The goal in for-profit communication is always going to be the same: getting return visits. The best way to do that is to tell people what they want to hear. This is why Rush and Fox and MSNBC and Breitbart have the content they have.

This is also what Facebook is doing. However, since they have the advantage of being able to complete personalize your feed to give you what you want, they can provide 100% coverage across all demographics.

>The best way to do that is to tell people what they want to hear.

It's about providing validation and reassurance.

Which doesn't always require telling people what they want to hear, but it certainly helps.

Rush and Fox and Breitbart exist because there is a need -- millions of people who are seeking emotional validation that their worldviews are correct.

It's the same reason left-leaning publications exist. Emotional validation disguised as news.

> "places where there’s no social push to behave in a certain way."

This social push is a function of a community. If you happen to not feel any pressure to behave a certain way, you're very likely already behaving in line with the norms of the community you're in.

Oh big media have Trump a big push as well

When they bought every bait and switch from him

When they blew several of his tweets out of proportion

When they demonized some of his opinions or sided with the more extreme ""leftist"" opinions

>I tracked the original studies and discovered that literally every statistics said by feminists, namely Hillary Clinton and Obama, is false.

Nope.

Whenever someone tries to imply that the "enemy" is perfectly evil or malicious, as you are attempting to do here, you can be certain that someone is trying to propagandize you. I'm going to be charitable per HN guidelines and assume you're not commenting in bad faith, but just in case you are, my advice would be to dial back the hyperbole just a wee bit if you want to accomplish anything more than incel virtue-singaling.

I don't know about "every", but I know Obama(and probably Clinton) pushed the 77% wage gap statistic. Just googling "campus rape clinton" brings me to Clinton's website which proudly displays the "one in five is sexually assaulted" story. You can tell how illusory that statistic is because the site gets the narrative wrong - it says 1/5 report sexual assault, but you can count those reports and disprove it. The narrative that goes along with that "statistic" is that 1/5 get sexually assaulted and 90%+ don't report it.

(I don't think these "lies" really make Obama or Clinton stand out from the rest of the political flock, for what it's worth, I'm a fan of Obama).

Not to mention that someone who has studied this alleged phenomenon as much as the commenter claims would be less reluctant to post evidence in support of the allegation.

I never understand why people put Fox News and MSNBC on the same pedestal.

Fox News is an an outreach of Trump's political apparatchik. MSNBC was never particularly close to Obama.

I wouldn't put them on a pedestal. And to think that MSNBC airs any kind of content that is non-partisan is a joke.

There are Republicans with shows on MSBBC. Nicolle Wallace has an hour each afternoon – she was Bush's comms director & and worked for McCain's presidential campaign. Joe Scarborough was a Republican member of congress, and he gets 3 hours of MSNBC air per day.

I never said MSNBC wasn't partisan.

But Fox News literally coordinates with the Trump team and he lavishes them personally with praise via Twitter almost every week. It's far more akin to campaign outreach rather than independent news. This never happened with Obama or the DNC.

MSNBC also does have independent journalists e.g. Chuck Todd and right-wing commentators e.g. Hugh Hewitt, Joe Scarborough etc. So it's not entirely liberal.

> This never happened when Obama or the DNC

Except of course when CNN gave the debate questions to Hillary in advance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...

Why are people downvoting this? What is incorrect here?

Fox News is following its viewers’ sentiment; it originally favored anti-Trump stories prior to his nomination by the Republican Party.

Now it pushes the Trump line, but this is due to the fact that Fox News rightly recognizes that its viewers want their biases confirmed.

As does CNBC and CNN, admittedly to a far lesser degree, except theirs is the "correct" bias.

CNN has bias that fluctuates wildly toward the perceived flavor of the week; it operates for maximum sensationalism. It basically invented the 24-hour news cycle and hasn’t altered its formula for decades.

CNBC is business news; did you mean MSNBC?

MSNBC has the least viewership of the three and I would not consider it particularly influential. It is biased towards a minority ultra-Democrat position, hence its relatively lower viewership due to its fringe editorial content.

CNN's bias is firmly anti-Trump and it doesn't fluctuates in any way, shape or form. You can go to their home page and at any point, there will be some anti-Trump headlines.

You don’t think it’s coincidental that most Americans will click on a negative Trump article? CNN is a trend follower, not a leader in this regard.

To be fair to Fox News I don't recall anyone in the RNC resigning because they gave candidates debate questions they were privy to as corespondents. (Donna Brazile)

Misconduct occurs in all organizations; while pointing fingers I could make the claim that the Fox News organization is pro-sexual harassment because of two high officials’ actions (Ailes and O’Rielly). Yet this would be unfair and false.

Lest ye be Roy Moore’d (or Anthony Weinered), it is a mistake to take a bad actor and extrapolate isolated statements or conduct to the greater organization without evidence of a trend.

However, CNN is the topic. Don’t think for a minute if Trump or another Republican achieves greater than 50% popularity, CNN won’t swing that way. Negative coverage of Trump was en vogue before CNN started doing it, not the other way around.

I think people have trouble distinguishing the personalities from the editorial direction.

If MSNBC wasn’t close to Obama, it’s certainly in alignment with many progressive thought leader types. Fox and MSNBC are similar animals, it’s just that the Republican platform is simpler and smaller than the “big tent” Democratic platform.