN the last few years was that they seemed to be they spending an inordinate amount of time talking about whatever outrageous thing a Fox host just said on air. It's all rather dystopian and meta. The article hints that Discovery would like them to focus on hard-jouralism but I can't recall the last time CNN was hard-journalism. The Ted Turner years, the first Gulf war?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/business/media/chris-wall...

It's not a dupoloy at all. Fox cable handily beats CNN and MSNBC in daily ratings. Only thing beating Fox is the mainline broadcast networks' evening news.

I didn't mean an actual economic duopoly, that was sarcasm. I meant a duopoly in the sense of two poles of the political spectrum that each seems to cater to exclusively.

The Ted Turner years were great just generally. https://www.tedsmontanagrill.com/

The switch came with the W administration and the ramp up of conservative rhetoric.

> Perhaps Mike Judge could produce it?

Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Hannity and Colmes was -supposed- to be that, and it was at times interesting.

It was rather obvious though who the star of the show was supposed to be, and Colmes was rather moderate. The conspiracy theorist in me says they probably handpicked Colmes for that role because he was a rather unattractive guy, and anything Fox can do to make liberals look bad goes.

Colmes hosted one of the few left-leaning, nationally syndicated AM talk radio shows in the 90s. I remember when the show launched, the buzz was "big left/right AM talk shows now square off on TV."

I don't know how old you are, but it really was quite a different world before podcasts, YouTube, etc. The right pretty much dominated talk radio, and there wasn't another "talk" platform around.

Grew up in the 80's and 90's. Yeah, I remember a few. Had an uncle who always had Limbaugh or Harvey on in the background. I guess I didn't know about Colmes as I'd never heard him until I saw him on TV I guess a bit later.

As a kid, and even today, I'm bewildered by the fact it was and is still popular. Why do folks actively seek to listen to things that will make them angry or get them worked up? I guess it sells, but not to me.

You probably doomscroll and fall victim to ragebaiting without even realizing it. I know I do.

Well, I do keep checking on the realestate megathread daily, so maybe there's something to that. More of a 'misery loves company' thing I guess.

Hannity and Colmes look like macho type A and dweeb from central casting - if it was an over-the-top comedy routine, it would be fitting. There's no way that was lost on the show's producers, and thus was intended to some degree.

The entire purpose of opinion news is for people to be fed back their own opinions. Every time someone’s opinion is challenged by “their side” they find another outlet.

The NY Times opinion page is very successful, afaik, and has writers from the entire spectrum. A history I read said that it was created in the 1960s to attract readers, seemingly by publishing controversial opinions.

How many modern day “conservatives” would read the NYT? They started leaving Fox News when they called the election fairly and their journalists started saying that claims of “election fraud” were unfounded. Heck they started calling RedState a sellout until RedState kicked out the NeverTrumpers even people with conservative bona fides.

I’m sure the left would turn against NYT if they started publishing about the silliness of mask mandates in 2022.

I hear many conservatives cite the NY Times conservative op-ed writers. Also, I saw an article, maybe in the Atlantic, a few years ago where they asked various leaders what they read. All the conservatives read the NYT.

I bet they were all traditional Bush/Romney/McCain conservatives and not Trump/MAGA “conservatives” who have overtaken the Republican Party.

I'd love that!

I regularly read 'Real Clear Politics' for just this reason. To see what the zealots on either side of the aisle are saying, and to try to triangulate some sort of truth.

Lock them in a cage with folding chairs and make it pay-per-view.

You might be surprised by how little difference there would be!

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