CNN cutting back on over-hyping everything as “breaking news”
axios.com
axios.com
Back in the late-2000's, I worked at CNN on a 12-month contract. While there, I built a predecessor to the current "Breaking News" website banner.
At least at the time, Turner did not allow contractors to extend beyond the 12-month mark. So when my contract came up, they offered to convert me over to perm. I declined, because my interests lay more on the backend side of the tech stack, and my role there had been far more frontend-focused than I wanted for the long term.
Fast-forward 10 to 15 years, and I've had a lot of experiences that I'm very proud of. I've built concurrent systems that scaled to impressive levels of data. I've built event busses that moved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of financial transactions per year. Etc.
STILL, "my son built the Breaking News banner on cnn.com!" is the thing that my mom tells her friends. It's the only thing that my wife ever understood about what I do for a living.
There is such power in the visual, and in the consumer-side. In a very real sense, this silly thing was the crowning achievement of my career... and it was about two days of work and a few hundred lines of HTML and jQuery.
It would probably be pretty entertaining.
Then one day I figured out that she thought I literally created paper currency at my day job.
Oh well. Whaddya gonna do.
Ask HN: What does your Mom tell people about your work or employment?
But when someone asks what I did at reddit, the thing that gets the most interest is, "I made the thing that puts the link title in the URL".
I thought maybe it's a database optimization, but it could also just be an unfortunate design decision.
But yes, that too. The whole system was designed around SMS which couldn't be "unsent".
Nobody would ever Like/Retweet anything if it could be changed later.
Fun fact that, it's actually optional on reddit. You can put anything you want there and it will still work. These two are the same:
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/rantiwork_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/grayskull_...
The reason we made you unable to edit titles is to avoid the bait and switch. Getting a bunch of upvotes and then changing it. If you want to say, "well how about in the first five minutes" our counterargument was, "just delete the post and make a new one". It kept the software simpler.
If a URL ends with something like "/1234-content-goes-here", you can often shorten it to "/1234" and get a successful redirect.
(Just kidding.. I appreciate your work and I've been using reddit for a long time)
My favorite one was when we knew we had to take the site down for a few hours, so we made a page with curated content a-la-Slashdot where you couldn't vote or comment and it just stayed that way for a few hours. We just picked some of our favorite sites.
But we didn't warn the sites we were linking to and some of them got quite a shock with the sudden influx of traffic!
This is, unfortunately, true with managers and execs. Do some backend thing, no one notices as long as the site doesn't go down. But do some flashy thing on the front-end, let's give so-and-so a promotion and a big bag of money. This is even true of tech companies where you would assume more tech-oriented managers exist. But sadly, no. They have to pitch your work to higher ups and the higher ups just have their eyes glazed over when they hear about databases and caching and transactions per second.
Since then, I've built way more complicated things I'm proud of. But nothing beats that during beer time with friends .
I had missed that. That's very welcome - I hope they succeed. I imagine it could be very hard to pull this off after a ~decade of whatever CNN has been doing though.
More context: Discovery and WarnerMedia (former CNN parent company) merged back in April. The resulting entity "Warner Bros. Discovery" is led by David Zaslav, Discovery CEO since 2006.
I'd be weary about this. I don't sense CNN was somehow compelled to present progressive commentary and they now want to confront that market pressure, but rather, they employ mostly progressive journalists and that is how they choose to cover the news.
I suspect the execs will try to tone it down but progressives aren't known for wanting to be neutral or muted about their causes. Activism and "everything is political" are fundamental aspects of their worldview.
Edit: clearly the down votes don't seem to see the context wherein OP has described the commenter.
My post is not an opinion, it's the contextual position given by the OP.
But by all means downvote away per your bias.
Thanks Mods
It's rather strange to me that it is so hard for the term "radical left" to be defined in any sort of objective way, often it seems no definition is available at all which makes discussions about the topics hard to have.
What rights do Christians have over others?
No, that is not “radically far left.”
In 2019, according to Pew Research, 44% of “Republicans and Republican leaners” supported same-sex marriage.
As for your question about equal rights for “non-religious / non-Christians”, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Can you elaborate?
> I ask it because the "conservative" party in the US explicitly is against such things in their platform documents.
I assume you’re referring to the Republican Party platform document? It’s quite large; can you identify the portions you’re specifically referring to?
P18 in the PDF (p11 as per the included numbering) condemns and calls for the reversal of both US vs Windsor & Obergefell v Hodges as well as calls for marriage to be between one man and one women only.
P 19/12 calls for special rights to worship "God" which is the Christian god in this context, it doesn't call for the same rights for other religious beliefs. It all calls out for special rights to display the Ten Commandments but not other religious artifacts / documents.
I’d suggest this recent piece as a very cogent breakdown of the lost ascendancy of the religious right in conservative politics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/republicans-relig...
Globally, supporting marriage equality puts you in the minority, both in terms of # of countries as well as per capita. [0] Personally I think it's an obvious right, but that doesn't make it popular.
[0] https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-w...
Besides your comment being some broad generalization, it fails to assert the reality of the 'world' and in its place takes a group of progressive first world countries which align with liberal politics.
The world includes such places as India, Pakistan, Africa and China, oh my, where liberal ideology is a far cry from what you are describing
CNN is not to the left of progressive Democrats.
It's not even to the left of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Card-carrying communists sit in the parliaments of some Western democracies. Yet they somehow still get on as democracies, without many of the problems that plague the USA like wars of resource appropriation, rampant racism, and school shootings.
Every country falls somewhere on the political spectrum, implying that they are all insane because the aren't Sweden or something is revealing some heavy bias.
The mainstream rhetoric around North Africans, Africans and Roma people in europe would be totally unacceptable in the US and make the American right look downright tolerant in comparison. Remember, "blood and soil" political parties such as the FN in france that literally advocated for kicking back north Africans and openly calls for discrimination against Muslims can get up to 40% of the vote. Prejudice against the Roma people is so insanely prevalent and violent too that it's just disturbing. So much so that it would be worthy of an entire thread on its own.
The difference is that American issues get worldwide coverage and tons of internal debates. That's not the case in europe, especially on the internet where there's a weird complex of inferiority that pushes people to reflexively downplay or deny local issues whenever they get brought up.
As for resource appropriation, I guess the Libyan war never happened? And maybe you should look up what Francafrique is. Neocolonialism is still a very European hobby.
The only context where GP's sentiment makes sense is a purely economic one. Left economic parties, like social democrats and communists, do a lot worse in the US than in Europe. But this Europe good, US bad meme by folks who identify as progressive is an incredibly shallow reading of politics and history.
From economic side probably yes, but that's not straightforward either. Conservatives in Eastern Europe often hold power by generous social programs and benefits while liberals want to cut it down.
AllSides Bias Rating puts them on the left, https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
Pew Research shows a significant slant toward the left in terms of CNN's audience, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/interactives/media-po...
Searching CNN in this bias chart shows center-left, https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/
From 2014 but still showing CNN toward the left, https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444
Everything else they report comes from PR NewsWire, and to me that union of corporate power and media also seems very right wing
For those that downvoted him, many of the CNN "war contributors" have ties with the defense industry that are not disclosed, and those are all pro-war/intervention.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/news-networks...
https://jacobin.com/2022/04/defense-industry-ex-military-off...
This has been going on for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
EDIT: I just noticed but I think it's funny that the WaPo has an article showing that the defense industry has infiltrated our news organizations in the lifestyle section. It's almost as if the editors are trying to hide the fact. I would think it would be a front page thing. Pretty significant assault on the democratic process, particularly on a subject as immense as war.
