The Fairness Doctrine was partially removed in 1987 and completely removed in 2011. There's no legal requirement that a news organization be impartial any more. If you want balanced news you need to watch multiple sources and decide what really happened yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

> Hardly impartial or rational. I mean where are the people cheering for Trump and their view points?

In other highly impartial and irrational places, like breitbart, the_donald and other conservative media sources.

Human beings as a species are highly partial (was the word you were looking for) and irrational. Aside from the internet, the low population density, rural areas of the US are heavily pro-Trump.

Fair enough :) I meant on television. I guess Fox News. And maybe I'm in the online echo chamber. It's really hard to tell.

Trumps facebook groups, twitter feeds, and the aforementioned subreddits around his campaign are non-stop pumping out Trump love.

The Internet is only as much of an echo chamber as you let it be. You can always go look in those alternative forums.

But most of those places are exactly the same kind of echo chambers...just for a different side

Spot on. We need new media with more diverse viewpoints and more viewers for this new content. Why does every airport always have CNN on by default?

I've long suspected CNN pays airports for this.

Those Trump supporters exist, I'm sure. I've never met any of them in California, though. I assume the media has the same problem.

Many Trump supporters in California are afraid to declare their support openly.

And not without reason; Trump supporters have been assaulted.

I don't know. I'm the only American-born scientist in my research lab (though not only US citizen), but is that really uncommon in tech? So maybe my situation is different? Living next to UCLA probably doesn't make it easier to mix with Trump supporters. When I was in China a few months before...well, expats aren't exactly known for being xenophobic white people.

Characterizing Trump supporters as "xenophobic white people" probably doesn't make it easier to mix with them either.

You may know Trump supporters who just don't want to fight about it.

In LA county, Clinton got 60+% of the vote, I don't know many here (just moved from Beijing to LA in August), but they were all more apprehensive than me about the election results. I honestly think I've never met a trump supporter in real life, how many immigrants (many of the people I know) were enthusiastic about Trump anyways?

Abroad is the last place to meet a republican (at least outside of the high earning senior manager demographic), let alone a trump supporter. Ya, they just might not be talking about it, but it is a very self selective bunch of people that are going to be basically migrant workers in another country, they won't be anti immigrant since that would be too hypocrititical.

You, a single person, not meeting a single Trump supporter may not be surprising. You may tend to meet only like-minded people. But the media is/must be a different animal: they should spend time trying to gauze the social moods from different strata of the society. But in USA, it seems most of the mainstream media is serving to Saudi funded Democrats [1]. So there is no news critical of Clinton, nor Islamic ideology. That's one of the important points what triggered people's support for Trump.

edit: added link

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex9ldUHSgjs

The fact that the clinton foundation took Saudi money is an issue but hardly germane to any current discussion and link you provided was of extremely low quality and contained disreputable nonsense like the theory that Obama is a cryto muslim.

It would be great if you wouldn't pollute hacker news with this.

If one group promotes eating dirt and tree bark and another proposes we dine on sandwiches you may unsurprisingly find that the media promotes one message more often than the other.