Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.
I won't say Fox is the only one guilty of it, but they intentionally mix what would best be described as "opinion pieces" with "real news" and don't really make any effort to draw a clear line between the two. The end result is as disastrous as one would expect when taking someone's personal opinion and selling it as a factual source of news.
I mean, sure, but why are we talking about Fox specifically? CNN, MSNBC, etc. are just as bad. I find this ironic since this thread is about how bias isn't necessarily about outright falsehoods, but story selection and what is not said :)
Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a questionnaire on politics. Then he got a second group, separated them, and gave them the same questionnaire. Only he asked the second group of liberals and conservatives to answer the questionnaire the way they imagined the other side would.
What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise. Liberals frequently chose the red herrings on the multiple choice questions, the ones that exaggerated the conservative positions to the point of more or less demonizing conservatives.
That's why we're talking about Fox News, don't you see? CNN and MSNBC are just folks. Fox News is the Anti-Christ.
Even the article itself has this same smell of bias about it.
I'm currently a registered Pacific Green, lean left, and on the political compass I'm basically smack dab on top of Bernie Sanders (whom I voted for and donated to in the 2016 primaries). And have never voted Republican. So his observation is about my own "side" more or less.
But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in.
What's funny is if you bring this up (even with sources) to conservatives. They're unsurprisingly unsurprised. But if you bring it up to liberals they often get furious because it goes against their beliefs that they're the more intelligent, more educated "side". Nevermind that believing in only two possible sides is six times dumber than astrology... something "both sides" are about equally guilty of. If nothing else I strongly encourage everyone to watch his TED talk. It's super informative, well delivered, and has a solid message of unity tbh.
I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be.
I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not.
But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis.
I recommend watching his TED talk. It goes into more detail, and expounds on the abstract underpinnings of both liberal and conservative morals. They're very different. The axes apply even outside America, consistently.
I'm a fan of Haidt and think his moral "tastebuds" (I think he makes that analogy somewhere) is an interesting model. I largely buy into it, but I found a really perceptive take in this short blog post that came out a few years back that's a bit more skeptical. https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2017/05/26/trump-as-...
Thank you for that. I used to read Crooked Timber pretty regularly, years ago. In fact, I had one of the sometime contributors for a semester as a philosophy professor (back in the last century).
I agree Haidt's model is flawed, especially on the idea of sacredness being something liberals aren't concerned with. I think he's onto something, but he's painted with too broad a brush.
Lately, I've been reading a lot on the subject of religion: specifically, from an anthropological or sociological perspective. I'm interested in the idea of ersatz religions—filling the void left by modernity's secularism. My suspicion is that the great bulk of people cannot do without the things that religion affords; and so if they aren't "religious" in the traditional sense, they unwittingly find some substitute that does everything but revere Christ, YHWH, Allah, etc.
Behavior that fits that model I see again and again, on what we think of as the political left.
In a way, it's the Family Feud problem. Spiders are not insects. But if you are playing Family Feud and the prompt is "Name the most popular insect", you should say spider because a lot of people will off the cuff say spiders are insects.
So it's possible they are not answering to how conservatives see themselves.
And let's not ignore that the MFQ is kinda shaky at best.
I also find it interesting in that link is the why they were the most off. Liberals seemed to have been wrong because they regressed to the mean when answering for other people. They seemed to think conservatives were more group-focused than they were and less individual-focused. And vice versa for liberals. They thought that the average liberal was less group-focused and more individual-focused than they were.
And it's not like conservatives weren't wrong. They got it right when estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for individuals, but not groups.
Moderates were the most accurate in estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for groups. And both conservatives and liberals over-estimated conservatives concerns for the group.
So I really don't think it's entirely fair to frame the results as "conservatives know how liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives think". Because another reading of it is that liberals give conservatives a greater benefit of the doubt. And also that conservatives don't even know how little they care for the group.
And that's also ignoring that these are self-reported morality questionnaires. It's not really indicative of how these people might act in real situations. Even Hitler thought he was a swell guy just trying to do right. We all kind of think that of ourselves. No one thinks they're the monster.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all actually. I'm sure both side demonize the other to some extent, and it's our natural reaction to look at them both as equally bad like we're disciplining two siblings or something, but it really seems that right now the left is more melodramatic in the demonization than the right. In my personal experience, quite a few people I've met seem to think if you disagree with them, you must be full of hate, racist, sexist, dumb, a gun slinging Christian, etc.
My wife (who is pretty far left), observed that Trump was actually many of the things that G.W. Bush was accused of being.
I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.
It's all part and parcel of the same problem. The default media narrative bubble leans heavily to the left.
