I don’t know if that’s relevant to be honest.
Michael Moore doesn’t have his own show dressing as news. He doesn’t look straight out the camera every night and tell millions of viewers what to believe. And he’s not a politician on the tax payer’s dime.
I know some people consider his documentaries to play fast and loose with the facts. I don’t know enough about that to hold an opinion, and I haven’t watched his documentaries. But I enjoy seeing him interviewed; he seems relatable and rational to me. In fact, I watched Moore once with a family that claimed to hate him, and they found themselves actually agreeing with a lot of what he was saying.
Do you believe his own words? As I quoted, he mixes opinion and satire into his documentaries to create “art”. They’re not true documentaries. He’s not being deceptive; he’s open about it. But he still calls them documentaries, and they’re often given the same consideration and weight as actual, factual documentaries would. And he doesn’t make it clear where the fact is in his work, and what is his opinion, and what is intended to be a satirical wink.
So his work can’t be trusted. Everything he creates is trying to make a point and he can be really effective at it. But the methods he uses aren’t straightforward and can’t be taken at face value.
I’m not suggesting he’s the equivalent of Tucker Carlson, nor am I trying to criticize him. I’m just using him as an example of how journalistic integrity can be complex. There’s truth, there’s bullshit, and there are gradients between. I see Moore as someone who’s not always telling you actual truth but because he’s open about that, he’s also honest.
They have a very simple rule. If the news source tells them things they already believe it’s trustworthy. If it challenges their beliefs it’s fake news.
Please note the contradiction in the two sentences I bolded. You don’t trust media funded by the government, except that it’s trustworthy.
As I said in another thread, media that is funded by commercial interests suffers both from allegiance to its sponsors, and from having to distort and sensationalize news in the endless pursuit of profit. Publicly funded media has none of those disincentives to honest reporting, and they can be kept impartial by a formal charter and code of conduct.
Here is where the US stands in funding for public broadcasting among first-world nations:
I’m embarrassed that Canada is so low on the list. But the US, the richest country in the world, is less than one-tenth of that per capita! No wonder the place is full of Trump-voting morons, and is nowhere near being able to achieve even the most basic framework of universal health care. Public broadcasting in the US is so impoverished that they have to go begging, hat in hand, to corporations to whom they become beholden, not to mention activist libertarian oligarchs like the late David Koch, who in his later years was a major force within PBS.
Fundraisers too, I’ve donated to local fundraisers in the past to support public broadcasting. I needed my Red Dwarf and Fawlty Towers fixes after all. So they have to go begging to taxpayers directly because they don’t get enough funding from the government.
Of course that undercuts their purpose. Before people will donate they need to put out material that appeals to those people and in that sense they are operating the way that your standard for-profit broadcaster does.
First, CNN TV news - the subject of your post- doesn’t even show up on the chart for some odd reason. The CNN that they erroneously peg as “far left” is qualified as online/ opinion only. But since whoever “Both Sides” or “All Sides” media is, they seem pretty sure they aren’t marketing to people that know how to read fine print. Otherwise, more people like me might notice that the arguably most prominent media outlet, CNN television, isn’t even represented on their stupid chart.
The second reason it’s a horrible chart is that it treats the Washington Times and the Epoch Times as legitimate news outlets that it claims are “light right”. That’s fucking ridiculous.
Both newspapers are owned by cults. The Washington Times is the media arm of Rev Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church…aka “The Moonies”. But I can hear conservatives now…”unification, I thought you liberals were in favor of unification, why are you being mean to a church dedicated to unification?” But anyway, it does nothing but spew Trump disinformation because, in true cult grifter fashion, there’s money to be had. Cults love Trump, if these guys were still hustling in airports they’d be selling MAGA hats instead of paper flowers.
The Epoch Times is the media arm of the Chinese Falun Gong cult and was traditionally dedicated to reporting negative to the Chinese government- it was a minor street corner throwaway paper in NYC during the time I lived there, the kind of thing you might grab out of the box on the corner if it was raining and you didn’t have an umbrella and needed something to hold over your head.