They put CNN, and Democracy Now! , in the *same bucket*. that is insane. NYT opinion also has Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, Bret Stephens for chrissakes, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, I dont know how they can put NYT opinion in "left" without putting it in "right" as well.
As far as CNN's audience, certainly they would be slightly left because right leaning viewers are sucked into the FOX news vortex.
is any of this "far left"? absolutely not. if you dont see "abolish the police and all prisons" and "forgive all student debt", you aren't looking at far left content.
I never took the "defund the police" movement as "abolish the police." I thought equating it to "abolish the police" was just a right wing hit-job.
No, not really. Some on the left actually took it that far.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
> Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
> By Mariame Kaba (Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.)
> ...I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
> ...People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.
That was published a couple weeks after George Floyd's death.
I mean, "reform" is right there...
EDIT: Wow, I didn't think a rational person would think defund meant completely getting rid of police. There are plenty of examples of where defund doesn't mean 100%. During the Reagan administration, the federal government greatly defunded state colleges and universities. Politicians talk about defunding medicare. People talk about defunding the military. To get states to adopt the minimum drinking age of 21, they threatened to defund highway federal highway funding. None of these are 100% removal of funding.
"prevent from continuing to receive funds."
"to stop providing money for something"
"To stop the flow of funds to"
"to withdraw financial support from"
"to deplete the financial resources of"
But Cambridge at least gives you your 2nd meaning as an alternate:
"to stop providing money or as much money to pay for something"
EDIT: Oof, and the Cambridge definition was changed sometime after Dec 2020 to give it that more broad definition:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201207142418/https://dictionar...
Ultimately, 'defund' - to most people - doesn't mean reform. Insisting that the vernacular is incorrect is just fighting an uphill battle.
Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, and David Brooks are the NYT's token "palatable to liberals" conservatives, meant to keep their opinion pages from being a complete echo chamber. They are in no way a justification for placing the NYT opinion section on the "right," just like Alan Colmes didn't put Fox News on the left.
What is that based on? Can you provide evidence? The evidence so far says otherwise; dismissing it with a characterization doesn't change the facts.
IMHO, it covers a wide range, from Douthat (certainly not palatable to liberals) to Brooks, more centrist. Bret Stephens was the WSJ editorial page editor before coming to the NYT, and you will see almost zero non-right opinion on the WSJ (seriously, find one opinion piece that supports Democrats and post it here).
The contention was that they make the NYT editorial page somehow "right wing," which is obviously false to anyone who actually reads it. It's clearly left wing, and if it feels to you like it isn't, you might be one of those people who is so far to the left that everything else is to your right.
IIRC, all three that I listed are Never Trumpers. Douthat is probably the least palatable to liberals, but he's often pretty indirect and soft in his columns (compare to the more liberal columnists, who can regularly put out red meat for liberals). The impression I get is he's also probably the least capitalist of the bunch. IIRC, Stephens openly voted for Biden and is strongly for gun control. Like you mentioned, Brooks is quite centrist, probably to the point of being a moderate Democrat. I'd be extremely surprised if he hadn't voted for Biden. For conservatives, they're all fairly moderate with at least some prominent heterodoxy, and I don't think anyone right-of-center would get hired as an NYT columnist without those qualities.
IMHO, the tension created by their positions makes them far more interesting than most opinion columnists. Columnists that are on friendly ground (e.g. conservatives on WSJ opinion pages, liberals at the NYT) are usually just boring and predicable (especially the WSJ).
I don't recall that contention, but certainly the NYT opinion pages aren't right wing. However, you dismissing anyone who disagrees without as having a distorted, extreme perspective isn't evidence - other than evidence of your perspective.
I think the NYT's opinion page is diverse, but feel free to support your claim: Count up the columnists and their positions.
> Douthat is probably the least palatable to liberals, but he's often pretty indirect and soft in his columns (compare to the more liberal columnists, who can regularly put out red meat for liberals).
I think this characterization of Douthat is way off. Douthat is direct and puts out absurd BS 'red meat'. I think he puts out more brazen BS than any other columnist I've read there, but I seldom read any opinion pieces. And note I say 'brazen' BS; there's plenty more that is just less brazen. The opinion pages are an embarassment of deceit and manipulation to the NYT and other publications; the deceit, from all parties, is obvious if you are informed. I can predict what many will write based on the political navigation: e.g., for Stephens, 'how do I attack Dems without supporting Trump or sounding irrational?'
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides
Founded by Republicans and using methodologies developed by conservatives to arrive at the outrageous conclusion that the NYT and CNN are "left of liberal". No bias there of course
Germany allows nudity, sex work, and prostitution; bans Nazi imagery; and has socialized medicine.
The Mississippi law that supposedly violates Roe also allows abortions after 15 weeks in case of danger to the mother’s health and fetal abnormalities. And unlike in Germany, there is no mandatory counseling or waiting period. The Mississippi law is more similar to the German law than different—certainly much closer to each other than to Roe, which requires legalized elective abortions for two months after nearly all other developed countries ban the practice.
I’ll certainly grant you that, when it comes to the government paying for things, CNN is definitely in the center. But that’s just one of many issues.
Whether or not the assertion is correct overall? Dunno. I don’t find CNN “progressive” but I suspect the term is being used to refer to more sensational, polarized content, not actually very progressive content.
By extension, progressives by-and-large tend to be very active and vocal. This is, I believe, a key component as to why their positions and worldviews are so well known and so frequently seen. Activism is a virtue for progressives, and they place a serious emphasis on making sure their voices and perspectives are heard. I don't think it's wrong or disparaging to say that and I suspect I'm not the only one with this observation. I'm commenting on their approach, not condemning them for it.
I'm surprised it is being received this way, mainly because I specifically tried to avoid making comparisons to other groups so that the topic doesn't get more heated. I also wanted to avoid having my observation about progressive vocality and activism invalidated or diminished because [group xyz] is perceived as more vocal and active.
I suspect the execs will try to tone it down but progressives aren't known for wanting to be neutral or muted about their causes. Activism and "everything is political" are fundamental aspects of their worldview.
I have no reason to believe that CNN or FoxNews or any other media outlet is doing anything other than trying to corner whatever part of the market they are going after. Occasionally they have to shift emphasis and direction. In X years when FoxNews starts to lose its audience will people say the same thing but replace progressives with conservatives? If the employees don’t follow the corporate directives they can hire new people. It’s a business that does not have a shortage of people wanting to get rich/famous.
Particularly because your quote of "If the employees don’t follow the corporate directives they can hire new people" is along the lines of something I wanted to get across but failed to do so. I believe that if CNN wants less of a 'progressive stance' they would have to hire more conservative journalists because I don't see the progressive ones as wanting to 'be less progressive', so to speak.
You make the baseless claim that progressive views are well known because progressives are vocal and active. This implicitly disavows the notion that progressive views are well known for other reasons; for instance by being what people desire without said desire being the product of brainwashing. You sort of imply that their worldview (as if there is a singular worldview the majority of progressives agree with) is popular because of propagandizing. This might the the case but it need to be backed up with some convincing evidence.
You are framing the issue of CNN wanting to shift its business focus as something that will hard to do because progressives are obstinate and obsessed with being vocal and staying on message. This is demeaning and quite frankly stupid.
Tucker Carlson used to work for CNN. He found a more lucrative niche catering to right wing news junkies. He’s a showman, an entertainer. He can shift emphasis on a dime because he is a professional and likes the money/attention. The same goes for most people in show business. Framing things in terms of how progressives or conservatives are in this instance is…well, I’ll say it’s weird.