People trapped in that bubble are overly confident in what they believe. They aren't often exposed to arguments and data that are contrary to what they're told to believe over and over whenever they turn on the TV. So when these trapped people are confronted with opposing arguments or data, they resort to the easy mechanisms that relieve their cognitive dissonance. "You're a racist" "You're a homophobe" "You're a white supremacist" "You want sick people to die in the streets"
Defunding the police, government handouts, etc etc, whether you are in favor or against them, are policy decisions that some factions within the Democratic party are striving for using democratic (small 'd') methods. That is, if these factions can convince a majority of people to defund the police, then the police will get defunded. That is how democracy works.
If you disagree with defunding the police but with significant other parts of the Democratic platform, you can ally with these people on some issues but fight them on this issue. This is also how democracy works.
Trump attempted to stay in power even though the people voted against him. This is tyranny. Working with him, in any way, is a subversion of democracy. Anyone who is willing to work with him is, by extension, an enemy of democracy.
The only logical conclusion from your post is that you are against democracy: You argue that a policy you disagree with (defunding the police) getting implemented democratically, is a similar level of "bad" as a tyrant being installed. This means that you are willing to see a tyrant installed if the alternative is (democratically chosen!) policy being enacted that you disagree with. Seems like textbook authoritarianism to me.
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. For anyone curious, Haidt is a liberal professor who is dedicated to figuring out how to get people talking across political ideologies. The book that covers this topic is called The Righteous Mind and is an excellent read or listen.
Conservatives didn't have "no problem" answering as liberals.
Conservatives were better able to estimate what liberals would answer for individual concerns, but were wrong about group concerns.
Moderates were better able to estimate how both groups would answer for group concerns. Both liberals and conservatives overestimated how much conservatives cared for group concerns.
Liberals underestimated how much conservatives cared for individual concerns and overestimated how much they cared for group concerns. Liberals also overestimated how much liberals cared for individual concerns and underestimated how much the cared for group concerns.
In light of that, we could even frame it as liberals see themselves closer to conservatives than vice versa. Because that's how they answered for the groups. They think there's less difference than there actually is. So they under and overestimate appropriately.
Framing it as "conservatives know liberals better than vice versa" is wrong and is a tactic to put the onus on liberals to do all the changing. Because conservatives can fill out a morality questionnaire better.
Or let me put it this way, if the question was "How many puppies is it acceptable to kick in a lifetime?"
The fact that puppy kickers were correctly able to guess "zero" for the non-kicking group while the non-kickers said the kickers would say "ten" while the kickers really said "twenty" doesn't mean that the puppy kickers are the better group.
That's not at all what I got out of reading "The Righteous Mind", so not sure how to respond to this constructively. Did you read the book? Granted it's been ~ 1 year since I read it, but I walked away with a completely different impression. The interesting thing that was covered was that liberals and conservatives have different ways to approach moral reasoning.
Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational.
The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.
Another way to look at this is that extremists have a significant platform on the right, and that is likely to skew the perception of the right by the left.
Atwater's Southern Strategy: attract racists, without saying... you know the rest. He said that a long time ago, but the strategy is obviously still in play (see e.g. Thomas Hofeller, bithers, blatantly anti-mexican and anti-muslim quotes from the party)
The far right keeps showing up bearing the battle flag and nazi flags -- and Flynn, Stone, and Trump appear to love groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Other Republicans who speak out about that get cancelled.
Jerry Sexton's "who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days."
That's a very interesting study, but I think it's quite spurious to connect this result to media quality/partisanship the way you do. Certainly the study doesn't make this connection. After all, surveys tend to find that Fox News viewers are less informed about domestic and international events than consumers of other news media (one study found them less informed than people who did not watch the news at all). So I don't think this effect is caused by media.
Haidt's study uses his five moral foundations model, where one's moral foundations are characterized by five dimensions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two are called "individualizing foundations" and the last three are called "binding foundations".
Haidt's findings in other studies (which generalize beyond just the US or the West) are that people across the political spectrum care about the individualizing foundations, but progressives care more about these foundations than conservatives. But progressives care much less about the binding foundations.
With this in mind, I don't think it's too surprising that conservatives have an easier time estimating the viewpoint of progressives, since the moral foundations of progressives are not alien to conservatives, they are just weighted differently. Whereas for progressives, the moral foundations of conservatives can feel utterly alien and inexplicable, especially if they tend to have their social interactions in a progressive bubble.
