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Comment by SavageNoble | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, no. The Overton window is so incredibly small in America that normal, run of the mill political positions - either left or right - in the rest of the world are deemed extremist and radical in America.

Your Corporate media is the problem.

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Things have been far more polarised since the rise of social media. You can blame fox news and cnn or whatever all you want, but given how far the US is from the days of Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy etc I don't see how you can simply blame "corporate media".

Social media is the new corporate media.

Both are true. The end of the Fairness Doctrine normalised the psychotic distortions and lies pumped out by Fox. But the same machine that uses Fox also runs bot farms, astroturfing operations, and curated social media algorithms to normalise even more extreme RW POVs.

And here we are.

Fox is a cable network.

Fairness doctrine only applied to limited spectrums (Radio) not to cable.

Corporate media used to have regulations on how much local media any single company could own. I think the consolidation of media ownership made it easier to have a single corporate vision.

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 has something to do with it.

Also, a lot of what has happened goes back to the Church Committee and the fact that no meaningful reforms were made after that.

The problem is not the people taking advantage of a vulnerability, but the vulnerability itself. That such a significant portion of the US population is so gullible and so ready to believe misinformation that aligns with their desires is the real issue.

The problem is not media, at least not primarily. The problem is an ancient and not-democratic first past the post system, preventing emergence of any alternative, good or bad.

I agree with your sentiment, but Canada uses FPTP and as much as I would love to move to a proportional system, our politics is significantly less limiting than yours. Both of your major parties, and all of your corporate media are so captured by billionaires you don't even know how bad things are in your country without an external frame of reference.

On the other hand, both American parties are radical compared to the rest of the world on human rights issues such as free speech

Really? Is your speech freer than mine in Canada? Are your human Rights protected better than mine? I wonder what the rioters in LA would have to say about that?

The US is notably "freer" for some types of speech. Quite a few countries ban Nazi flags, hate speech, etc. to some extent. The EU bans direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. The UK banned political parties from advertising on TV in 1955.

In my opinion, doing so to some extent is important to preserve the rights of other parts of society, but that's not a universally held opinion by any means.

You are a country that suspended bank accounts while your legal citizens were staging a protest at your capitol.

The LA riots involve property destruction and interference with criminal removal.

Those who are protesting peacefully and are here legally are free to continue. Some areas may be off limits while crimes are stopped.

Not the same at all.

Pretty sure the Murdochs are 'Strayan.

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