> I suspect the execs will try to tone it down but progressives aren't known for wanting to be neutral or muted about their deeply held principles, and issues critical to our democracy. They are too thoughtful, and intellectually consistent.
It's pretty interesting to me the difference between how your comments are seen vs a comment with "progressives" replaced with "conservatives". In my experience, a reply saying "well progressives do that too" (just like every response to all of your comments but about conservatives) would very quickly have several replies claiming it's just whataboutism, or just flagged (like yours was!).
I was thinking exactly this (I find that magical word fascinating), and I also think this thread is interesting.
Instead of talking about how the company will shift its focus we end up talking about how hard it is to get progressives to change or to be compliant. This then establishes in some peoples’ minds that it is well known and assumed that progressives are hard to deal with. They are pig headed one might conclude. I believe the intentions are underhanded and without merit. I could be wrong.
(full disclosure--I haven't watched CNN or any other new channel since the Iraq war, i.e. 19 years ago. The all burned their bridges with me then, and I've never been back, so I'm assuming its true that CNN has a tilt left. I've never seen it myself.)
I don't have the link at hand but studies demonstrate that progressives in general are far more politically interested and active versus anybody center to right of center, minus the far right.
In that group center to center-right, there's less idealism and more pragmatism, and sometimes plain indifference.
1. Insistence that everything is political and politics is everything. I’m sorry, sometimes folks are just reading into things too hard. From poorly shoehorned diatribes about sexism in second-rate Vox articles, to tirelessly policing vocabulary to avoid impure etymology, progressives outpace conspiracy theorists in their desire to pattern-match everything into their own personal political causes.
2. Intolerance to tolerance of other viewpoints. Again, it feels like a purity thing: “I can’t be friends with someone who is friends with someone who said something problematic once.” I’m not saying cutting people out of your life based on their bad behavior is bad, but the guilt-by-association to judge other people’s friends and acquaintances I find detestable and very cult-like.
I don’t think these are fringe behaviors on the left right now. I think they’re widespread in fairly mainstream, if not quite the most mainstream, of media, and common among heavy social media users. The closest right-leaning analogues very fringe and much less influential.
Of course, there’s another thing that’s tiring, which is having to constantly reassure everyone that I am still very liberal even though I critique left-leaning folks.
This got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it.
>Of course, there’s another thing that’s tiring, which is having to constantly reassure everyone that I am still very liberal even though I critique left-leaning folks.
During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
People that choose a career journalism are likely motivated by thinking these issues matter, in which case having an opinion is hard to escape, or by self promotion, in which case they'll say anything that draws attention. I suspect TV leans toward the latter because it's such a shallow medium.
I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate - keeping in mind I am not talking about all conservatives or even trying to estimate a percentage of them who fit this observation.
There are many conservatives who hold an "I just want to be left alone" or "the free market will fix it" mindset. The result is that when they are upset about something, they tend to act individually and "vote with their wallet" while hoping that the silent majority will follow suit. This is not to say that conservatives don't organize protests or mass boycotts, just that it seems like they don't do so as readily because they expect the free market to produce the pressure that brings about change. Again, this isn't true for every conservative cause and certainly not the major ones like the 2nd Amendment or overturning Roe v Wade.
I contrast that with how progressives tend to see problems as structural or systemic. In this worldview, they have to be active and vocal to dismantle these systems in order to bring about change. If they don't, the system will continue functioning because that is how it was designed. Because it takes much more energy to reform or replace a system than it does to maintain one, I sense progressives necessarily have to be active and vocal.
Broadly speaking, I believe that conservatives expect that "system will fix it" while progressives expect to "fix the system".
The loudest parts of the conservative movement in my lifetime have been religious conservatives, tea partiers, and now Trump nationalism. All of them have used protest, partisan media, and boycott to push their ideals.
Perhaps you're comparing the conservative community you are in with progressives on TV? In which case I'd suggest that liberal communities have a mirror impression when looking at conservatives on TV.
The end game for many progressives is things like Mao China. Where millions died due to bad polices. Also Venezuela, USSR, etc.
Conservatives mostly want to avoid that path, or things that take us down that path.
* Privatized postal services
* Zero governmental services/benefits for illegal aliens (certainly no driver's licenses or working papers)
* Point-based immigration policies, as opposed to family reunification and "diversity" visas
* No "affirmative action" programs
* Significantly stricter abortion windows than what Roe v. Wade imposed nationwide in the US
Doesn't that smack of demonization to you? It has nothing to do with progressivism, any more than all doctors lead to Joseph Mengele. Get out there and read some progressive things; go to the source; stop reading what others say about progressive ideas. It's nothing at all like what you imagine; progressive people are primarly just people, with common sense and opinions, like you.
This is less true then “the end game for many conservatives is things like Nazi Germany”; sure, Maoists (and, if one takes “like” that somewhat more broadly, Leninist and other authoritarian Communists) exist, but even among the radical Left they are outnumbered by Anarchists, Libertarian Socialists, and other anti-authoritarians, and the whole of the radical Left is outnumbered by DemSocs and SocDems within the “progressive” space (really, the radical Left and progressives both generally view themselves as different groups, but I suspect “progressive” is being used more broadly as “people to the left of the center of the Democratic Party”.)
OTOH, fairly overt authoritarian White Nationalists/Supremacists (and overlapping but not identical authoritarian theocrats) make up a lot bigger share of the local right (Republican and further right) than authoritarian Communists do of the local left (Democratic and further left.)
But, while we should not ignore the dangerous agenda of certain extremists of either side, and while extremists actions may occasionally merit a particular focussed response, it doesn't really make sense to judge either side by its radical fringe alone.
Because that's not what CNN was doing. They're a mouthpiece for the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. Maybe that's changing now but it's certainly not an accidental bias.
“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” ~Ibram X. Kendi
So a conservative reads that and thinks it's not only crazy, but literally racist in the context of how Kendi proposes it should drive current policy. Whereas a progressive reads that and says yes, we need to discriminate against "privileged groups" to solve past discrimination. Those are two very different worldviews, and has nothing to do with believing whether or not racism exists. In fact, it requires progressives to use a completely different definition of the word racist to not eat their own tail.
>If you discuss homophobia as existing, it's progressive.
Again, nobody denies homophobia exists. But progressives are known to paint with a very broad brush (ie. "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a Nazi"). Similar with trans issues, where many people who say maybe biological males shouldn't compete against biological females, will have progressives brand you transphobic (and probably a Nazi).
You see this same overshooting across the board on many issues that would actually have wider support, but they go off the deep end with their craziness.
Yes, they almost unanimously do, at least as regards anti-black racism; as of 2021, “A 53% majority of Democrats say White people benefit from advantages in society that Black people do not have. [...] Just 6% of Republicans now say White people benefit from advantages that Black people do not have.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/08/12/deep-divisio...
Pew was being disingenuous, that's why. From their own data, it's actually 45% that now saw White people benefit from advantages that Black people do not have. Only 34% of republicans don't think white people benefit from advantages Black people do not have at all. (That's still a ridiculous number to me, by the way)
6% say "White people benefit a great deal from advantages Black people lack"
On this very website, the other day, I saw a very special poster get down voted after claiming racism hasn't occurred in America since the 1950s.
Especially because there is barely any representation anyway for the economic left. Instead, we have two right-wing to centre-right parties fighting over a socially conservative / socially progressive battlefield they've constructed instead. It's very frustrating.