But they too have fallen into the “let’s spew pro-Trump lies for profit” business model and have been enthusiastically endorsed by the right, because Trump loves cults and cults love Trump.
The WaTimes are the ones who circulated the lie that facial recognition software had placed “Antifa members” at the site of the Capitol riots. They were subsequently forced to retract the story but not before the lie had circulated rapidly through other right-wing media and had been repeated by several Republican politicians.
On further inspection, note the statement at the top of that chart:
So unlike the Ad Fontes one, the AllSides one is not a useful chart for discussing the television or radio outputs of FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC, OANN, NPR etc.
The idea of ‘unbiased news’ is a journalistic fiction. The problem isn’t CNN or Fox or MSNBC - their wear their biases on gheir sleeves and no one is fooled that any of them are in any way ‘objective’.
The problem is outlets like the New York Times claiming to be unbiased reporters of fact while acting uust as biased as the rest of them.
We should just go back to the era where everyone admitted bias, where newspapers woild be called things like the WhateverTown Union-Democrat.
If you know the bias of the writers, you can read both sides and figure out foryourself where the truth lies, assuming both sides are spinning. If the bias is hidden and opinion presented as fact, it is hard to find the truth.
The Cuomo Brothers were somethjng else, though. Typical exchange between the two would be the brother asking the governor if he was going to start dating now that he was so ‘hot’ and women clearly loved him, repeatedly referring to him as the ‘Luv Guv’ (that didn’t age well), telling him he was the best politician in the country, and repeatedly telling him he should run for President because he’s so awesome.
“Media bias” charts like those of the Ad Fontes site mentioned above aren’t based on what the various media outlets “claim to be”. They’re based on analyses of their articles by teams of liberal, moderate and conservative analysts. (And they aren’t claiming that the New York Times, for example, is totally “unbiased”, just that its degree of bias is less (and its factual reliability greater) than that of Fox News and its ilk.)
ISTM that nowadays it’s quite generally accepted that all journalism has some degree of bias of one kind or another. I don’t think that that means that all journalism ought to try to be openly partisan. Objectivity and fairness are still beneficial ideals even if we recognize that no real-life journalism can ever actually attain them.
Well, that depends on whether you can rely on the sources to be factually accurate. If one source is biased and reasonably accurate, and the other source is biased in the opposite direction as well as being factually unreliable, then your attempt to allow for both bias effects is going to be skewed in the direction of the lying source.
Yeah, Sam, I gotta admit that your own posts are not exactly a shining testimonial to the reliability of your recommended approach. I’m still trying to figure out what on earth you thought you were talking about when you claimed that “Asians are heavily under-represented in the Ivy Leagues” over in that concurrent Pit thread, for instance.
That chart is kind of meaningless. Why is per capita public broadcasting funding relevant? It shouldn’t cost significantly more to run an American BBC just because we have more people than the UK. Maybe a bit more for flights and additional local bureaux, etc.
It’s absolutely relevant, because the cost includes infrastructure – television and radio stations in every major city with staff and broadcast facilities, independent local programming, and many other factors that have a per-capita basis. Per-capita expenditures are a standard way of representing the health of public media. Here’s another example:
NPR has stations with local reporting all over the country. There is a national network and syndicated shows, but they have reporters all over the place.
There’s a world of between bias and spin. Spin is propaganda (like Fox, maybe MSNBC?). Bias is your preconceived notions affecting how you cover the news (NY Times or CNN), but you’re at least making a attempt at objectivity. Spin is deliberate.
Meanwhile, this poor (non-CNN) writer claims that Biden’s lack of attention-whoring pressers “raises accountability questions.”
Like, how? Who’s asking the questions – besides Republican partisans and apparently bored reporters who, now that the daily shit show is gone, are struggling to find something ‘inneresting’ to write about?
