And no, none of them appeal to a general audience. The ads that each network displays will tell you exactly who their specific audience is.

Twitter's audience is narrow: Most of the people I know (across countries, religions, genders, professions) do not have a Twitter account. So, they make decisions that suit their userbase, which is significantly narrower than Facebook's.

Facebook user base is closer to the general public. Unfortunately, their platform also enables an echo chamber. So, they have a tough job to do and in this regard. They have to be careful about whom to censor. Whatever they choose will be closer the law. I think they're trying their best.

most of the people in media are on twitter 247, talking heads take from twitter discourse and export that to other media

Whether this is a good thing for society is a different question.

(I'd argue that it's not and that Twitter should be closed down. But I know that's an unpopular opinion)

It probably can't be closed down in a way that's not even worse than current situation. Even if there's no coercion and management just has the revelation and decides to close shop, some (probably Chinese-owned) clone will probably reach the same position soon, what's the win?

I don't know what the effect would be. I don't think we can roll the clock back to 1995. But equally given the current situation in the USA I don't think the status quo is sustainable.

If you forced me to give an answer, then I think there should be a 1-hour delay on all tweets. It's the immediacy of the thing that gives it the power. If we just slowed it down then I think it would work better, because human nature.

No wonder any public person, any politician, any celebrity may find out that Twitter is a must, if they want to keep and grow their fame / celebrity / notoriety.

Capitalism dictates how our communication and news operates, and this is a side effect of changing circumstances where TV and print media are dying, people aren’t paying for news, and companies are relying on ad revenue for their business models - which means having to attract and hold on to consumers.

I’m not trying to paint capitalism as the devil. Just saying it’s not like this was a total surprise given we could see the road we went down.

It’s pretty fucking unfortunate the most prevalent sources of current events and information equate to the ‘McDonalds of news and Walmarts of TV’.

I know people get spooked about propaganda at the thought of government funded news... though clearly having a bunch of rich assholes ‘run news’ hasn’t been so good either. Idk, I guess this is an eye-opener of the importance of publicly funded places like PBS?

At least that will come to an end.

Insofar as you value investigative journalism or pieces with some depth, you will be disappointed by organizations that host ESPN style shout fests, but they're produced for exactly the same reasons.

It's cheap to make garbage filler content. When you see that all of the channels are deeply flawed, it's because they're incentivized to be flawed in exactly the way that they are.

Curiously, John Oliver (say what you will about his biases) has found a way to fund real investigative journalism. This marks an interesting counterpoint to the 24 hour news room which extends what comedy central (daily show etc) had begun

There are no sources of information that are credible with more than 45-55% of US Gen pop. We really need a source that can at least be relied upon as accurate source by 70-80% to avoid total collapse of democratic order in US.

Advertising pays more with more controversy. Patronage (having a rich person pay the journalists) comes with strings. Consumers appear willing to pay for journalism only when it supports their political beliefs.

The real solution is a healthy ecosystem of independent news.

It's still advertising/freemium, but with some big differences. We syndicate out the internal updates that reporters are already writing within their own newsroom, so while they work on their current formats, we just piggyback off of existing work. Then we revenue share from those ads/subscriptions back to support the reporters and news orgs doing the reporting.

There is money being spent on ads now, its just going to the wrong people. We're trying to fix that -- and align the incentives back so that everyone -- readers, reporters, us -- succeeds when we have good journalism, not clickbait.

The main problem with advertising is it monetises engagement, which means that it massively favours controversial or emotional content. How are you going to avoid this? If you have a good journalist writing great journalism, and a hack writing clickbait, how are you going to avoid the hack getting more ad revenue?

Since we're posting _updates_ rather than full articles, it's more like Twitter. We can display ads in between the updates -- something print newspapers used to (and still) do all the time. Then we just take the revenue share from any specific market, divide it up by the number of updates contributed, and go from there. It's not perfect, and we may still want to tweak, but the hope is that we can then incentivize lots of hard news reporting, and not "5 celebrities without makeup."

Nillium looks really interesting, too. I get the need. Slack is utterly useless for this, yet seems to be the default for some reason.

We're launching in the US initially -- but I get the issue. Still, any newsrooms outside of the US who might be interested should still get in touch. https://www.nillium.com/schedule-demo/

The current news stations are reporting from the same, truthful, reality. It's the spin, slant, and selective omission when they're presented that is different. Having some true source, that dryly presents this reality, will be devoid of these biases, but they'll still picked up and presented in an almost certainly more entertaining, vastly more popular, biased way as they are now.

I think the problem is, and always has been, that people fundamentally prefer similar viewpoint rather than raw presentation of facts. I also assume this is why there are exactly 0, for profit, widely watched, media outlets that present information in this relatively boring way.

