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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

>Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine

I would call CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc lie machines as well. They tell just as many, equally egregious lies.

I very infrequently watch the news. it is obvious to me that major news outlets, at least in the US where I am familar, are definitely attempting to push political agendas and shape public opinion and manufacture consent.

However, Fox news is consistenly the only news source that I see which is explicitly trying to fearmonger, to use identity politics to pit people against each other, and is the only news source that allows airing people that advocate for the reduction or freedoms and rights of certain classes of people.

I can count on the rest of the news sources to be vaguely pro-police, pro-capital, pro-land-owner, pro-status-quo. There are negatives to having news be so favoring to the ruling elite. But on the topics of who gets to live with decency in the US, at least the other major news outlets agree that the answer is 'anyone with money'. The American dream. On fox news though there are 1000 ways to be the wrong kind of person who needs to be shamed and harmed and removed from society.

500%. Keeping people glued to the tube, sensationalism, is uncomfortably high many places.

But you're dead on right, there is nothing remotely close in equivalency. To the people Vs people hating & lies of one side of the media. There's coverage of issues & actions on one hand, & coverage about how fallen & bad everyone on the other side is from the not so honorable opposition.

Tucker Carlson's rebirth as a dark soul, after being shamed by John Stewart, is one of those dark bitter tales of humanity where someone, faced with crisis, tripled down on every bad aspect. There's a certain White House Correspondence Dinner that begat another shameless fall towards power, also of note.

I can imagine media products "lie" (by omission, by implicit bias, or even blatantly) but will need some references to reorient to the idea the scale is the same.

My prior is still heavily tilted by the lead up to the Iraq war -- and think the time since has only seen a further embrace of "tell the audience what they want to hear over evidence" (see "top talent" texts re. dominion suit)

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds... > 52 percent [fox viewers] say that they believe it to be “definitely true” or “probably true” that American forces found an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. > Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

FWIW the iraq war is on my mind after reading https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/iraq-war-u.... Bad war, bad reasoning, terrible consequences, but maybe Iraq could be worse today.

One could argue that the lies aren't as egregious, since CNN, MSNBC etc etc aren't getting sued over it?

One could also argue that the courts and/or government are tilted in favor of one false narrative over the other, and thus refuse to investigate or hear arguments against their chosen channels.

I'm not arguing that this is or is not true, but the argument you're making here is not philosophically different from "if they were bad people then bad things would happen to them; since bad things aren't happening to them they must not be bad people". The reality is that bad people escape punishment all the time, especially when their bad actions benefit the people who should be responsible for punishing them.

The argument goes like this: lies by Fox are worse than lies perpetuated by cnn, msnbc, abc, etc. Of course, that argument suits one political party and the class that tries to shape the public.

Your dismissal of it assumes those lies can't be worse though, which they certainly can and whether or not they are is kind of what the lawsuit is about.

It also implies that fox new's lies don't suit a political party or ruling class interests when they certainly do.

What a fallen awful disgraceful argument. What lies do you think anywhere remotely match the vile soul-splitting known-falsehoods Fox spun for the ratings? Say one thing, say anything. You got nothing. Screw this pandering excusism. There's nothing like the aggressive at-an-cost lie-machine of instigation going on anywhere but in the vulnerable, sad, hurting Fox neo-world that these monsters have fictated into being with their absurd woe-begotten misery trail of falsehoods. There is no equivalency what-so-ever. This has been long dwelling cancer in the psyche of America & it's utterly unshocking there's some records of these monsters being savage demons, the only surprise is it took so long to come to real light in such undeniable obviousness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

Statistics please.

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