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Media Meltdown and also Media Bias 101


pfife

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4 hours ago, mtutiger said:

 

Well... they can't very well risk showing FEMA's response, it might actually make the current administration look good. And isn't this type of response something that will be eliminated if Project 2025 comes into being? 

 

Meanwhile, people I know who live in the region are the ones who let me know that whole towns have been washed away.

Sigh....

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  • 3 weeks later...

The NYT knows exactly what they are doing, what the response will be, and wants the clicks and potential signups from going to the site. They're clickbait.  There's no way a person can be so obtuse to think "Well I gotta clean this up and not be biased...."

 

 

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1 hour ago, pfife said:

Its probably an issue when a journalism company's revenue isnt dependent on said journalism but on literal word games instead.

IDK - Journalism freed from commercial constraints used to work for the television networks. Newspapers have pretty much always needed to make a profit so I don't know if we conclude that alone is the issue.

Maybe it's more that ownership has become more politically monolithic along with more concentrated so there is just less divergence of world view among the publishers?

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1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

IDK - Journalism freed from commercial constraints used to work for the television networks. Newspapers have pretty much always needed to make a profit so I don't know if we conclude that alone is the issue.

Maybe it's more that ownership has become more politically monolithic along with more concentrated so there is just less divergence of world view among the publishers?

I would lean toward #2, especially with the amount of consolidation in recent years both in print and broadcast. Print also relied on things like classified ads help sustain the bottom line (or so I was once told). Local papers and broadcast also relied on the small businesses in the community. A lot of them have gone the way of locally owned radio stations and newspapers. Now except in a few cases here and there opinions are ruled by corporate overlords.

The counter point to the above (even back in the day of the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters) opinion was usually controlled by the beliefs of the business owners who did or did not buy advertising based on what was printed or aired.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Situation at WaPo still in a weird place. Bezos has written his defense of his action - it all parses fine except that if he was serious about the approach he claims, where was he a year ago when it needed to be implemented in a way that would not create the very appearance of bias he claims to be trying to eliminate.

I think the problem at work with Bezos and at CNN and many other news operations, is that they see that they are not trusted and they think that's because their coverage is skewed so they try to bring in more "balance" by increasing RW representation, but the RW in the US is so stewed in their false narrative reality that it can't work to have those people in the same room with the people trying to tell the truth.

What a guy like Bezos has to learn, hopefully before he destroys the Post, is that the problem is not his paper not telling enough truth, it's a public that doesn't want truth, and he won't solve that problem by making his paper trim its sails or incorporate more false shading to pander to that audience or to appeal to people who are intellectually aligned in opposition to the mission of all good journalism. Sure any paper can tighten up and be more accurate, they all have a tendency to get out over their skis chasing twitter virii that turn out to be misinfo, and he can change that by rewarding accuracy over 'scoops' if he cares to, but that's not their biggest problem. 

Maybe the best thing American newspapers could do would be to take on the role that American educators seem to have abandoned, which would be to use their papers to teach a little American civics on the side every day. Bezos could endow a desk at WaPo to write pieces on political history, economics, tied it to current events but not necessarily to any real time reporting. I bet it's exactly the kind of thing a modern newspaper would probably love to do but cant afford. 

Edited by gehringer_2
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