I completely agree

I also agree that John Oliver has a liberal bias! What I don't think, however, is that his bias is required by his business model.

(Curiously, as we discuss the daily show hosts, my very conservative parents both really like Trevor Noah. However, I don't think comedy central is to be our information salvation)

John Oliver is a curse upon humanity, he makes this world worse.

Leave it for entertainment and deep documentaries. If we had no more news channels and nightly programs, I think we'd both be happier and better informed.

It's quite possible that there was US protagonism on that process, and it's quite possible that the bill was a relevant factor, but the bill doesn't have an worldwide impact, and the US influence does certainly not come from it.

1 - It looks quite dead by now, nearly everything we call by that name is free of any usable information. Of course there's some activity here or there, but it's dead like a dead forest, something spurs here or there, but nothing is able to grow.

Unfiltered social media is an amplifier for bullshit. Truth, reason, a good analysis - they're all hard. Spewing out nonsensical mythology is easy.

Something needs to change.

What we have today is orders of magnitude better. The main challenge moving forward will be designing information systems so as to promote challenging opinions rather than reinforcing them, which requires these companies to move away from optimizing engagement but something else.

IMO, solving that problem is a step in the correct direction.

Implementing systems that rely on credentialing and moderation are a net regression, even if they (maybe) solve this specific problem. It’s just going back to systems in the past where things appeared great but weren’t actually. Think of all the people who, today, legitimately thrive because we’ve broken down some of the credentialing gatekeepers (Ben Thompson at Stratechery comes to mind).

In the interim i would like to see some level of moderation, maybe citizens or states able to exact some kind of consequences against people who via any sort of media spread information which either they know to be or should know to be false (or alternative facts as some people call them). i.e. some kind of process where i as a person or an independent body have standing to sue breitbart for knowingly/negligently distributing false information.

I know we have to be careful with this but at the moment there is simply no way of holding organisations to account if i am not being directly libeled despite the fact that the misinformation harms me directly.

In practice they always seems to be mixed with partial truths (when you read past the headline)... plus, determining what's "true" is kind of a nonstarter, especially at that scale.

I am also certain you would find things on NYT, WaPo, etc. that is not 100% truthful, even if the consequences are not as egregious. It's not just Breitbart. I say this because people on the other side of the aisle will take whatever you design and throw it back at you.

Identifying critical thinking as the problem (as you did in your post) is IMO somewhat right but maybe too hard of a problem to solve (as you pointed out).

The way I see it... we're in the middle of a tug-of-war between the old guard that used news & other power structures to broadcast what they wanted, and the new, democratized users who felt they didn't need to trust them while simultaneously being empowered to have their own voice heard.

The former would manipulate our perception of what was going on through news (print / media), while the latter are empowered by companies that control the new media landscape (Twitter / FB / IG).

What's interesting about the latter is that they leverage a system that was designed innocuously ("serve better ads") but can be adapted to control someone's perception of what is happening in the world (targeted content / engagement).

As of late, I've been thinking that the way forward is going to be identifying the forces that drive extreme polarization and re-imagining them to reign them in.

When I look at what happens with the way feeds are designed, there is such a crazy reinforcement of what I already "like" that drives polarization that maybe it really is just as simple as re-designing the feed to promote more diversity of content. It could be enough to temper some of the extreme outliers of craziness we see on either side of the aisle.

I will admit I am arm-chairing a bit here...

It seems to me that this reaction of "we must regulate what is said so that nothing false is ever said (because someone might believe it and even worse might repeat it)" has devolved into "we must regulate what is said because someone might be led to believe something different from what I believe."

"No reasonable viewer would think Tucker Carlson is news." The media barons believe their consumers are idiots, and treat them accordingly.

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/fox-news-lawyer-suggest...

You're going to have a hard time finding an equivalent statement from the progressive media.

This is about clash of fundamentally incompatible moral systems - one in which one group would like to operate entirely above the law on the superficial basis of skin colour and inherited wealth by appealing to lies and fantasy and the basest and most distorted human instincts, and another which wants humans, politics, society, business, science, and art to be better than that.

https://deadline.com/2020/05/rachel-maddow-one-america-news-...

How many people know that Fox News's news division only has 2 hours of programming a day?

"..about clash of fundamentally incompatible moral systems - one in which one group would like to operate entirely above the law on the superficial basis of skin colour and inherited wealth by appealing to lies and fantasy and the basest and most distorted human instincts, and another which wants humans, politics, society, business, science, and art to be better than that."

All? C'mon.

You can make the argument that MSNBC is a mirror of Fox News in terms of coddling its viewers, but if you're calling NPR or the New York Times "fact-free," you're only betraying your own ignorance of journalism standards.

Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem. There are people who go to universities to study how to do this well, then go to work for institutions committed to doing this well. Their words should be treated differently than the words of some idiot with a Twitter account or a personality on an infotainment TV show.

Any news org can only cover so much, there is an (editorial) call on what to cover and what not to cover. And in that (I've seen studies years go, so not handy) there is a detectable bias.

IMO this is fine. I understand that story selection has editorial bias, even in news reporting. I compensate by reading several different sources that have different editorial slants, but still fact based reporting.

Do tell. What is a fact? Is it an assertion that is truthful? If something is not asserted is it still a fact? Is gravity a fact or an assertion without evidence? Was Ptolemy wrong or just complicated?

Who are these people who go to universities and study how to investigate facts and report them clearly? Are they the in journalism or normal schools? Are they philosophers? Are they physics majors?

How much of a fact is bound in the frame of reference or context in which it is asserted? Can two nominally opposed assertions both be true? Does that make them both facts? Can all facts be recorded someplace?

If it's something you're interested in, nothing's stopping you from taking a journalism class or two, and after doing so you'd probably look at certain media outlets differently.

People sometimes say we live in a post-truth society. I would say that we live in a world where the narrative is more important than the truth, and part of the reason for that is that journalist are so well trained in creating narratives out of the crumbs of a few facts. I can even see the journalist students be given a handful of facts and asked to write a long article, each being graded on how well the narrative story end up.

And if they later investigated themselves and found that they published information that was not true, would that cancel the war pushed on us by the military industrial complex across all of our media and bring 500,000 dead Iraqis back to life?

I think that giving more recent examples would strengthen your argument.

There has been no incident as bad as the reporting that lead to the war in Iraq because the US had recognized that entering the war was a huge mistake and became somewhat resistant to the type of propaganda that lead to it.

It does not matter if the nyt is usually factful. If they can be subverted by powerful interests to push an agenda, they are not trustworthy.

OP also contains: "Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem."

NYT remains one of the more reliably correct news sources in the US but they all make mistakes - sometimes accidentally sometimes maliciously. Since there are humans involved you need to understand the biases the news sources have and compensate for that yourself.

But shouldn't we not continue to consume sources that have made malicious mistakes? Even if the maliciousness was a bad outside actor feeding incorrect information to ethical reporters, isn't it likely that such a source will make a malicious mistake again? When the consequences are on the scale of directing the country into a fraudulent war, how can we ever trust their reporting on anything of consequence again?

I can't really answer what the best tactic for weighing news sources is since I think that the true measure would need to involve observing the reporters and editors behind each specific article which isn't really feasible. I don't think it's wrong for you to be hesitant about trusting NYT, and feel free to never trust an article written by Miller - I personally think she's shown a lack of care for discovering the truth - but... Eh, balance in all things.

I think a browser extension that alerted you when an article you read was corrected would be interesting.

This is just one example.

And a lot of these people have lost their minds. I’m trying to explain to my college educated friends right now why using “whiteness” as a pejorative is a bad thing. As an engineer I’ve always been skeptical of liberal arts education. But I didn’t think it would destroy America.

Maybe it's OK if that term gradually goes away?

There's a difference between acknowledging that the term "white" is bad, and suggesting that Poles need to apologize and live lives of penance for what English slaveholders did in the 1800s.

Imagine we’re not talking about America. Imagine we’re talking about Hindu treatment of Muslims in India. And India is on track to become majority Muslim. But people decide to remediate past imbalances by attaching negative characteristics to “Hinduness.” A small minority of Hindus, who control the media and universities, pipe this message to to Hindu households. “The challenges we face dealing with our Muslim immigrants are due to our Hinduness.” What happens? Like millions of people die in a civil war. Obviously. Americans can’t see how obviously wrong this approach is because they’re the fish inside the fishbowl.

The use of “whiteness” as a pejorative is rooted in an odd psychological phenomenon of liberal whites: https://us-central1-spirit-fish-function.cloudfunctions.net/.... They are the only demographic group to express an out-group ethnic bias. Black, Hispanic, and Asian people, along with non-liberal whites all display a moderate (and about equal) in-group preference for people of the same ethnicity. So attaching negative connotations to “whiteness” doesn’t bother them. They view white people as the out-group. They understand that you can be white but not “white” and have a range of other identities: liberal, Democrat, New Yorker, etc. But for non-liberal whites, the same rhetoric serves to reinforce the moderate in-group bias.

Put differently: if you draw a circle on the floor and call it “whiteness” and say it’s bad, liberal whites will happily step out of the circle. But for non-liberal whites (the majority) they will feel attacked on the basis of their skin color, exactly the same as if you did the same thing with “Blackness” or “Asianness.”

