This. Folks here are probably familiar with the fairness doctrine (now defunct). I’d like to see at least one major information channel in each major media venue (TV, radio, internet) that is publicly funded and required to abide by the fairness doctrine.
In addition the hyperpartisanship needs to be de-escalated. Fox is a direct offshoot of hyperpartisanship (in a righty sort of way; the right gets bellicose and militant, the left pious and scolding). Each side begins to see the other as a “dangerous threat.” That’s the core problem. The right tends to consolidate under a single script source (“democrats fall in love, republicans fall in line,” as the saying goes wrt political candidates), so you get this large organization with a big footprint, a large percentage of 'pubs tuning in and synching up, and you’ve got Fox’s operatic opinion arm foaming at the mouth. Concerns over principles, being truthful, etc. go out the window in the barfight.
I was also thinking the other day that when hyperpartisanship gets bad, even when one or the other side actually has the better idea (the more practical, or more moral, etc.) telling the truth won’t get you anywhere. You have to lie, resort to propaganda to do the right thing. So people stop trusting media outlets. That in turn makes people more susceptible to appeals to emotion, for example, and they also start getting real arbitrary in terms of what they choose to believe. Google “partisan doom loop.” Bad stuff.
No, many are just exercising their right to put scratches on a ballot. There’s no self-determination without some requisite degree of knowledge about what you’re determining. When people with no health insurance or crappy overpriced health insurance are bamboozled into voting against Obamacare – because Obamacare is “socialism”, because government death panels will come after their grandmothers, because they believe people in UHC systems die in the DMV office waiting for “government health care” – they are not exercising self-determination, they are acting as the tools and useful idiots of the insurance lobby and the health care industry. And the same process repeats itself for virtually any self-interested entity that has a lobby in Washington. When people are deluged with industry propaganda due to rulings like Citizens United having opened the floodgates of disinformation, and then turn on Fox News and get all the propaganda confirmed, they are quite simply robbed of the ability and the right to govern themselves in their own self-interest.
“Elite” is a strange term to use for “people who are actually informed about the issues”. I have no wish to force people to vote for the choices I prefer. There can be legitimate disagreements on values and policy. My wish is to live in a society where, when I listen to people being interviewed in exit polls to explain their choices, I don’t have to do a facepalm. The one thing that the vast majority of Americans correctly believe is that their government is dysfunctional. I wonder how that happened!
If someone wants to eat at McDonalds daily because they think it’s the healthiest stuff ever, that’s their problem and I don’t care. What I don’t want is McDonalds lobbying politicians to pass a law to make everyone do that. That particular travesty isn’t going to happen, but the equivalent has happened on behalf of the health insurance industry, on behalf of oil and coal companies, on behalf of automakers and heavy industry, on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, on behalf of the AMA and the for-profit health care industry, on behalf of the NRA, and on behalf of thousands of other interest groups just like them. Think I’m exaggerating? The USA is the only country on the planet that isn’t part of the Paris climate accord, the only industrialized country on the planet without a universal health care system, and definitely the only country on the planet with an orange embarrassment heading up the executive branch of its national government.
As I see it, the issue that our normal media (Post, NYT, CNN, etc) is dealing with is summarized by the following old saying: “A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on”.
I think Trump-world understands this, and they pump out an enormous volume of misinformation. It takes a huge effort to debunk their lies, and by the time Lie #1,991,945 is debunked, they’ve moved on to lie#1,992,018. People don’t even remember the earlier lie, because they’re now being surrounded by the latest lie, many lies down the line.
Regular media is fighting not only TrumpTV (which is what Fox essentially is), but also social media and talk radio, where misinformation is even trafficked even more heavily. This has also filtered into the regular Republican party, who parrot the lies often to avoid the wrath of Trumpworld or because they themselves believe in it.
And advertising, too. It’s crazy, it’s everywhere. I watch a Youtube channel of a fella who sings homemade anti Trump songs, and even his videos begin with a Trump campaign ad and are followed by an ad featuring a media conspiracy guy directing you to his news publication.
I think another critical issue is short attention spans. If you reduce an issue down to the size of a sound bite, a bumper sticker, or a slogan on a t-shirt, it’s only going to be a bare expression of the idea. Good ideas, bad ideas, smart ideas, dumb ideas, true ideas, and false ideas all look the same at that scale. In order to differentiate between ideas, you need to look at what they are supported by. And a lot of people don’t bother; they want the TLDR version of reality.