I'd agree with this 100% if it didn't pretend that this is only true of progressives. This is undeniably true about the hard right as well.
To me, in this thread with this topic, this reads as whataboutism.
If they'd simply attributed activism and an "everything is political" attitude to CNN, that would have been reasonable since this discussion is about CNN, but they decided to expand this attribution to to "progressives", which is a very different thing.
BitwiseFool’s original commentary was not just about progressives, it was also about CNN’s staffing choices.
I genuinely wasn't trying to do that. The article, and discussion, was around progressives when I shared my observation and thoughts about them. Wanting to stay in focus, I kept my comment and observation about them only.
I'm genuinely surprised that by not bringing up a contrast with other political ideologies I'm perceived as believing it is unique to them.
After reading through all the comments in this thread, I get the sense that many commenters want to dismiss any perception that is remotely negative about the behavior of progressives by attributing the alleged attributes as something that, one, other groups do more, and two, something that everyone does. But in so doing, progressivism becomes something you can only ascribe unquestionably positive attributes to.
I make absolutely no claims about being able to objectively say which side does this more, but it is clear to me that both sides do it a ton, so trying to attribute it more to one side in any significant way requires some evidence that hasn't been offered.
And for the record, I'd have made the same objection if in some alternate universe comment thread you'd tried to claim this was a particularly conservative trait too. There are unlimited examples of either side being egregiously bias-driven, insistent, vocal, uncompromising, hyper-partisan, activist, etc. There is remarkably little news on either side that's free of it. Note also that this isn't an "I will ignore that because both sides do it" argument. It's deeply disappointing in all cases.
More broadly, one of the things I am feeling dismayed about is the increasing expectation of 'evidence' on personal observations. I have formed an opinion based on what I have seen, and I wasn't keeping track of everything that informed my perception. Indeed, even if I had, it would not be in an acceptable format because it would be too easy to dismiss for lack of academic rigor. There's something demoralizing about having ideas that you share dismissed so readily because they're not presented with a myriad of citations to back them up. Especially considering I am not sharing them in an academic setting. It also feels stifling because I want to write a few sentences without having to compile a bibliography in an attempt to rout potential naysayers.
I hope this doesn't come across as an attack - I'm just feeling very worn out.
Edit: would you have accepted a suggestion of changing "progressives" to "partisans" instead of changing "progressives" to "people"? That seems pretty fair to me.
Also, the prominent place of opinion "journalism" and talking heads that try to rile people up, especially in visual mediums. Yes, I'm talking about Fox and Friends et al. and some of the hosts on CNN. People spend more time, I think, getting riled up on entertainment, than actually learning about the world. More hard journalism will be a good thing.
Then for whatever reason in the 2010's they started to fork to the hard left and covering every story with a level of bias I would associate with Fox News(but left facing). Some of their news stories were so bad it was comical, ie. saying Joe Rogan had taken horse tranquilizer stands out as particularly egregious(a Dr. prescribed him ivermectin a perfectly safe drug with dubious effectiveness against covid).
This change is like Jerry Springer leaving his trashy TV show and trying to run for Senator(and backing out), his reputation like CNN's is so tarnished that no one would ever take it seriously again.
If this were a winning strategy, most organizations would be coalescing around it already. The question is whether CNN will be able to stay the course _despite_ the hits to revenue/growth/viewers they will take with this approach.
I don't have much hope that they'll make a ton of money doing this, but I also don't know how they're making money now. It seems all of their advertising is for snake oil.
The announcement reads like "We're going to have our cake, and eat it too." Sounds great! But is that actually possible?
That's why it would be such a challenging turnaround. I don't think a competent and serious news channel can work as a profit center.
I guess CNN worked really well economically in the 80s/90s when there weren't many options for people to get news fast, and then gradually declined after people got online.
Some news is relevant to everybody, but I think most news is not relevant to most people most of the time. And most news that is relevant to some people won't be relevant to most people. "Six-car pileup on I-whatever" might be very relevant to me if I'm commuting on that road, but it's irrelevant to most people.
There's nothing wrong with the media running this kind of news story, a story that's relevant to some but irrelevant to most. The problem occurs when the decision is made to sensationalize the coverage of the incident, to make it interesting to everybody it isn't relevant to. And since very little is relevant to everybody, just about everything ends up getting sensationalized.
Really? Unless you're using a much broader definition of "relevant" than I use, I'm struggling to remember the last time I saw something on mainstream media that had any impact on my life whatsoever.
I'm in Germany. Just this week, the news have been full about new policies that went into effect on June 1 to reduce cost of living amidst inflation and energy price hikes in particular (a tax rebate on fuel, and subsidized public transit passes). There is also news about shortages of particular food items like sunflower oil and mustard. (I actually wanted to purchase mustard last week and was confused why there was so little of it. Turns out that Ukraine used to be a major supplier of mustard seeds.) Also, Coronavirus policies for the next winter are being discussed, which admittedly does not have impact on our daily lifes right now, but there will be an impact when the policies go into effect.
I don't disagree with your notion. There really is a lot of news that is non-actionable and can therefore be considered superfluous, but "I can't remember the last time" is taking it way too far in my opinion.
I'd watch a news channel with FT/The Economist style content translated to TV, I think...
What I think there isn't much of is the above in easily mined form. Serious news consumes resources (reporters, investigators, supporting crew, etc).
What passes for news today (opinion from Twitter) is virtually free and pretty endless so it's the option most go for because the other option costs serious money.
Yeah. IMHO, one of the major contributing factors to America's problems is there's too little news, and too much time and space to cover it. If they're not going to fill the time with news, they'll probably just fill it with obsessive coverage of scandalous crimes (which will, in some cases, probably create conditions for more scandalous crimes by giving people ideas).
Though I suppose there's a third option that might work, but it's not news: documentaries. Air stuff that's not news, but has some newsworthy aspect (e.g. Vladimir Putin's political career, the Russian military).
Hell will freeze over before CNN will air bad coverage about, say, a Democratic Presidential nominee in October of an election year. But what do you think leads a "news" source to switch to commentary?! There's no distinction.
https://i.imgur.com/2y3K1w2.png
"Breaking News: Titanic Sunk 102 Years Ago Tonight"
Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links, and that really cheapens the brand of news delivery they had.
In a highly competitive market, the key to winning is not to imitate competition, it's to decrease overhead costs and to deliver a higher quality product, but in the age of social media, everyone is losing sight of that because of the allure of instant virality and it's getting really toxic to normal human beings more and more every day.
They regularly forgo important local and international stories unless they're comical or sensational and it's contradictory to provision of news, and that makes them competitive with every single commentator in podcasts and on social media, which is silly because CNN has far mor resources than that competition. Too many of their stories are subtle ads for big industry products as well, which also erodes trust in their brand and increases potential for conflicts of interest in reporting objectively.
It's a terrible tragedy that they really watch reddit mostly to determine what is newsworthy, because Reddit and users there all have agendas of their own... The downvote/upvote system is not transparent and it has been totally compromised by brigading. News stories, especially online should not be competing with each other for noteworthiness, because everyone has a different set of things that are relevant to them... Now we simply have one pipeline for everyone, which is taken over by commercial or sensational interests, and quickly put on mute once it becomes boring or too repetitive, despite lives being deeply affected (e.g. Water pollution in Flint, Michigan).
This is why CNN is suffering a decline in revenue and spikes in hype during a time they could really shine most... They're wearing social media blinders instead of returning to the traditional book on news coverage.... That and all the pharmaceutical ads perhaps... (I am not a journalist FTR).