To get people to disassociate from something bad, you need to attach it to an identity they can reject, while embracing some other, shared identity. When you say “this is not how we do things in America” people can all come together around that shared identity and reject the bad thing. If you attach it to some characteristic they think they can’t change, you force them to double down on it.

A great example of this is George W. Bush versus versus Macron. When Muslim terrorists hit the twin towers, Bush gave a speech where he said brought Muslims into the fold: https://qz.com/1074258/911-video-and-text-of-george-w-bushs-.... He said we all watched the planes crash into the towers and we Muslims condemned it all around the world. (Which of course wasn’t strictly true.) It worked. If you were a Muslim and you heard that speech, you had no reason to feel attacked. You were being invited into a group where you could condemn this bad thing while doubling down on your identity. As someone with a Muslim last name during that time, I’m eternally grateful for that. I wasn’t thankful then, because at the time, I just assumed this was how America did things. I didn’t realize appeal to universal values would one day be on the chopping block.

Contrast what’s happening in France with Charlie Hebdo and subsequent events. Macron responded by making Islam the issue. He’s giving speeches about radicalization of Islam, etc. He’s not strictly wrong. Almost 1 in 5 French Muslims polled said the didn’t condemn the killings. But the other 80% now feel attacked and forced to maintain group solidarity.

This is happening right now in America and it’s bad. When my aunt in law (who is a sweet woman but a Trump supporter) reads on Breitbart the New York Times tweets blaming the Capitol insurrection on “whiteness” how does she react? “Yes, I condemn the lawlessness and I will strive to be less white!” She doesn’t even think of herself as “white” but she knows she is white as a factual matter, and she doesn’t have a college degree and doesn’t understand how we can “get rid of whiteness” without getting rid of white people. She would absolutely condemn what happened. She votes Republican because she doesn’t believe in abortion. But now she feels attacked based on her skin color. And what other identity would she latch onto anyway? She’s not a New York lawyer who has a plethora of other identity groups to fall back on, and the media shits on those too. She lives in rural Oregon, she’s white and so is almost everyone around her (except her grandkids and us, which include a range of brown and Black), and she works a service job.

White people who aren’t privileged don’t feel privileged. Liberals do not understand this and it’s a dangerous misconception about our reality. Normal white people don’t believe in this “punch up versus punch down stuff.” Those are ideas that exist in books, not in peoples’ heads. All you’re doing when you use “whiteness” is attacking people for something they can’t control and creating a white identity that didn’t exist before. And that’s a recipe for disaster.

What's going to destroy the country is respectable news outlets running headlines like "The Unbearable Whiteness of Storming the Capitol." It's language that's designed to make college-educated elite feel like they're in the in-group, while enraging normal people who don't see the term any differently than if you had inserted any other race in there.

I have tried to explain these academic terms to my dad. He eventually got it, but says "well if it stays in academia it's fine." My mom doesn't get it at all. She's got a graduate degree, but has a language gap. My in laws in exurban and rural America mostly think it's a racial attack on them. If they're somewhat right-leaning to begin with, to them it's as if respectable media has normalized overt racism against white people.

Normalizing this will provoke something very ugly for no reason. There are shared premises that exist when you use terminology like that among educated people. In particular, most people have internalized the idea that "you can't be racist against white people" and things like that (or at least won't complain about it too loudly). Those shared assumptions do not exist when you're talking to the public at large, in a context that's already adversarial and charged.

The problem I keep having with these arguments is that it's easy for me to accept that Kendi and DiAngelo are grifters, but the people pointing that out also want me to swallow a bunch of other less tenable stuff.

This happened with the vaccine prioritization at the CDC. I understand the arguments for it. Most Americans do not believe that life saving vaccines should be allocated based on peoples’ skin color. They would call that unambiguously racist. Thankfully for the CDC, the media barely covered it. Imagine what would have happened if the CDC had prioritized vaccines to white people? All of these people are operating with assumptions that are not universally shared by the public.

Ditto the riots this summer. Most people in the media have internalized this notion that whether violent rioting is okay depends on context. Most Americans do not see it that way. That distorted their coverage of what happened this summer, and burned credibility when it came time to cover the Capitol Hill riot.

I think Biden handled it okay, though I don’t think this was the time to inject the issue. But what if we’d had a President Elizabeth Warren? I shudder to think. Folks like her have really internalized this “they need to hear it for their own good” approach and are apt to use language that ordinary people aren’t familiar with. My in laws in Oregon don’t understand what any of this stuff means, and scolding them won’t help. They don’t feel “privileged” and you’ll only make them feel attacked. Which is fine if your intent is to bring about some sort of reckoning where the bad people are vanquished and the good prevail, but I don’t think that’s a great way to run a country.