Yes, I agree. Joe Sixpack and Jane WineDrinker are busy with their daily lives. They have jobs, and kids, and in-laws, and errands to run. Leaky faucets to fix, cars that need the tires rotated. Weekends are spent cheering for the Bears or the Packers, or the Braves during baseball season. I think a lot of people just don’t sit down to really study many issues. A guy like Trump, armed with his ministry of media misinformation, can boil everything down to a few words, and Joe just goes with it…
Donald Trump is currently the President. Does that affect your view that the government should be deciding which news media are doing proper investigations, without bias?
Perhaps you missed what I wrote in post #54 about how public broadcasting actually works in every modern democracy in the world. Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the government actually meddle in any material way in broadcast editorial policy. There is in these countries a fundamental principle of public broadcasters being independent entities that are above politics that not even Trump could violate without major repercussions, equivalent to suspending civil liberties, and would indeed violate the First Amendment. Trump may be a wannabe dictator but he isn’t actually one, no matter how much he wishes it. Those kinds of worries are the stuff of conspiracy theories rather than reality.
Jeff Bezos, publicly subsidized Amazon oligarch, buys up the Wash Po, then enters into a deal with the Pentagon worth 3 times what he paid for the paper. Then he hires an ex-CIA operative to push endless war on the editorial board.
I do not share your apparent optimism that the proposal is something that Trump or a President like him, on the left or the right, could not possibly abuse.
IMHO it will depend on who is controlling congress, not bloody likely with a Democrat as president, it is more likely with a Republican senate that does the three monkey act with gusto.
This. We live in an age where truth no longer has an objective meaning and when few people have the time, resolve, or intellectual resources to seek the truth, particularly when the most popular news TV news source, one that has reached its many tentacles into the Internet and social media, actively persuades people to trust no other media source but itself.
I’ll agree that the problem is much bigger than Fox News, though I won’t agree with those who say bias is as severe in all news sources. My concern is that the bigger and more abstract the parameters of the debate become, the less likely solutions can be formulated. Probably if Murdoch hadn’t come up with the idea of exploiting the credulous masses with a conservative news station appealing to tabloid readers, some other slime ball would have. Nor is Fox News the only propaganda source masquerading as news. But if we can figure out how to effectively counteract this one concrete example, we stand a good chance of combatting all of them. That’s my hope, anyway.
The concern here is that many on your side only appear interested in “effectively counteract[ing] this one concrete example”, that, rather than “combatting all of them”, you’ll wash your hands of the whole business once item #1 on your punchlist is complete and give the rest a pass. If I had even a minimal amount of faith that leftists were more interested in restoring impartiality, factuality, and honesty to media generally, rather than just destroying Fox News, I’d be eager to partner with them in that effort. But I don’t have even a minimal amount of faith in that.
I suspect we’d have a hard time agreeing on what “impartiality, factuality, and honesty” actually means. How do I know this? Because Republicans are forever whining that some of the nation’s most respected news organizations – the New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, NPR – are hotbeds of liberal propaganda (though it appears that Fox News is just fine – fair and balanced, one might say :rolleyes:).
And the same thing happens outside the US, too. Here in Canada the national public broadcaster, the CBC, holds itself to the highest journalistic standards and produces some remarkably informative documentaries and discussion programs with world-class experts both on television and on commercial-free radio. But conservatives decry it as liberal-biased, and the last time I had this argument with them the support for their argument was that it was hounding the then-current Conservative government, holding it to account and exposing broken promises, inaccurate statements, etc. Then the Conservatives lost an election and Liberal government came into power, whereupon the CBC proceeded to hound it, holding it to account and exposing broken promises, inaccurate statements, etc. The right-wing types appeared to go silent at this point – you could hear the crickets.
All I truly want is accurate information and an end to the kind of shameless lying and distortion that comes out of Fox News and the present administration, and let the chips fall where they may, as long as people are making informed decisions, because I’m confident that if they’re informed they will act in their own self-interest and not the interests of soulless corporations and the plutocracy. If you want that, too, you couldn’t possibly support rulings like Citizens United, because no lobbyist is going to pay big money for saturation ad campaigns and/or sleazy astroturfing front groups to communicate honest and balanced information, since the media can do that just fine for free.
So you agree Fox News is impartial, nonfactual, and dishonest, but you won’t partner with those who want to change that because you’ve decided all the OTHERS fighting this fight are liberals–and liberals who won’t continue the fight against other biased sources, both liberal and conservative? Man, that’s quite a dance.
Let me simplify my previous post for you:
Start by figuring out a way to fight Fox, the most egregious of the biased news sties.
Use that same method or variations of it to fight bias elsewhere.
You want to fight bias over at MSNBC? Right behind you. You want to fight it at Breitbart? I’ll be there, too. If you can’t find any conservatives willing to join you in fighting bias at Fox and then elsewhere, fight on our own. Or join liberals and independents and then split off and fight it elsewhere. But don’t use a lame, disingenuous excuse for not righting a wrong.