Sometimes I wonder if some folks want news, or just something to confirm their biases.
The point of a political position is catalyzing political change, developing consensus, and holding interest groups accountable. Reducing news or politics in general to sensationalism just encourages disengagement
It's the same sort of thing, I think. There's what we say we want, and there's how we behave, but (what is often lost on advertisers) how we behave is not always an indication of what we actually want. I'll eat potato chips, but I really do want nutritious food.
Imagine if they keep reusing headlines “Trump made a tweet that offended someone news at 11” could have been run hundreds of time slanted to the left or right but was it ever actually important for either side?
If anything, it is now easier to chop down any tall poppies or non conformists.
This opinion is more modern than the legacy "ill listen to any news even if it offends me"
FCC Fairness in boardcasting was not regulating speech by the way, it is closer to defining guidelines for the meaning of libel in the context of authoritative news broadcast on airwaves that at the time were federally regulated.
1. Every issue had exactly two sides (same as current dogma).
2. Every "bad" take from the "wrong" side would be aired to nobody, in the middle of the night.
It was a political weapon just as much as removing it was a political weapon.
Way back then there tended to be the same news, more or less, on every channel. Sure, you might prefer or avoid Walter Cronkite's "unhinged" op-eds on Vietnam, but that was about as different as it got.
Here's a liberal view of Cronkite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCdXVWsTpSM
Are you a physicist? Because surely you're joking.
Dear downvoter: Your book collection sucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
I'm not anti-news but at the same time acknowledge that you can ignore 99% of news without it directly affecting your life. Even if you'd go on this news diet, anything of real importance will find its way to you anyway.
So not only can we choose to eat potato chips while saying we want better, but we can be forced to either eat it or starve.
Insert analogies for the news as appropriate.
> Sometimes I wonder if some folks want news, or just something to confirm their biases.
Many people just want their biases confirmed, which is pretty clear if you ever take a look at newspaper comment sections.
I honestly doubt that social media has anything to do with it, but rather the consolidation of ownership of news sources over this same period of time and an ongoing desire to have very high ad sales rates while having rock bottom news room costs.
This is simply the result of that financial calculus playing out over the past two decades.
That's not going to help at all with online media as that's only broadcast licenses which to my knowledge only affects operators of a broadcast TV, Audio Radio (as in AM/FM/SSB/etc), or other radio station - meaning the internet, cable, and satellite (not sure how satellite broadcast licensing works) are unaffected by this. Also it only affects the holder - ie DishTV - not the channels themselves that DishTV is transmitting
And I have no idea how you adapt this for the internet - broadcast licenses were relatively hard to get, relatively expensive to operate, and generally unavailable to most people, edit: and had limited availability. With the internet anyone can make a blog for free in 5 minutes.
EDIT: I think you'll have a lot of 1st amendment problems here. To be honest I'm not sure how the FCC was allowed to do it. To my knowledge the FCC cannot enforce this for cable/internet - I think that would have to be the FTC. But I really doubt this be found to not violate the 1st amendment with the internet.
EDIT 2: > The courts reasoned that the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum, which limited the opportunity for access to the airwaves, created a need for the doctrine.
It looks like the supreme court at the time ruled that because of the limited number of broadcast stations it made sense for the FCC to regulate it in this manor. Because of the lack of scarcity of resources for the internet, I highly doubt the FTC would be allowed to do the same.
> To be honest I'm not sure how the FCC was allowed to do it.
Amateur Radio Extra here. I have a tiny bit of insight into this.
Back in WW1, the radio spectrum became the property of the US military and the DoD actually "leases" spectrum to the federal government through the FCC.
The Fairness Doctrine was a handshake agreement with the political parties of the day and enforced by FCC policy. The FCC is the regulatory body for airwaves.
So the spectrum is a public good in the sense that it is 100% owned by the US military for military purposes and it only grants radio spectrum to the rest of the FCC that it doesn't care about. You can actually go to prison for using radio spectrum that you're not allowed to use (I have never actually heard of it happening...but it is theoretically possible).
Edit: I should also add, that 1st amendment rights DO NOT APPLY on the airwaves. The FCC has 100% control of regulating what you can and cannot say or do on them.
So, like that entertainment channel with "News" on the name that was on judicial record saying that, for one of their commentators, "his audience doesn’t expect him to report facts"?
But for some reason it's not seen as a negative there by its main audience? (whereas for CNN it is seen as more negative?)
By the way, most opinion/commentator shows aren't expected to report facts. They are by design an opinion piece, where conjecture and "analysis" (as bad as it can be) are normal. It's just not the "own" you think it is, especially since it's a standard defense against claims of defamation.
Of all the things to criticize and dislike Fox News or Tucker Carlson for, this one just isn't it. I don't get why this "gotcha" in particular is so often used when there is no shortage of actually valid arguments against Fox News.
We lost some real valuable metadata about news from the print era, opinion pieces were limited to Column 1 and the last few pages of section A in most major publications. They were sometimes even in a different font. You knew instinctively that the content you were reading was held to a different standard than the main content.
It would really help if we somehow bring that metadata back in a video and online environment.
When you watch something that one of them makes, they (or someone connected to them) have creative control over the curation, and it gets attached to their reputation.
So, if I hear something on CNN, I have near zero indication about its quality. As a result, I don't read or watch CNN literally ever, unless some other curated source refers it to me for some reason.
But if I watch John Oliver or Fareed Zakaria, I know there's going to be a much higher than usual standard for quality of curation, analysis, interest/relevance, etc.
What I find concerning is the way, through omission or contrivance, these 'full picture' opinion news media organizations can manipulate the storyline for their agenda and also leave you feeling fully informed. Zakaria and Oliver being in reality organizations and not a sole, independent report. NPR being the most notable version with a distinct slant on the news. To the extent that through a day's listening, a recognizable story arc is defined. Often with tension and resolution, so that the audience feels they have challenged their beliefs, but have ultimately been proven correct in their presuppositions.
Fascinating and terrible things.
Good observation. Even if there's nothing nefarious going on, this is not a great situation.
Not just that, the newspaper edutorial staff might strongly disagree with the content on those pages. They published it as someone's opinion, not necessarily their opinion.
That seems to be a lost art. When Tom Cotton wrote an opinion piece for the NYT, the editor who ran it was gone in a few days. Yikes.
I don't know how to tell you this but that's probably because CNN targets an American audience and most Americans don't care about either of those things outside of very narrow circumstances (such as if they're funny or relevant to the individual's concerns). It's not a failing to focus on coverage people will read.
I guess the quality of the site will drop even lower at that point, probably past the threshold where they can even be misunderstood as being good for determining what is newsworthy.
Is there still a bifurcation between CNN and CNN International? It often felt very different to watch CNN in the US compared other countries when I actually watched any TV news (~1990-2005).
True, true! But some engineer there still maintains https://lite.cnn.com/ :-) Also relevant: https://text.npr.org/ https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news
This is one of my biggest pet peeves too.
I still only really enjoy reading the FT consistently overall, and The Hill for political news reporting (their op-ed section is 76978726435278 trash fires converging, but their actual journalism stays solid) and a handful of others sparingly, but every major cable news outlet (and certainly all the overtly partisan outlets like Breitbart and Palmer Report) I simply have avoided for years due to its insufferability.