The stuff she complained about really highlighted for me how the media isn't speaking language she understands anymore. For example:

> Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

These complaints all rest on completely conventional beliefs and assumptions. Increasingly, folks in news media and liberal policy circles not only don't hold any of these beliefs, but can't even talk to someone who does. For them, these things are axiomatic, and they can't explain their beliefs by reference to universal principles my wife's grandma shares. And when she reads a steady stream of their tweets, its alarming for her. When people don't share a basic framework of how to see the world, they can't trust each other or have meaningful policy discussions.

I'm also not sure what several of them have to do with anti-whiteness.

> > Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

There is a pretty fundamental divergence between most people and the left about how to define "discrimination" (a critical thing in a multi-ethnic society). To most people, the absence of "discrimination" means race-neutrality. Most people on the left have embraced the idea that discrimination between groups can be justified to achieve more equal outcomes.

> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

This is how my wife's grandmother perceives a lot of the discussion of "white privilege" and "whiteness."

> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

I think there is an increasing number of people on the left don't care about defending the border. They may not be fully "open borders" but within their intellectual framework, they really can't articulate what the legitimate purpose of controlling the border would be and thus aren't willing to spend money on it.

> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

There is a major push to offer tuition-discounted or tuition-free community college to undocumented immigrants, including in Oregon. A number of states that offer tuition-free community college are extending those programs to undocumented immigrants.

Traditionally, the view was that welfare benefits should be for those here legally. There is a great discomfort about the idea of extending those benefits to people here illegally. On the left, and in much of the liberal media circle, the prevailing view is opposed to distinguishing between Americans and non-Americans in provision of welfare benefits.

> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

There is again been a real shift in how abortion is conceptualized. Roe was justified on universal principles of bodily autonomy. Today, the right to an abortion is treated as axiomatic. And increasingly, there is a push to conceptualize it as "healthcare."

My point is that we're seeing quite a major divergence in basic assumptions about society, which has become particularly acute because most in the media have embraced these new axioms while most of the rest of the country have not. Whatever logical framework causes some people to view the term "unbearable whiteness" as not a racist term is just one example of that divergence.

Moreover, because, for the left these things are increasingly axiomatic, there is no way for them to talk to my wife's grandma about these issues. If you view abortion as a balance between bodily autonomy and the developmental advancement of a fetus, you can have a discussion between someone who supports abortion and someone who doesn't. If you view abortion as "healthcare" you can't have that conversation.

Or, if you have a diluted concept of "citizenship," you can't formulate a response to why anyone would oppose free college tuition for undocumented immigrants other than "bigotry."

Last thing first: Abortions are at their lowest rates since Roe. Abortions are health care. Frankly, the idea that people should be alarmed by a supposed reframing of abortions as health care is incoherent. People who oppose abortion should be happy that's how it's seen. I come from a very large, very Catholic family, I went to 12 years of Catholic school, my godmother aunt who has made multiple pilgrimages to Međugorje and pickets hospitals still gives me presents every year, and I will relate to you the previous conception pro-life culture had of abortion: a cosmetic convenience.

If our outlook on abortion has changed, it has empirically gotten more conservative. I agree that conservative white people are alarmed by change no matter what form it takes. But we can't reasonably discuss that here while suggesting that destabilizing conservative shifts are somehow attributable to elite left discourse.

(Also, next time you think about how people casually look at abortion as "health care", I'd ask you also to consider that Catholic organizations control huge chunks of the health care infrastructure in this country, and they deny routine medically necessary procedures and medications to women because the church has deemed them abortifacient. I'm a parent and a Catholic and I've seen this firsthand; it's a real problem in Chicago. There is more going on with the "reproductive health care" thing than you're acknowledging here.)

Moving along:

The tuition programs you're talking about build on the DACA framework. They don't reward adults who cross the border with free tuition. Instead, they seek to acknowledge that people brought here as children, a huge portion of whom have known no other life but that of an American, are for all intents and purposes American. This notion is wildly popular in the US; it gets something like 3/4 in favor in surveys. (Would it be more popular if it hadn't been set in motion by executive order? Sure. But that supports my point, which is that the concern you have about destabilization has more to do with partisan politics than it does with ideas).

One of the problems with our discourse on immigration --- surprised if you disagree --- is that we used to be proud of our inclusiveness. People don't pay enough attention to how strict European countries are about immigration. We have birthright citizenship! The left spends too much time rhetorically tearing down American institutions, and the right spends too much time tacitly conceding and expanding on the left's criticisms. That's a shift rightward.

