I mean… are you advocating for not knowing where your sources may have potential biases? I may not have expressed myself right, but isn’t knowing where people get their money important if you’re going to evaluate the validity of their claims? It’s like you carrying around a bag with a big dollar sign on it because you’re potentially a bank robber.
“Potential bias” is a convenient way to cast aspersions without having to back them up, in my opinion. If you can show bias, then do it.
Well, I will try to look for a few… I saw Liz Chaney on Meet The Press… and she said things I thought were dishonest, (I don’t know for sure, because I don’t remember), and received little to no pushback. These are all the people that decided to have the war in the first place.
Here Nicole Wallace says this out loud:
Wallace was commenting on a speech made by Biden. She said that 95% of the American people would agree with what he just said, and 95% of the White House press corps would disagree with what he just said.
I’m not at all sure how this backs up your point about a news source being biased. And it speaks nothing as to where a news source receives its funding.
Isn’t that how it should be, to some degree? The press is not supposed to be the President’s friend. He has a staff to get his own message out. The job of the press is to ask tough questions; to find out the things that the public has a right to know, but which the President doesn’t want to tell us.
The bias is in how this dynamic changes depending on which party holds the presidency. When it’s a Democrat, everyone asks tough questions. When it’s a Republican, conservative media lobs him softballs and implies that anyone who asks tough questions is un-American.
Okay then. Understandable. Can you tell me why there’s such a discrepancy between the press and the public, by chance?
The press are a little whipsawed these days. Under an assault of right wing propaganda.
Here is a biased thing I do see on MSNBC involving the hosts, not the network. They have been so trained that Rs and RWers are “scary” and that their arguments are both totally unanswerable, and yet, ironically, need to be included as a necessary half of the mainstream political dialogue, that they compensate by giving Dems and liberals a lot of backtalk as if it proves their journalistic bona fides.
The republicans are gaming the liberal and center news networks too. They are making it impossible for journalists to do a good job.
I have seen a half dozen times Dems getting real disrespect and hard questioning just because things are so bad in the world, and fucking Republicans just gaslight. The hosts attack the closest safest target, which is always liberals.
For any network to be called biased for the left they would at the very least have to start shutting down republican bullies on the air and end the gaslighting and trolling democracy. Until they do that they are biased to the right by default.
Imagine this conversation:
Me: One should not eat five-pound bags of sugar as a snack.
You: Yes, but fresh fruit also has sugar.
Factually accurate, but unhelpful in context. And that kind of bothsideism is exactly what the conservative establishment relies on to maintain their veneer of respectability.
When you say, “ah ha, but what about the other outlets,” you’re doing Fox the favor of placing them on the same spectrum as reputable organizations. They do not belong there. We can talk about the bias of actual news organizations, but it shouldn’t be done in the context of a discussion about how Fox News is an aggressively malicious actor.
Got it… But I did specify Fox is much worse a few times. Just saying. I like how you broke down what was going on… because I was a little confused.
You did, and I acknowledge that. But go back to the apples.
Me: Okay gang, we’re here to talk about the epidemic of teenagers eating five-pound bags of sugar. Diabetes is on the rise and little old southern ladies are having trouble getting what they need to make sweet tea.
You: That’s bad. Yes! But can we talk about how eating too many apples is also bad for you? Because of the sugar?
It’s just not the same conversation. Even though you definitely shouldn’t eat too many apples.
I didn’t make that point, Nicole Wallace did. And @Robot_Arm did a good job of explaining what the role of the press should be.
Your assertion that sources are biased because of their funding is still just an assertion.
One of Trump’s classic tools. Whataboutism.
Whataboutism , also known as whataboutery , is a variant of the [tu quoque] [logical fallacy] that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with [hypocrisy]without directly refuting or disproving their argument
Maybe someone should start a “This Just In…MSNBC channel is a bunch of lying fucks” pit thread so everyone can chip in with all their evidence. It should be a hot thread!
Did I say anything remotely like that?
I’m trying to be nice and listen to what everyone has to say.
The mainstream media’s seeming embrace of forever war and its cozying to people with a vested interest in it has been very disappointing. It could be that the instincts of the citizenry are correct in this rare instance and trust in the media will continue to decline.
Right vs wrong doesn’t usually line up in this manner but the media has done a poor job here providing context to make its case for criticizing the withdrawal.
Such as who? Criticizing the nature of the withdrawal, blunders in how we’ve tried to build an Afghan army* and policies such as the “Go-FY” translator immigration policy, does not remotely entail “forever war”.
* And of course a big share of the blame for this factor, maybe most of it, should go to systemic corruption in Afghanistan’s government. But the news is naturally going to focus more on the US role.
The media is cowed now into thinking that being hard on Democrats is safe and makes them look like real journos.
Nicole Wallace is a Bush-era Republican, she was communication director of the GWB White House and worked on both the GWB 2004 and McCain 2008 campaigns.
Daytime MSNBC isn’t particularly liberal - Joe Scarborough is a former Republican congressman and he’s is still pretty conservative even though he broke with the Republican Party - they are just anti-Trump af. With good reason, Trump ran an extortion campaign on Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (another MSNBC host with conservative creds) because he didn’t like they way he was being covered -tweeting potential embarrassing personal information about his former friend using the National Enquirer to harass their families. Orange man bad, I guess.
The media are not in bed with the MIC, per se, it is just that they are, as businesses, in bed with the economy, and the economy has become heavily dependent on the MIC. Whole cities would collapse into post-apoc hellscapes if DoD budget cuts severely impacted the local bases and/or pentagon-teat-sucklers. In that respect, in order to have a vibrant consumeristical economy that provides lots of room for product movement that demands revenue-generating ads, the media is naturally going to be somewhat hawkish. If there were some other major primary leg for the economic stool, the media would be all up around supporting that.
I think this is correct; for a lot of the individuals making up the non-Fox news business, feeling ‘independent’ is worth so much that they won’t ask themselves if their coverage is fair or if it includes reasonable context.
In addition, these people remember how the high ratings of the Trump era affected them, personally. Business was booming; promotions and raises were happening, as Americans couldn’t get enough of the news.
So some of the Biden-bashing of the past couple of weeks may well be an unarticulated cry from the heart: