It’s no use. Those people (who think mainstream media is liberal propaganda) think all other countries are liberal / socialist.
Do you think WaPo / CNN / NYT report things that aren’t factual?
I suspect there’s not nearly the uniformity in reporting in “every other outlet in the world” that Exapno Mapcase seems to believe there is.
Occasionally. They’re run by humans, after all, and humans are imperfect.
But they report things that aren’t factual a lot less often than Fox News, and their errors show much less deliberate bias.
I know you’re not suggesting that alternative facts are just as valid as objective facts based on evidence.
Do you think these people on the right who subscribe to their alternative version of facts are right to hold their views? Is there some sort of justification for their willful ignorance? Should they be allowed to hold on to their ill informed views without challenge for risk of hurting their feelings? Are they better or worse off in holding on to their uninformed opinions? Is society improved when such a large segment of population believes the lies their elected president tells them?
What’s your cite for this last sentence?
The people best able to slap some sense into Trump supporters are former Trump supporters, not Dems.
Imagine the power in saying “Hey, I’m just like you, I had high hopes for the President and thought he was just what the country needed” before unleashing “Now let me tell me why I regret my vote .”
Dems aren’t going to be able to offer this kind of politically correct candy coating because the vast majority saw him as nothing but bad from the very beginning. People who have always been anti-Trump can’t liken themselves to Trump supporters and come across as sincere; it would be a lie everybody can see through.
What Dems should do is encourage an atmosphere that allows former Trump supporters to speak up and announce their change of hearts without being attacked. The more of them that come out of the closet, the more supporters will question themselves.
LOL. I don’t think most Dems are capable of this.
Reality, fact-checking, outside observers, and common sense. Seriously, to get to “both sides distort equally,” you have to be stunningly–catastrophically–bad at evaluating evidence and information sources.
I’m not sure if you don’t know how a cite works or what, but this isn’t one.
See, this was an opportunity for you to be magnanimous. “That’s a great point, ywtf. I think that’s something everyone on both sides of the fence could try to do.” Very easy to type that out. Instead, you blew it because you just had to take a dig at Dems. Which now is going to invite comebacks from me and others.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
It’s a FANTASTIC idea, it’s just not realistic. There’s far too much bitterness in our politics today.
Perhaps a more clear example is the recent health care votes in the senate. With the exception of Murkowski and Collins, every single republican senator displayed just how little spine and moral fiber they have. Yes, McCain too. The entire process was shameful, and the people who let McCain get away with it should not be in any position more influential than daycare owner.
Oh, I bet they do! That’s the whole reason they don’t read those sources. Then again, Young Earth Creationists are generally convinced that they have the real science, and it’s the evilutionists who are running fake science. And yet we don’t tend to give them a pass and say, “Well, you think that way, you think that way, guess it’s about equal.”
So how do we tell who’s right? What criteria can we observe to determine which side is delusional and which side is not? Let’s think of some.
For example, maybe it’s relevant to look at what facts they get wrong, how often they get things wrong, and whether there’s a clear pattern on how and why they get things wrong.
Maybe it’s relevant to wonder whether what they get wrong, what they report on, and what they don’t report on has some sort of pattern.
Maybe it’s particularly relevant to see if there are any big news stories that they ignore, minimize, or dismiss.
There really is no contest here. And looking back through the history of these places, you can see some really important things. These places were never meant to be bipartisan or unbiased. They always were intended as a blatantly right-wing exercise, allegedly to balance the liberal bias of the left. And sure, mainstream news has some liberal bias. But there’s a huge difference between “our coverage is unintentionally biased by the political affiliation of our reporters, but we try our best to be news for everyone” and “We’re news for and by a specific political wing, with the intention of supporting one side of the political spectrum”.
This is an incredibly bad question. Of course everyone makes mistakes sometimes. The difference is in frequency and goal. When I see the New York Times Corrections page, I have no problem believing those were honest mistakes. When Fox News barely covers the president firing the head of the FBI who was investigating his campaign for links to Russia, and instead spends the whole evening slagging off “dems in meltdown” and pushing an insane conspiracy theory about a DNC staffer being murdered by the Clintons, I have a really hard time seeing this as anything other than intentional. I mean, come on. When’s the last time the New York Times did that? When’s the last time any mainstream news outlet did something as insane and stupid as Fox did with Comey’s firing? I mean, maybe the reporting coming out of Russia in the 30s, but recently? Anything?
Yeah, it is. You need to do research and evaluate information sources, compare them to others, evaluate them against what’s possible and evidence sources of your own eyes, and come to a conclusion. And you need to do it for every fact presented.
I can give you cites: Science or Spin? | Union of Concerned Scientists, http://fair.org, PolitiFact | PunditFact checks in on the cable news channels, and a dozen or two others, but you’re just going to No True Scotsman them away as being “biased.”
Seriously, the “Whopper of the Year” on one side was Obama making a statement (intended to be true) about keeping your plan under the ACA. The Scandal of the Year on the liberal side was an otherwise true CNN story mis-stating the number of intelligence agencies that wrote a particular report on Trump. On the other side, we have three major conservative “news” agencies sponsoring a well-attended march protesting the imposition of Sharia Law on unwilling Americans.
One side is making small errors. The other side is inventing whole worlds that don’t exist. So no, both sides are NOT distorting equally, and frankly, you either know this, or you should.
Many people simply did not like Hillary. They could not be enticed to vote for Hillary. Those people either did not vote or voted for someone/anyone else.
It’s now up to the Democrat Party show runners to field a candidate with broader appeal. Or not.
Nope, not going to bite on this. Anybody who has been reading here on the Dope knows of the dozens of threads on Fox News lies, distortions, and omissions, giving links to hundreds of articles containing thousands of examples. Telling people to go back and waste time and effort to redig them up is a distraction technique straight out of the Trump playbook.
Your denial of reality is exactly why so many of us are saying Trump supporters must be bypassed and minimized rather than engaged and converted. You may think you’re going a great job on opposition but you’re just Exhibit A for the prosecution.
And here’s the key…the MSM correct them when the errors are discovered.
How about some counterexamples? How many bullshit conspiracy theories and flat-out misrepresentations have Fox News/Breitbart/Infowars championed over the years that MSM not only won’t but that they actively argue against?
Seth Rich? NASA kidnappings? Birtherism? “Death panels?” Climate change denial? Vince Foster? Obama is a Muslim? Hillary gave away 20% of our uranium to Russia?
That’s a very small list of things off the top of my head. I could easily dig up more if you’d like.
It’s as realistic as any other issue progressives have decided to turn into something. I mean, only 10 years ago the expectation that society would call a trangendered woman “she” was unrealistic too. But people made it realistic.
We’ve seen a number of Republicans publicly defect in response to Trump. That is only going to continue. Eventually, only the most resistant to reason will call themselves Trump supporters. Everyone else is going to act like they were always against 45, just as we’ve seen with Iraq revisionism.
Most people who still support Trump only stick with him because they hate Democrats and liberals, and supporting Trump is the best way to hurt them. They’ll never turn against Trump as long as liberals want them to. If somehow it were possible for the left to ignore Trump altogether, his support would evaporate. But of course we can’t do that.