(Also, be mindful that the population sample of the study is nowhere close to a random sample of the population. The sample is over 60% female, overwhelmingly young (median age is 28), and liberal participants outnumbered moderates and conservatives combined. Since it's an online survey, there's a reasonable chance that you're mostly reaching urban people, which tend to live in progressive bubbles. Conservatives who live in areas that are mostly progressive may understand progressives better than those who live in conservative bubbles. The study acknowledges this in the discussion section. The result might still hold up, but the effect might be exaggerated by the sample.)
I would be curious to see what that looks like today when elected Republicans are increasingly spouting what you'd call a "demonized" conservative viewpoint if it wasn't coming out of their mouths directly.
"Those are just the opinions of a small fringe" was much more believable in a pre-Trump world - but now, even more than post-Tea Party, the fringe is pushing the agenda.
And even pre-Trump, you can read that study as an indictment of the conservative media and it's evolution to sensationalism since the 1980s.
To use an example from the linked article: "For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights." - the vocal conservatives were not expressing a very nuanced view, it was the violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime even in conservative outlets.
If you want liberals to understand your complex conservative reasoning, you gotta get the very-un-complex trolls off the air!
If this reasoning is correct, then conservatives should be becoming worse at gauging liberals' position on social justice-related topics, considering how their reporting tends to be dominated by extremists as well.
What exactly seems fair? The reply you're responding to asserts there was a "violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime." Is that fair? The discussion, at the time, concerning gay marriage in conservative national media was dominated by a "violent fringe"? Were their calls for violence? Were there even suggestions that violence "may be necessary"?
I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?
Fox news personalities frequently allow Trump and his allies airtime where they lie about losing the election to Biden. I don't know how you get any less truthful than that
It's an example of how Fox is less honest than other news companies, exactly what you asked for. They let people on air spout obvious lies all the time. Find a mainstream channel that does the same. I'll wait
I am not from US. And could not care less who won.
I think there is no less honest. It is simple, you lie or don't. In my eyes they are all bad, and it is up to me to inform myself.
CNN has gone so far downhill imo due to this. In the past five years I've seen a shrinking gap between news and opinion, where articles w/o the label are very clearly editorialized. It lowers the quality of the product and at least for me, I no longer read it as much.
That said, journalists are just humans so it's a difficult problem, especially in the heightened political climate we've had.
That seems like a preposterous claim. Those are classic regime television stations. And I find this diagram biased.
Also, "middle" or centrist is not the same as objective. The path of least extreme disagreement is not the same as the truth (ask a Christian: he'll tell you that Jesus is the truth and that the world hates Jesus). Besides, the middle of what? The neoliberal paradigm? The current spread on offer?
Fair point - these dichotomies are often false or manufactured.
However I believe that, to a much greater extent than citizen support for particular political issues, media bias tends to polarize along party-line dimensions because of overlapping power structures.
Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years, while CNN and MSNBC have moved quite a bit to the left. You see it more on cultural issues than say economic or foreign policy issues. Joy Reid, for example, just says the most outrageous falsehoods and goes completely unrebutted: https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1403950560907300865?s=20
I got the "the civil war wasn't about slavery" line fed to me in school. Reconstruction was a bad thing, too, and it was good when the North stopped meddling. So where's the most outrageous falsehood here? The "nothing to do with" bit? That's not the exact version I got, but the gist was: "the Civil War was about states rights, it's just a coincidence that the right in question was the right to have slaves, but the South wasn't morally in the wrong because states rights are actually that important."
The falsehood is saying that “currently, most K-12 students learn Confederate Race Theory.”
I grew up in solidly Republican Virginia in the 1990s (even my “liberal” Northern VA county voted against Clinton both times) and we certainly didn’t learn the “Daughters of the Confederacy” version. When we visited Monticello, slavery was discussed at length. Teachers have discretion so maybe some kids are still learning this stuff, but it’s a huge lie to say it’s “most” kids today.
Folks like Reid are massively gaslighting people by making it seem like the opposition to CRT is opposition to “teaching kids about slavery.” Conservatives in Virginia weren’t up in arms complaining about that when I was a kid almost 30 years ago, so it’s hard to imagine that’s what they’re doing. The opposition, instead, is to people like Reid who are trying to normalize racism against white people. It’s opposition to people who want to turn slavery into the entire narrative, such as the 1619 Project, which asserted that “nearly everything exceptional about America grew out of slavery”: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/year-zero
> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music.
> Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years
I routinely read Fox News online. I do not think they have moderated over the last 2 years - there was perhaps some moderation 4 years ago, but no longer.
CNN has swung leftward, I don't think MSNBC has substantially changed.
I think they mean the word "Moderated" not in the colloquial sense of removing content, but in the sense that they're opinions are not as strongly right-wing as they once were.