Dopamine mattered less in the paper age, with the exception of the frontpage headline, but not even that mattered as most people had a subscription. Once this paper is in your possession, it frankly doesn't matter much which articles you decide to read, it's a package deal. Interestingly, and this behavior is important, you'd probably read a few articles you weren't super enticed to read, but you'll read them anyway since you paid for them. And thus your world view expands across topics, organically and almost accidentally.
That package deal is now cut up into tweet-like snacks, where each snack needs to entice you to read it. Unfortunately those playing on our weaknesses work best.
A cute cat performs better than a breakthrough paper on climate science.
Updates on the Kardashians outperform...anything.
Opinions outperform dry facts, both agreeable and disagreeable opinions.
Bad news outperforms good news.
Naturally, news adjusts to whatever people read the most. Which wasn't needed before (to this extreme degree), but it is now. Even very competent journalists that write excellent articles need to go on Twitter and with screenshots package the most triggering paragraph of the article, otherwise nobody will read it.
The other tragedy is the demise of truth or accuracy. As this doesn't matter on social media. The unreasonables always win and things move fast.
If only all outlets adhered to the significance score.
That doesn't mean I believe or agree with everything they say, they all have blind spots and biases. But the quality of the news from these sources makes all corporate news look like complete garbage, because it is. I would be shocked if there's anything any corporate news network could do that make make me trust them for one second. Surprisingly, the closest thing to mainstream news coverage worth its salt that I've seen in a very long time is from Buzzfeed News, and on some issues, especially war-related, Tucker Carlson.
I am positive that I will live the rest of my life talking to a majority of people primarily informed by corporate news networks (and their fake-populist analogues like reddit) whose raison d'etre is to prop up the same corrupt donors and establishment organizations that have hijacked our government and economy.
I don't follow all of those, but the ones I have seen a lot from (especially Greenwald and Taibbi) seem to have abandoned even the pretense of doing news for pure commentary, and commentary that is usually pretty predictable in content from just the subject matter and the current alignment of political factions.
I can understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach but mistaking them for quality news sources is... surprising.
I've also found myself disappointed by those two, even if they're not as bad as CNN/Fox or whatever. They're "independent journalists" as a profession, rather than journalists who happen to be independent.
Glenn Greenwald doesn’t “seem like” the adult in the room, he is. The corporate media meanwhile almost exclusively provides commentary on stories from news wires, and where they do break stories, have many times turned out to be false, politically motivated, and never retracted.
Chris Hedges spent years of his career in active conflict zones. Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi — these guys have done tons of original investigative journalism. Your criticism doesn’t land.
Greenwald clearly was a real journalist, but also fairly overtly quit real journalism specifically over journalistic integrity standards (standards which, even prior to his departure, he had, somewhat unusually, left to others when founding a “gigantic news organization”, fairly overtly because while he at the time recognized their importance to journalism, they were not what interested him about it.)
I would never accuse Greenwald of being incapable of real journalism, only as having, after building a career in it, decided his calling is in building a personal brand in ideological commentary unconstrained by the norms of journalistic integrity.
I cannot imagine how you arrive at that conclusion.
He sacrificed his position and salary at the organization he founded because he was the one with integrity. He refused to have his anti-Biden article about the Hunter Biden laptop blocked by The Intercept's editor: https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-quits-the-inte...
Which the New York Times 17 months later quietly comes out and admits was real https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-... "The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation"
What it sounds like to me -- is that you disagree with Greenwald's political positions so are attacking his integrity with no evidence.
It is not exactly a conspiracy theory, unfortunately, that "elites" have the last say in political decisions[1]. Having said that and gleaning over past human history, I think the oligarchs or "elites" of our "dynasty" allowed us to enjoy more freedoms than we ever had before.
I also doubt that WarnerMedia or CNN has our best interests when "reporting the news". CNN lives off of sensationalism, and it appears to be a convenient tool for a set of oligarchs to persuade folk over a political topic.
Who are these oligarchs, you say? Rich people who abuse their wealth for lobbying on any matter.
1) https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Actually this group’s political positions are all over the map. The thread that connects them is a lack of influence from DC/Wall St/arms industry. So in other words the comfort is to the extent that I completely distrust those institutions. For someone who does trust those institutions, corporate media is probably fantastic.
So?
What I said is I understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach, not if you happen to share their exact (especially superficial) ideological position.
> The thread that connects them is a lack of influence from DC/Wall St/arms industry.
That (substantively or superficially) is certainly an angle that can appeal to a particular set of ideological biases, yes.
I apologize for being argumentative, but originally you didn't say "approach" you said "ideological biases" which I interpret on its own as a synonym for political views.
> mistaking them for quality news sources is... surprising
This statement you didn't really support with anything, though of course you're not obligated to. In the absence of that I'm not sure why you would find it surprising that people with Pulitzer prizes for their work in journalism are considered quality sources. I'd be very curious what you consider a quality source to be.
> I apologize for being argumentative, but originally you didn't say "approach" you said "ideological biases" which I interpret on its own as a synonym for political views.
No, I said both (one referring the the reader and the other to the writer) the first time [0], exactly as I did the second time [1]. “I can understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach.”
I can forgive being argumentative, but a selective quote of a partial sentence in one response followed by a straight-out lie about the same material excluded from that quote in the next is... more than just argumentative.
The parent post seems to be conflating punditry with news. Ironically, the very issue CNN et al are so incredibly guilty of...
Pundits can be interesting, entertaining, and at times even informative, but using them as a primary source of information seems suspect to me. Their worldviews are (usually, not subtly) skewed towards their ideologies, and they market and sell themselves to people who enjoy confirmation bias.
Parent poster may be a more informed consumer of punditry than most, but regardless this seems like an incredibly poor replacement for factual reporting.
They wouldn't be a source on, for example, what is happening in Ukraine at the moment (which is the kind of thing I consider "news" rather than commentary).
Unfortunately they pretend they are. Half of them make a living being contrarians so for the past few months they have been spewing pro-Russian lies and propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges
You can look up the others if you like.
People like Jimmy Dore don't claim to be investigative journalists, fwiw. Then again, most "news" is fed to us by pretty actors, talking heads, and not active investigative journalists (who should not be judged on prime-time attractiveness).
"What's happening in Ukraine" that most people are worried about is actually the geopolitical machinations that might lead to WWIII. The situation is so messed up that Chomsky and Kissinger are both publicly advising everyone to seek peace! When did you ever think you'd see those two on the same side of anything?
Kissinger was a hawkish warmonger in the 60s and 70s.
But since 1982 he has been a lobbyist and his lobbying firm, Kissinger Associates, is currently owned by the U.S.-Russia Business Council.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissinger_Associates
As for Chomsky, he will compulsively oppose whatever the West does. Is he still opposed to the Western interventions against genocidal Serbian forces in the 90s?
Alexander Mercouris has posted blow-by-blow updates on every battle and political move of the war once or twice a day for months. He called, for example, the Russian capture of Mariupol a month before it happened, while the entire time corporate media was running non-stop propaganda about how well the war was going for Ukraine.
Sometimes I think people understand the mainstream narrative only through the lens of the contrarians, which is sometimes accurate and sometimes not.
This claim conflates the overall war with Mariupol. I didn't see any serious media that claimed that Mariupol would end other than it did. Everyone called it the same way, that I saw (though I don't read opinion pieces).
Many opinion writers create strawpersons; they say 'the corporate media did X' and then contrast themselves with it. When that happens look at some mainstream media (which is not one thing, but many, many independent publications) yourself and corroborate it. It's almost always false, IME.