I just don't see what health care costs have to do with border security costs. The problem with $5B for border security is that it's a joke; you can't physically secure the border with that much money. It's a grift, a jobs program for cronies and a monument for Trump. If immigration hawks were serious, their next move would have been nationwide mandatory E-Verify. But more to the point: I have trouble believing that your grandmother-in-law is really tallying up the Trump Wall against health care in the first place.

Nobody is being held responsible for things that happened before they were born. When your grandmother-in-law says that, do you ask her what, specifically, she means?

It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they insist there is no such thing. They’re all in on Critical Race Theory fairy tales, and it’s career suicide at these companies to even question this.

I’m extremely liberal about social justice, I am. But this critical theory stuff is a powder keg. Building a multi-racial democracy that hasn’t descended into civil war is hard. Look at what’s happening in France right now. Trying to make these untested academic theory into what governs relationships between races in this country is a recipe for disaster.

And at the end of the day, most non-white people don’t want it. The majority of every minority racial demographic doesn’t even want to use race as a factor, even a small one, in college admissions. The recent California affirmative action ban failed miserably. It’s a boutique ideology.

But it’s a boutique ideology with a massive platform. Tomorrow a bunch of people will wake up and see the New York Times and CNN talking about how you can blame the Capitol breach on “whiteness.” And most will brush it off because Americans are good people. But for some it will make them feel attacked based on skin color harden their hearts against condemning something we should be able to condemn universally.

"Whiteness" is a term I don't use and don't really like, but it just plain was white Republican activists[1] who were rioting to stop the election and intimidate representatives two days ago. The Confederate symbols, presence of neo-Nazis, and the bizarre American Viking guy gave it away.

I live in southern Oregon and was born in Missouri, and I don't really understand what you're point is, below, about these areas culturally. The best parts of the culture in Missouri were sports, music, literature, food, river life, and fireworks. The worse parts included the notorious white racism. The "whiteness" discourse in Missouri was already asinine well before the NYT lost its mind. My grandparents had to elope out of state because their marriage was illegal, and when they came back the scandal of what they had done was featured in about a dozen papers.

And Oregon is an entirely different story. For someone who lived in St. Louis and then the Bay Area most of my life, the uniformity here is astonishing. It was officially a no-blacks state by constitutional amendment. My county today is < 1% black, and just got around to renaming "Negro Ben Mountain" in November.[2] Not having to think of yourself as white here is helped along a lot by the demographic homogeneity.

I think that the blame for your aunt feeling attacked for being white lies more truly on Breitbart. If you show non-liberal whites the NYT tweet/article, and also the Breitbart piece quoting the same NYT language, my bet is that "I feel attacked by the media for being white" is a more common and more intense response among those who read only the latter.

My parents were Democrats, and I am a Democrat, but one of my brothers is a Republican. We're both from the same place, the same upbringing, and are the same race (whatever it is). He watches Fox News personalities religiously, and categorically refuses to click on a link to the NYT. I read a local paper, the NYT, and wherever else the news comes from. I'm annoyed every day at the presentation of facts and looses writing standards, but I make my way through it. But this idea that the whites are under attack really connects with my brother in a way that it doesn't for me -- even though I'm the one supposedly encountering the brunt of the media's attack on white people, since I read main stream news and opinions and he doesn't.

Could he simply identify as more white than I do, and so feel more attacked? It's possible but I doubt it. I think it has more to do with this feeling of insecurity being one that the right wing media is nurturing for him.

[1] I mean "white activists" here not just in the sense that they were white people. [2] Renaming it for the second time. :(

I didn't claim NYT writers are unbiased, I said their reporting isn't "fact-free".

The burden of evidence no longer applies neither with NYT not any other heavily biased liberal outlets like WaPo or CNN.

Some sort of myth seems to have been created that news reporting can't use anonymous sources. It's not only wrong, but not disclosing sources is an absolutely foundational accepted element of journalism.

But if you're skeptical about whether they completely made it up, published a rumour without any confirmation or are deliberately substantially altering it in how they portray it - that's an extremely serious allegation for a reputable news organisation. For example, I think that would stretch beyond "reasonable" in most cases for NYT based on my observation of their practices over time.

There is no way to tell if a lie originated with two anonymous sources or with a reporter with an agenda. The "trust but verify" approach only works if something can be verified. IMO the nyt damages its reputation when it posts rumors which cannot be verified.

This is just a more general case of having a trusted broker. How do you trust your bank? How do you trust airlines to be safe? How do you know your doctor is competent? You don't demand first hand evidence for all of these. You trust a regulator to oversee them and the regulator may absolutely rely on evidence that is not made publicly available. A lot of society ceases to operate if you throw out reputational trust.