How is that a falsehood? The daughters of the confederacy pushed the "civil war was about state's rights" narrative that is still taught across the South.
> Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years
They moved slightly back from Trumpism back toward their earlier pre-Trump far-rightism late in the Trump period (not abandoning the former, just not going in whole hog on it), which might be seen as moderation from a tribal/partisan viewpoint (as pre-Trump far-rightism currently lacking a major party home, to the extent many anti-Trump-but-far-right voices advocated voting for Democrats over Republicans despite ideological issues with Democrats in 2020 as essential to the defeat of Trumpism), but is not moderation ideologically.
While the D-R partisan split is not independent of left-right ideology, its not the same thing.
This seems much more accurate to my experience as a leftist. The insistence from centrist liberals that CNN/MSNBC is unbiased seems baffling and delusional.
Did you read that article? I mean, even that article has the multiple bitchy comments thrown in. I would quote, but honestly it would be every other paragraph. But yes, the headline is generally positive I guess. Now, could we find a similar article for Biden in Fox over the next 4 years? I would guess probably.
Anyways it's kind of pointless to argue what the "opposite" of Fox is as it's really ill-defined. i think it's fair to say CNN and Fox are similar to being opposites.
Ok, I'm going to do it:
> Presidents usually get too much blame when the economy is doing badly, since downturns are often caused by outside shocks or cyclical factors, but that also gives them a chance to crow when things are going full steam ahead. Trump is not the kind of person to pass that up.
> The strong growth number gives the White House a significant boost after days of grim headlines, and its failure to move on from the President’s humiliating summit performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly two weeks ago.
> It also offers some personal respite for Trump, given that he must feel that legal walls are closing around him, following news that one of his most important confidants, Allen Weisselberg, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors investigating his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
> The New York Times reported on Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller is examining Trump’s tweets, potentially to see whether they can help him build a case that the President acted with malicious intent when he sacked former FBI Director James Comey.
> Trump is forever trying to change the subject. With the current state of the economy, he may have some ammunition.
> Often, the President’s hyperbolic assessment of his own performance is at odds with the facts
> but he [Trump] often has only himself to blame for it getting overlooked, given the daily political turmoil he creates.
> Trump’s end zone dance might come across as a little premature.
It just goes on and on. I'm practically quoting the whole article. Just the language alone: "humiliating", "walls closing in", etc. Then they quote one poll, presumably the one what makes him look as bad as possible. It's just ridiculous. I don't know how you can say this article is "positive" for Trump. The headline is relatively positive (though even then I can feel CNN begrudgingly wrote some credit).
"Now, could we find a similar article for Biden in Fox over the next 4 years? I would guess probably."
Biden's not the opposite of Trump either. Biden pleases some conservatives, which is why he got the nomination over Sanders, so that he'd stand a chance of winning over "undecided" (ie. right wing, but not extreme right wing) voters in battleground states. Many neocons are also fans of Biden, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find support of him on FOX.
Now I'd be surprised to find any positive coverage of Sanders on FOX.. not to mention people who are really on the left like Noam Chomsky.
Given the number of actual Trump staff CNN has hired and put on air, I don't think one can credibly argue that they are on the opposite end of the spectrum. As someone who generally politically identifies as "left", I can assure you we are quite frustrated with them.
MSNBC too! They may not have as many Trump folks on primetime panels, but their focus on dumb "Resistance" stuff is definitely not what the left wants at all (though liberals seem to eat it up).
I've heard people characterize cable news as kayfabe—the handbook for professional wrestling. Cable news is entertainment, and the same way the WWF was eventually pressured into changing their name to the WWE, we have to hope one day CNN and Fox News (along with MSNBC, etc.) will change their monikers.
It seems that the change from WWF to WWE was mainly caused by a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund, but they used the opportunity to emphasize their entertainment focus.
>Mrs. McMahon [(CEO of WWE)] said the company began considering dropping the word "Federation" from its name when World Wildlife Fund (a/k/a World Wide Fund for Nature) prevailed in a recent court action in the United Kingdom. The court ruling prevents the World Wrestling Federation from the use of the logo it adopted in 1998 and the letters WWF in specified circumstances. The "Fund" has indicated that although the two organizations are very different, there is the likelihood of confusion in the market place by virtue of the fact that both organizations use the letters WWF. The Fund has indicated that it does not want to have any association with the World Wrestling Federation. "Therefore," said, Mrs.McMahon, "we will utilize this opportunity to position ourselves emphasizing the entertainment aspect of our company, and, at the same time, allay the concerns of the Fund." [0]
I'm aware of that, but I don't think that changes things much. They chose to call it "entertainment," when they could have called it any number of things. But at the time they had been under increasing criticism of the matches being fixed, etc.