If the war was going so-so for Ukraine, half the country would be under Russian control.
IMO as long as Ukraine doesn't lost any substantive amount of territory over the summer and stalemates the Donbas/etc, they are winning the war and Russia will falter in the winter.
IMO strategically Ukraine is winning the war, they are getting better weapons, gaining experience, getting supplies, Putin is weakening, the World will adapt to the economic disruption, and Russian troop morale will continue to falter.
The West obviously loves Ukraine draining Putin of all his might. The risk of nuclear war is still ominous.
The entire corporate media was reporting the likely impending fall of Mariupol for long before it happened, while still covering how much Russia had been forced to pivot in their war aims, was taking enormous casualties (in general and in senior officers) by historical standards, and all kinds of other negative indicators.
You can win battles while losing the war.
Just because someone doesn't hold mainstream views doesn't make them whatever your version of evil or insane or ____ is.
I would hope that people here were attempting to be better informed instead of merely shouting down otherness.
"[The] Panel recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, except in a clinical trial (AIIa). Additional adequately powered, well-designed, and well-conducted trials are needed to evaluate the effect of ivermectin on COVID-19"
So in other words, it has been approved for clinical trials, which are ongoing. So how does believing in its efficacy make him a "quack"? That characterization is more inline with the highly misleading, and in some cases outright false, stories about ivermectin being "horse dewormer".
I have no idea who half the people you're talking about above are, but anyone who says Ivermectin works is either being lied to or lying to you.
I prefer not to get into the weeds on the particulars about who is exposing or responsible for "flat-out lies and falsehoods" - we won't agree, and that's ok, I'm not trying to dissuade you on that front, I am just pushing back against the rhetoric of your comment which suggests your news sources are inherently superior to those you malign, rather than they simply being a reflection of your political biases like everyone else.
At this point my standard is way below finding people I agree with. My standard is that I have some level of trust that they’re reporting things they believe to be true. Versus the opportunists we have throughout government and media who apparently have no personal beliefs or values and are willing to say or do anything to get ahead and appease the people signing their multimillion dollar checks.
>yet here you spit because of some pompous notion that the sources are worse than mainstream propaganda outlets? You are a silly person with silly opinions
I won't deign to judge the silliness of your opinions and I didn't attack any of the sources, just compared them to others. Ironically, your "mainstream propaganda" key phrase is actually a popular propaganda tactic meant to poison the well rather than encourage critical thinking.
I will also say that Tucker may or may not be good on war coverage but the rest of his show is so toxic I'll never know.
My condolences.
Laudable, and I hope they succeed. The progressive angle on everything has really undermined a lot of their credibility - and assuming they're able/willing to make the requisite changes internally to make this happen, it will still take years to regain that trust from their audience across the entire spectrum of viewers.
They just broke some news today, it's on their front page:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/02/politics/meadows-texts-januar...
The natural, normal, expected behavior is to have big spikes of viewership when something major happens. Then a radically lower level of ongoing viewership, because well-adjusted productive people just check the news briefly every day.
This is not compelling at all from a business point of view, hence the relentless search for any and always to drive constant viewership.
This may have started over at CNN but it's filtered through to all media outlets. Even the humble BBC News is a victim of it. My wife has the BBC news app on her phone and some of the inane things it'll ping her about under the banner of "breaking news" astounds me.
The pandering to selective political ideologies and pushing particular agendas is pervasive across the American media landscape. I don’t know if it’s better in other countries.
I do think think social media gets a lot of criticism and disdain from these outlets, and sure I’m not a fan of FB or Twitter. But traditional American news media in my mind has been stirring this pot for decades, and they seem to get a pass. We talk about breaking up FB, but these American news outlets seem to get a pass.
At that point, I just stop listening to rape accusations in the media no matter what, like you can accuse anybody, at any time, of anything, provided he has a penis[1]. Nowadays, if "they" are white. White male, basically. Just accusing white men of being white men, frankly. Mike Arrington is a white man, news at 11.
And let me say something else.
I will never vote for a man who has not been accused of rape in the media.
If he has been accused of rape, maybe he has my vote maybe he doesn't. Probably does.
If he hasn't been accused of rape on the media, he's not a threat to bad people and I will flat out not vote for him.
I actually acted on that recently. José Antonio Kast, though I would have normally voted for him, I saw he had no accusations so I didn't go to vote in the Chilean Presidential Elections for him. Obviously because that in a presidential candidate that candidate had strategies to dodge or diffuse or dislodge or discourage rape accusations, nobody that well-known can possibly have a clean record. His opponent, Boric, didn't.
It's the most basic form of mudslinging, rape accusations. You can always get some female confidence artist to "come forward," always, it costs like 2000 USD in Chile, if that. It's cheap, it's trivial, there's no cross-examination, victim never gets named in public, if nobody's done it it's because the candidate planned it all out for it not to happen, ie premeditated that same crime. Pretty much is a rapist for real if he's never been accused.
And Kast lost the election, due to thousands of votes like mine. Every vote can break a tied election, in fact I tied an election 126 to 126, in high school. Kast lost in part because he had that suspicious clean slate. It's counter-reliable, whatever the media says, the truth is almost exactly to the opposite.
[1] I still judge rape accusations made in person to me, or what I witness in person, as I see fit. "He says she says" has no weight, but in the moment, it's a totally different ball-park. I have taken suicidal levels of risk to defend women who asked for help in person, risks I've never seen anybody else take. But not for an accusation in the bitchvictim media.
Not going into politics on this site, limiting it to media coverage.
Frankly with the amount of slander he had going in his favor he could rightfully be called a victor of the election--if and only if he got more than 60%. The ballots were I think--not sure as time goes on, but I think--correct, but the slander was absurd.
To the point the media had many bad weeks trying to figure out what to talk about because Trump was no longer president, meaning they couldn't make 4 out of the 5 biggest daily headlines about him in varying levels of directness. Him, his past, his family, his nepotists, his administration, his legacy, his apocalyptic nuclear monarchy, his impeachment, his craziness, his uh coup I think they called it, literally ad nauseam.
Couldn't read the news, it was literally "ad nauseam", to the point of total disgust, and even then I bought into the bullshit to some degree. It was so copious, so much shit, you can't keep your mind clean of all that shit any more than you can keep your shoes clean if you're surrounded by dog feces like a foot of snow. Better to do what Thomas Jefferson said and not read any news at all, ever. It's back to the point it was in in the Spanish-American War, yellow journalism, shitty rags full of slander. Not even that, that would be better than this, just blogs manipulating every reader individually, visible A/B testing in eg Financial Times ("Larger" vs. "bigger", they let me see both versions of the same headline, incompetence), generated news...
Yellow bits. Yellow ones and yellow zeroes. Gray Lady? Not in the least, not gray at all. Haven't read what she says in many years, just too gross.
And guess what? If you refuse to let them in to your mind, in a way they stop existing. It's weird, it's a quantum-mechanical thing, just stop reading and they sort of just die. It's like applause in a theater, one person stops clapping and then there's four more clappings, that's it, dies very rapidly.
In this case, "Breaking" really just means - "latest development" so I don't really mind the word - the problem is the accompanying music and banner font and color scheme used make it seem like it's 9/11. So they say "Breaking", but make you think "Groundbreaking, earth shattering".
Hopefully the next things to go will be
* when they are interviewing someone that actually made a sacrifice to be on their program, like a civilian from a war zone, etc.. but you can tell the anchor is getting nervous because they have to go to commercial - I can't stand that.