Airline crashes are regularly in the news when they occur and are easily verifiable.

My doctor has a licensing board and such to report to.

What recourse do I have if the new york times posts something not truthful that can't be verified? How would I even know? I am not the only person to not trust the new york times, they do not have near the level of public support as the Medical/Airline industries. Given the fundamental lack of accountability inherent to anonymously sourced articles, why wouldn't they be abused?

This was a rumor started by The Atlantic article citing 'anonymous sources' which spread and re-broadcasted by all news networks and NYT, some of these third-hand versions of the rumor claimed additional verification by, guess what, another group of 'high-ranked anonymous sources', completely ignoring rejection of these allegations by everyone who actually attended that particular event with the President.

This is the definition of slander which is somehow acceptable if you (and your reader base) hate a particular person or ideology.

Over in the editorial section there were people trying to stitch that all into a vast conspiracy that was in the end not proven out. But that's what editorial is about.

Who am I kidding, we all know the answer is that you think by ignoring the facts insulates you from realizing the republican party and their leader colluded with a foreign adversary to influence the election

Trump's son, son in law, and campaign manager met with a convicted Russian spy at Trump's house to discuss a trade of damaging information on Hillary Clinton in return to relaxed relations between the two nations in the form of repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Trump lied that this ever happened and tried to create a cover story which was blown apart. Source: Volume 1 of the Mueller Report

Trump's campaign manager met with a Russian intelligence officer and exchanged internal Trump campaign data which is presumed to have been transferred to the FSB. Source: Senate Committee on Intelligence of Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference

Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.” Major attack avenues included a social media “information warfare” campaign that “favored” candidate Trump and the hacking of Clinton campaign-related databases and release of stolen materials through Russian-created entities and Wikileaks. Russia also targeted databases in many states related to administering elections gaining access to information for millions of registered voters Source: Volume 1 of the Mueller Report

The Mueller team was unable to establish a before-the-fact criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Mueller report includes a whole second chapter dealing with obstruction from the President and his allies, which included lying (by the President himself), witness tampering, interfering with principle investigators, and destroying evidence.

And what did Democrats do with all of this? Did they storm the capital? Did they even impeach the President for any of this? There was literally no response what. so. ever.

Oh, and during all of this the President promised pardons for those who would obstruct the investigation, such as Paul Manafort, who was literally meeting with a Russian Intel Officer and handing him Trump campaign data. If that is not collusion, what is? And then Trump pardoned him. So more obstruction on top of it all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/us/politics/trump-impeach...

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764071379/read-house-intel-re...

But democratic controlled media and companies “fact checked it” so it was censored everywhere until election was over.

You mean the thing that several people were tried and found guilty of?

All of those things were proven in court. Not one of Trump’s barrage of election lawsuits has gained any traction at all. They are very much not the same.

FD just required a media outlet to make sure the media basically gave another candidate the opportunity to access, it didn't actually require equal time, not unless that candidate wanted to, or in the case of advertisements was willing to buy them.

Certainly parkland should be equally available to members of different political parties, but it's not like you have to use the same standard either: the nature of a "public good" would determine the nature of what fair equal access meant. For airwaves it's one thing. For a limited physical resource it's another.

Wires are not limited supply in any meaningful sense (just install more), and in many parts of the world, not even public property.

It's so hard to take that seriously (e.g., exactly how many sets of cables per home is reasonable? and how often can people be expected to change them?), but even if I somehow do:

How is that different from, say, electric power, as far as constitutionality goes? We have the Federal (Water) Powers Act, FERC, etc. that regulate power distribution (among other things). I would've thought these are all easy to constitutionally justify the regulation of based on other clauses (like the Commerce Clause).

But anyway, you really seem to be missing the fundamental point here: there is no limited "spectrum" for wiring in the sense of multiple possible parties who want to use "parts of it" for various purposes. If you assign the XMHz to YMHz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to some purpose, it's gone, it cannot be used for anything else, by anyone else, across a potentially vast geographic area. There's no equivalent for this in the context of digital (or analog) data moving down wires.

So full blown censorship by controlling who gets access.

This model has been pretty successful financially and the other major media outlets in the US have followed suit (though often leaning left instead). I think MSNBC was one of the first with the obnoxious melodrama of Keith Olbermann.

I might report that "a woman is suing McDonalds for spilling hot coffee on herself". That is an unbiased fact. And it implants a story of runaway litigiousness. If I also report that "McDonalds was warned many times about the temperature of its coffee and even sure once already and the woman sustained 3rd degree burns" the story becomes one of corporate malfeasance.

