Are you yelling into the mirror?
“Never”? What does that even mean? Major TV networks have only existed for, what, 90 years?
Before TV, news was radio and before that newspapers. And they have been calling each other fake since the beginning. Propaganda has always been a thing, and calling for the government to somehow regulate it is asking for the foxes to run the hen house.
Never meant never.
But thinking is really hard. It’s so much easier if I let the fine people at Fox do all the thinking and then they can tell me what I should believe is true.
If you want a turning point, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was it.
I guess I don’t understand your point then. By “major network” do you mean CBS, NBC, and ABC? If so, why is it important that they haven’t called each other “fake news”?
What is the problem you are worried about, and why do you think it is new? If you ban the term “fake news”, won’t Fox News or Trump or Brietbart or whomever just come up with another term? It’s not like their supporters will suddenly think “Oh, I guess CNN was telling the truth all along because now nobody is calling them fake”.
If you are concerned about media bubbles, the replacement of news with propaganda, and the fact that we can’t debate the correct course of public policy without having some set of common facts, then I’m all in agreement. Regulating speech isn’t likely to get us there, in my opinion.
The point is that there was not enough aggregate power in the media to create the level of influence that “major tv networks” exert, before there were such things. So this kind of public pathology matters, now more than in Andrew Jacksons time. And there are a number of reasons for that having to do with the industrial revolution, a couple of world wars and modernity for instance.
What about the term “news”?
I have no idea how you came to that conclusion. I made no claims whatsoever about the current occupant of the White House, whose inanities have nothing at all to do with the wisdom of regulating speech.
Hm, that’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure I’m completely convinced that the ability of TV news to influence the electorate is any more powerful than the major newspapers at the time of the founding of the country. I’d need some evidence of that claim.
I actually think the far more nefarious force isn’t the TV news networks but the tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube that curate what we see and consume to align with what we have seen and consumed in the past. This creates systems where if I tend to mainly watch/read/consume The Guardian and John Oliver (for example) I have to make a genuine effort to find opinions, facts, and stories representing a different viewpoint than what might be called the “middle-left consensus”.
Seems to me that if you regulate a word they will just come up with another word. Fox News can’t call itself news? They’ll just call themselves Olds and their fans will say it’s the real news.
I agree about facebook. I’ve seen it turn people. How can a normal american who voted for clinton and obama all of the sudden become so in love with their own fumes that they say the same things as William Barr and dt, about Mueller and russia and impeachment? They are not offended by the presence of dt in the white house!!! That is a big shift. Because there are bigger fish to fry I suppose. Like hating HRC, and watching the world burn.
It has to be noted. People who I used to have a beer with and share normal stuff, are not exercised about gettting dt out of office.
But you have to admit the synergy between these things is the deadly aspect. Bubbles are reinforced. Facebook becomes deadly in the synergy with Fox news, a true fact free bubble, and a major news network that is on all cable platforms and is seen in gyms, hotels and other public places. I can’t see how newspapers in 1840 have relevance us now except for those “It was always this way” kinds of claims. It wasn’t always this way for me. I have a great respect for the stuff that has happened since 1840 and don’t think it’s the same now. I don’t think we are the same as we were 5 months ago to be honest.
To come at this from another angle, why is it that Fox News is so careful to paint itself as an entertainment organization rather than a news organization, at least officially? Is it to avoid lawsuits from people who rely on Fox News’s pronouncements to their detriment?
I, of course, did not come to that conclusion. I was pointing out the flaw in your argument.
But is Fox News officially “careful to paint itself as an entertainment organization rather than a news organization” in some way that CNN or MSNBC aren’t? In what way does Fox News do that?
I agree that Fox News is propagandistic and full of lies, but I really am not aware of any indication that they are somehow officially self-aware about their own awfulness. Really, some of these arguments are in danger of becoming some kind of “FOX:NEWS capitalizes its name and punctuates it funny, plus that flag has a gold fringe on it, therefore Fox News is exempt from the Secret UN Illuminati World Law on What News Is”.
What constitutes a legitimate news channel?
I think if you put restrictions on what can and can’t be reported, and how vetted it would need to be to be classified as “legitimate”, there wouldn’t be many MSM “news channels”
Also let’s not confuse “Fox News” with “Fox Network”, which is part of the same conglomerate and carries material from Fox News Media, but is also clearly entertainment-oriented as the home of Simpsons, Masked Singer, Gotham, etc.
Right. And of course that’s not in the least bit unusual; CNN is a corporate sister to HBO (and both are ultimately owned by The Phone Company); CNBC is part of the same media conglomerate as the SyFy channel (and both are owned by The Cable Company), and so forth. (Whether all this media conglomerating is good for democracy is certainly debatable, but would also be a different thread, I think.)
I think you’ve mistaken Fox News with Rush Limbaugh, who does point out that he’s an entertainer. He does that to illustrate that we can’t trust the “drive-by media” who try to hide their bias behind the label of “news.”
Nevertheless, I’d prefer we fight over what is or isn’t “fake news” on message boards than to put the power to decide in the hands of a government body with the power to silence what it doesn’t agree with.
I don’t get what this means.
Hannity dances on the line all the time. He’s in the twilight where he claims credibility on real world events, but emphasizes he is only an opinion host when he needs to, entirely situational.
What I mean is, in this thread there seem to be a couple of ideas, which sort of verge on a Conspiracy Theory:
- That there are some kind of Official Federal Regulations about what “news” is, but that
- The “Fox News Channel”, in spite of its name and its entire “brand” as a news channel, is somehow secretly evading the Official Federal Regulations by cleverly specifying (somehow) that they are really “entertainment”–even though their name is Fox News and their entire corporate identity, as a channel, is as a “News Network”.
As far as I can tell, none of this is true. There are no Official Regulations in the United States about what “news” is (or isn’t), it would be unconstitutional to attempt to enact any such regulations, and furthermore, it would be a really bad idea in any event.
I mean, think about who’s in charge of the U.S. federal government right now, and imagine, if there were such Official Regulations, which news channel would be able to smugly display its Official Presidential Seal of Approval as a Real News Channel, and which news channels and other media organizations would have to run some kind of disclaimer:
In accordance with the Communications Act of 1937, we are officially classified as “Fiction/Entertainment”.