* the news you must hear after the break where it took longer to tell you it was coming up after the break than to just tell you the news
All these cable channels probably have great reporters and news staffs but getting you the news is secondary to advertising, which is fine, I understand that, it's just the medium is not that well suited since it requires frequent interruptions and baiting you into staying through the break. If it has to be broadcast, the news hour with Judy Woodruff on PBS is the best in the US. Yes, it's curated, can't possibly cover everything, but they make decent editorial decisions.
I first started noticing this in 2016, when their promotions for their presidential debate coverage reminded me a lot of how boxing matches are promoted.
I think this is a problem with all cable news, and is more or less directly responsible for the dramatic polarization of US politics over the last 30 years. Politics looks more like sports now. Irrational fandom and support for one's "team" is fine when it is over something trivial like moving a ball from one end of the field to another. It becomes detrimental when it's over things that actually impact our lives.
Hell, before cable news, Republicans and Democrats didn't even get consistent colors on electoral maps. It used to be that blue meant "incumbent party" and red meant "challenging party".
that is probably true. And reporting about politics like sports brought out the worst of the US two party system. The talking head format did a lot of damage too.
I came to the US in 2000 and when in 2004 they philosophized for hours about whether people would prefer to have a beer with Bush or Kerry I thought "WTF? What does this have to do with anything?".
Wikipedia seems to agree:
(Watch for Turner's speech on why he made CNN - below CNN's first day on air):
I hate the flashy animated bumpers they (all of them, all American television) use to segue everything. Stars and color gradients swooping around the screen, computer animated robots throwing footballs at each other like howitzers, animated channel logos exploding in fireballs, it's all completely insufferable.
Typical examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz0efQ5uuYk
This was a Monday. That coming Thursday, James Comey was testifying before Congress about something or other.
The entire 20 minutes they talked about Comey's upcoming testimony and what he might say.
Something that was going to happen in 3 days. And that was the most important news item right then?
CNN came to prominence during the first Iraq invasion, because of their live coverage from inside Iraq.
What are the important stories that CNN broke? I can't remember any. They don't seem very big on "investigative" reporting.
Also, anyone with a smartphone can take video and post it online, so video is not as much at a premium anymore. Professional reporters have been obsoleted somewhat by amateurs.
I still think that, but I usually keep that thought to myself these days because everybody laughs at me cruelly when I say it. I'd say they've lost a lot of credibility.
You shouldn't think this anymore. At least since the 2016 campaign CNN turned into the left wing FoxNews.
Really hope CNN one day will become a news source, like CNN International that is a joy to watch when traveling outside of the USA and Canada (at least it was the last time I watched a few years ago). Will follow CNN once Harry and Meghan or some pop stars will not appear in the headlines for at least a year.
It truly meant serious shit. Like explosions or shootings.
Now you see it for stupid petty (in the grand scheme of things) shit like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's court battle.
And before some of you get your knickers in a knot not saying Johnny Depp's suffering ain't important, but before you'd only see the banner at the end of the trial, not during every fucking court event.
Heck, I remember only seeing the banner at the end of OJ's trial and during the white bronco chase.
That's it. And that's for a murder trial. Not for a spousal abuse trial. Motherfuckers had to literally die to see that banner.
That banner had serious gravitas.
Now, I'm conditioned to ignore it most of the time.
> "It has become such a fixture on every channel and network that its impact has become lost on the audience."
Banner blindness makes sense as a motivation. If authority to use it is too decentralized then it's a tragedy of the commons situation. Every reporter / section editor wants their story to get visibility.
I don't think I'll ever be a consumer of television news in my life even if it were to improve. I think they have alienated a large group permanantly but maybe they can make it a better medium for the next generation.
One of his first major decisions as the new CEO of CNN was to cancel CNN Plus, and it looks like the review of things that need to change is still ongoing.
It's not too surprising to see him introduce this no-BS mentality at CNN, the over-hype of minor events is something they would have mocked at The Late Show.
"Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/22/the-troub...
https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2019/11/curmudgeonish-2019/#...
So now they just generate provocative content as cheaply as possible to attract eyeballs for advertisers.
And no content is cheaper to produce than opinion...
> Breaking News: CNN cutting back on over-hyping everything as “breaking news”
Thanks for the chuckle, CNN.
Journalism is serving as witness for who was not there.
CNN is about interpreting stories to mold your opinion, instead of reporting what happened in a neutral way.
Also, this: https://youtu.be/FK3vpdmEFow?t=35
CNN should not exist, or at least, you should avoid it like the plague.
No wonder many people didn't realise that they just got fooled and manipulated back in 2016 and on wards.
Perhaps that's why CNN needed so many clicks at the time and this is why they lived up to being the tag-line that they have always hated as being 'fake news' media.
So it really unsurprising.
Do we really want or need a "personality" to deliver us information? Reading just seems so much easier and more efficient
Talk about fast news cycles!
The bigger problem with CNN is the excessive focus on attracting eyeballs. I understand the need for that, but CNN takes things beyond reasonable limits.
"The aliens have declared war on earth ... oh, hang on, we interrupt this program to show you an hour of Donald Trump riling up a crowd in nowheresville".
There are currently 4 "live updates" on cnn.com, including "Biden to deliver speech on guns tonight", which is obviously not live.
they lost credibility long time ago...
bye, Felicia
But the whole concept is from a time when communication was slow. The news that traveled the fastest was the most important. So when something was denoted as "breaking news", you'd know that it was important enough to be told right now.
But today? We practically know of events before they're covered by news organizations. And communication is so quick and cheap that even the most banal information can be bandied about without care. So we can be notified of everything. All news we hear is "breaking". So the term has lost its cachet. We don't need it anymore.
And while I agree that a defamation trial between two celebrities is not noteworthy, I treat it as such by not reading news about it. If I see an article about it, I just scroll past it. But it is news by the very definition of the term. Not all news needs to be of grave import.
Better headline: 'Breaking news: CNN cutting back on over-hyping everything as “breaking news”'
what's worth consuming? ap, reuters, npr?
The closest I've come is to ignore standard news media and be informed via things that filter in through friends, co-workers, and non-standard news sites like HN. I'd love to be better informed of what's going on, but I refuse to subject myself to the firehose.
I came to the conclusion the only time it's probably worth checking up on news or historic news is before an election, that has some value.
Otherwise ignore it. Anything truly important will reach you anyway.
One thought experiment I would propose for those people is that if you find yourself overwhelmingly agreeing with nearly everything that a source presents, that itself is proof of extreme bias in that source.
An impartial, unbiased, source would present you with different, and often conflicting opinions. It would give a -good faith- attempt to present both/all sides of an issue. It would cover the grey areas of issues and not just make every issue binary, black and white. You would find yourself agreeing with some content and disagreeing with other content. Every story shouldn't be you just nodding along in agreement as they bash your political/societal 'opponents'.
Nothing.
I'm a firm believer that even checking the news daily is a waste of time and energy. I'm a former news junky but had a change of heart when I realized it was worsening my anxiety and depression with actually zero return on investment.
Everyone is different, of course. But if you haven't tried it before, quit the news for two weeks. It might change your life.
I really liked the morning news on TV5 because they kept it light (my local news channel thinks I want to watch murder scenes while I eat my cereal).
Television news programs done right should be an hour or two a day, like PBS's NewsHour.
Totally illogical to think that giving the reigns to the government to solve all injustice is silly. But I guess that makes me inhuman.
It just seems like "left wing" means a bit critical of republicans. It's more about team affiliation and who you criticise than actual politics.