If you do not consider those news outlets adequately centerist, that may be an indication that your personal Overton window is somewhat skewed.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/associated-press-media-...
They just rate it center. There is no single media source that will never have any bias at all. So that would mean there would never be an center.
>AP is a source that AllSides has struggled to rate, due to its content seeming to toe the line between Center and Lean Left. People on the right may be more likely to see AP’s content as clearly Lean Left. While AP's news and world reporting is largely Center, AllSides has found AP often includes subjective, leftward analysis in hard news reports and omits sources in its political writing; in addition, its fact checks are biased to the left
Reuters and AP are rated similarly there.
Granted that you need to read the websites methodology to determine whether you think those ratings are credible.
The Associated Press in 2015: "BREAKING: Obama sends $4 trillion spending plan to Congress, pledging help for middle class."[1]
The Associated Press in 2018: "BREAKING: President Trump sends Congress $4.4 trillion spending plan that features soaring deficits."[2]
If a news organization put "soaring deficits" in the Obama headline and "helping the middle class" in the Trump headline, I'd definitely call that right-wing bias.
https://apnews.com/article/97f7a140f39a43d0995587be61ed388f
Trump proposing tax cuts and ~$1 trillion in annual deficits going forward:
https://apnews.com/article/e50aec4820da4e30aed4bea9ff440e86
The plans differ considerably in substance, your comparison speciously treats them as similar or the same.
And even more, Obama sent a wishlist to a hostile Congress. Trump got more of what he wanted.
Factually speaking, Trump did blow up the deficit, and failing to report that, instead of reporting it, would be indicative of bias.
Budgets requested by Republican vs Democratic administrations are different as the parties have different spending and taxation priorities. Reporting budgets without acknowledging that the parties are spending/borrowing/taxing in different areas would be a lie.
Printing news stories that make Republicans look bad is not indicative of bias if those stories are, as is usually the case, factually true. The solution to this problem is not to complain about media bias but rather for the Republican party to do fewer things that look bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...
I would agree with you, except the AP didn't criticize Obama's deficit increases compared to Bush. Pick a non-recession year in the Bush administration (like 2007[1]) and you'll see deficit spending half that of Obama's. That's despite wasting tons of money (and lives) warring in the middle east.
I don't want to go all "both sides" here. One side is certainly more worthy of criticism than the other. But considering the fraction of journalists who are on the left, it's not surprising that an ostensibly unbiased organization can still have some leanings.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_federal_bud...
Could you draw a diagram of this?
Generally speaking in America it has moved leftward continually since the American Revolution, which was a left-wing act of protest against a monarchical government (which, on a flatness <--> hierarchy view of the left/right axis, is among the furthest right political systems possible). Each successive major shift in American politics has been a shift towards the left in some way (more egalitarian/equalizing policies, more erosion of authoritative positions on social policies, etc).
Conquest's Second Law is in effect!
At any one time, the "center" is just the point of acceptable shared discourse between the organizations that control the 'poles' at the left and right extents of common discussion; anything past those poles is considered "extreme".
For example, during our lifetimes, discussion of a topic like Gay Marriage has gone from being an extreme leftist social policy you couldn't discuss with people in polite company, to being a hot topic of common debate that even Obama said he would not legalize, to becoming official policy, and then even being accepted by the Republican Party as simply the law of the land and not a subject for discussion any more, pushing the topic as far to the right now as it was to the left 30 years ago. (I hold no judgement on the topic here, merely using it as an example for how the window of what is socially acceptable can shift, and the "center" shifts with it.)
This is the GOP party platform for 2016 & 2020:
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states.
https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/#Item2
> Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
Surely you understand the difference between things written in a policy platform and things actually done in practice. There is no GOP rep who is out there stirring anything up on reversing this and despite the words "urging its reversal" there is not and will likely not ever be any action in this direction.
I can't really imagine someone following American politics for more than a year and not realizing this. Almost none of the policy white papers these parties and candidates write will ever be implemented, at all.
The GOP almost never does anything its base actually wants, in the socially-conservative sense. They just pretend they will, to get votes; the same way the Democrats pretend they're going to do any number of things for their base that never happen. It's just kayfabe, it's just an act to get you to vote and legitimize their power so that they can continue to do whatever is easiest and most expedient for each individual politician and player at any given moment.
Anyway, I hear what you're saying a lot, and yet:
- The GOP enables Texas social workers to refuse LGBTQ clients[1]
- The Trump administration allows doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ people[2]
- The Trump administration allows taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to turn away LGBTQ parents[3][4]
- The Trump administration targets homeless trans people[5]
But most importantly, and directly to your point:
- In October of this year, conservative Supreme Court justices chose to speak out against Obergefell[6] at length, for four whole pages, while deciding not to hear another case[7]
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/14/texas-social-workers...
[2] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/24/21234532/trump-admi...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-admin-s-adopti...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avgFhrHqBWM
[5] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/7/2/21311179/trump-hud-r...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/us/politics/thomas-alito-...
[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-c...
I'm confused about what you're saying about ".. don't think you'll find anyone that is satisfied ...". If no one is happy about these things, why do they continue to do them?
In this case it's possible the Overton Window may finally be shifting back leftward on race and history regarding the Civil War.
> it's possible the Overton Window may finally be shifting back leftward on race and history regarding the Civil War.
I think that the 1965 Hart Cellar Immigration Act began a leftward push on that front that has not really experienced meaningful pushback at all beyond a few small groups publicly acknowledging the quietly-held discomfort of a very large segment of the population.
Confederate statues and the defense thereof are just one of many small ways in which White Americans have tried to retain some sense of identity as their culture is perhaps irrevocably changed beneath them. Some try to make it all about slavery, but if you actually read what the more erudite examples of these folks think it's much more nuanced than that.
Yes! It's amazing. I don't think there will ever be some magical set of axes that allows a really clear quantification of where the US is at. The problem, of course, is that because of the false dichotomy of choices (R vs D) you can't actually vote for foreign policy decisions at all. It's not even a topic of debate, really!
Essentially, the USA continues to have a relatively hawkish position, continues to fund under-reported foreign wars (e.g. in Yemen presently), continues to be a destabilizing entity in many ways, often to the benefit of countries more closely allied to the USA (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc) at the expense of smaller and less powerful nations. It's very confusing, full of misdirections, and impossible for any normal person to follow.
Most Americans want fewer foreign wars, I think. Most Americans (surprisingly including a large and growing swathe of the working class right-wing, believe it or not) are open to the idea of social healthcare in one form or another.
Large moneyed interests make these efforts impossible to take on politically, though, and whenever public opinion could be useful to influence actions on the issue, you'll see more false dichotomies form, meta-layers of fractally nested infighting designed to make it so people get hung up on stupid things and debate that instead of the real issue (huge lobby groups intent on acting as middlemen in every transaction to wring every last dollar out of people for no benefit to them whatsoever).