Nope, not even close. Even if we are pretend that all wrestling fans were completely unaware that the WWF was scripted, that ended in Montreal in 1997 when Vince McMahon forced the belt off of Brett Hart. He didn't change the name of the company until 2002. Even before that, Vince declared it was all a work because he was tired of being under the thumb of various athletic and boxing commissions. His people did steroids and he wasn't going to stop them.
WWF officially broke kayfabe 1989 way before the name change because they didn't want to spend the money necessary for live sporting events. Before that pro wrestling was regulated just like boxing or MMA, with state commissioners and taxes and medical requirements.
Does anyone watch TV anymore? I read Fox News online, which is fine, but I don’t think I’ve ever tuned into shows. My parents have CNN on a loop, and even my dad (a die-hard Carter fan) calls it “DNC talking points.”
people can hate on tucker all day long, as they attacked rush and oreilly before him, but tucker brings up issues that resonate in red america. he does a pretty fair job, which is evidenced by how trivial the criticism against him is.
if people are confused about what red america thinks, they would be well served to look at Breitbart, tucker, and independent conservative outlets to see how they frame the discussion. I'm always amazed at how people on the left don't really see what the right is going on about.
> if people are confused about what red america thinks, they would be well served to look at Breitbart, tucker, and independent conservative outlets
I've been scolded for using Breitbart or Tucker Carlson as a barometer for right-wing positions because they're claimed to be extreme, or 'alt-right', and not reflective of how real conservatives think or feel.
Am I the only one who feels Tucker Carlson is so popular because he (a lot like Donald Trump) was willing to challenge the false idols of the Republican establishment (e.g. we need to be at war in Afghanistan/Iraq, the free market isn't always the best especially if it leads to outsourcing and offshoring, etc.)
Might just be me. I dislike 90% of fox news but I listen to Carlson sometimes and never find him to be horrible or BS-y (admittedly I don't listen in all the time so I may be missing some stuff)
I've seen a few clips, they have been pretty bad but with kernel of truths that make it hard to make substantive arguments against whatever he is ranting on. I personally think he's a big stain on news media, even while agreeing with a few points here/there there.
For what it's worth, I've only watched in order to try and understand other people's viewpoints.
More specifically, I think he's terrible because he has mastered the ability to tease out the base instincts of people with his messaging, which makes it hard to either agree or disagree with his statements with logic. He can point to some kernels of truth, and you are left with people saying things like "that's just dogwhistling" when attacking his viewpoints. In other words, he riles up, doesn't cause people to think critically, and overall lowers the level of discourse out there.
I pretty much only see clips of Tucker Carlson that are posted by liberals or leftists to point at and generate outrage.
To me, he seems like a whiner who disingenuously argues against things in a way to bolster conservative talking points. But, I expect the majority of this is selection bias, and only the 'worst' clips are making it into my filter bubble.
We don't even have to litigate whether Fox News airtime is distinctively malignant if we just acknowledge that all 24/7 cable news channels are bad. They kind of have to be, just by the nature of how they compete and what they have to work with in both audiences and source material. Just don't get your news from the TV.
A fair point, but I don't think the concession is worth what you get out of it. A citizen whose sole news source is Fox is considerably less informed than a viewer who might watch exclusively CNN (or possibly even nothing at all, see [1])
Fox News really is worse, and while there may be lessons learned there which can be applied to the other outlets, such as insisting on clearer labeling of opinion content vs reporting, I think it's an all-lives-matter-style distraction to throw up our hands and say there's nothing that can be done and they're all equally bad because it's a problem inherent in the medium.
While I can technically see that some news organizations are worse than others, my issue is that they are all so bad that they are actively doing significant damage to the world and most of the time they are doing it consciously and intentionally, so I don't really get much utility trying to distinguish them from one another.
And yet while they are all genuinely terrible due to trying to remain profitable AND trying to advance their personal political agendas, people are always trying to use the excuse that "its better than X" to justify supporting them.
My solution would be to ignore the news completely, but that solution isn't effective because I know multiple people that insist on ranting about everything they see/hear from the media on a daily basis.
IMO the media is very important for civilization, but somehow we have accepted that deceit, manipulation, and failure are the golden standard.
> If you aren't paying for your media sources, you're the product.
Even if you are paying, you can still be the product, as long as media can make even more money out of it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? More money is more money.
In Sweden we have public service TV channels, but even in that context I think your advice holds up – not a good source for news. Too stressed, too shallow reporting.