Compound this further. I now state that the woman won millions of dollars, you may be tilting back toward over litigiousness. But if I report that she only sought damages and the jury awarded her punitive damages of its own accord the we're back to corporate malfeasance.

Even if you want to focus on an ethical argument I'm not sure how to create a standard to compare them. Who is worse, Fox News who wears their bias on their sleeve or the New York Times who constantly hold themselves out as remarkable while piping all kinds of military and intelligence propaganda through to their readers. Who is worse? The organization that just outright supported Bush or the one that claimed to be a check and then held the illegal NSA spying story through an election?

IMO it's best not to choose which is better or worse. It's better to know how to read through both.

Another interesting point you brought up: how long a go should we look? Is today’s NYT still culpable for mistakes made nearly 20 years ago? (Not defending them, as I’m sure there are more recent examples. But when has enough time passed?)

When we have a great number of people who say things like “but that’s from xyz source so it’s bunk”, without examining the underlying facts or lack of facts, I’d have to say the answer to your question is Yes.

PS I’m willing to examine news from any source and employ discernment.

Someone once told me that you need bias in the news to create an adversarial system. Those that are biased towards some other viewpoint will be the only ones that dig deep to expose the problems of that other viewpoint. If everyone was neutral, there would be more motivation to present what happened rather than call foul.

I'm not sure I completely agree with this, but it did nudge my perspective.

the fact people don't even notice, or choose to ignore the bias in mainstream media is beyond me.

That's if you are using the commonly received connotation of conservative, rather than trying to rewrite reality.

My $0.02.

I'm more curious to ask "why" people no longer trust the Government?

The real failure is that we've locked down society, destroyed the economy, and hastily thrown together an election so rife with problems that it's led to an environment where millions of people do not trust the outcome. The same leaders implementing the lockdowns are meanwhile dictating orders from tropical resorts or caught breaking their own rules in blatant shows of hypocrisy.

The States have not done an adequate job quelling election fraud suspicions and as a result the President and his supporters no longer believe the result. Can you blame them? Is blaming them productive? It fails to address the problem and it won't go away. Calling them white supremascists, nationalists, fasicsts, racists, and the other explicatives that have been used for the past four years is only going to further divide this nation and have the opposite intended outcome.

Did the media single out and target the people supporting, promoting, and engaging in the 3+ months of left-wing riots this past summer? Most of the media pundits now calling this latest event an insurrection, were previously condoning and explaining away "mostly peaceful" protests as multiple cities burned, as violent agitators stormed the Federal Courthouse in Portland for over 100 days, threw bombs, lit fires, burned cars, killed people (chop/chaz/portland), and more. And let's not pretend that had Trump won the election, Antifa and other left-wing groups wouldn't be over a month in of the same thing.

The level of hypocrisy and disconnect is so startling it's scary. What I see is a total lack of understanding across the spectrum, a total failure to acknowledge both sides and apply standards consistently and unequivocally, a total failure of communication and decency. I'm not sure how the country moves in a positive direction.

Just saying, there was little surprising yesterday to anyone who has taken time to talk to these conspiracy theorists and seen the level of fear they choose to live in and surround themselves with, though it is deeply sad.

Your "explanation" contains a contradiction, so you're not off to a great start here. If the economy or corporations are directed by government dictate, they don't really own anything in a meaningful sense. In this arrangement they are more like managers than owners. If you disagree, ask yourself if any corporation really has another option other to comply if one of their decisions is countermanded by the state.

There is a reason it is named after the Fasces, a symbol of authority borne by a Lictor through the streets of Rome ahead of Tribunes and other officials with authority (okay, granted that this term and symbolism is decidedly Italian, fascism will always feature symbols distinct to each nation). The essence of fascism is power. A fascist believes this power comes from unity (another reason the Fasces is a chosen symbol, as it contains a bundle of sticks that when bound together cannot be easily broken) and so the subordination of the individual and every institution to state power is the cornerstone of their policy.

You seem to misrepresent the primacy of economics in fascist ideology, perhaps confusing this with Syndicalism, which Mussolini was involved with early in his political career. Fascism is something else. While it incorporates the subordination of the economy to the state, above this it values ethics of action, a willingness to commit violence against its enemies, courage, and obedience to authority. It is inherently anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian. It will not tolerate internal rivals or dissent. It always features a leader who rules as dictator and to my knowledge has never succeeded in a stable transfer of power once that leader dies.

It has often been linked to the Romantic period as so much of fascist ideology is based on emotion, feeling, symbolic mysticism, and the irrational. It's politics can be seen as a reaction to the ultra-rational basis from which Communism claims to descend.

Being an economist, I wrote what felt natural and accept your kind and pointed correction.

Your lack of understanding or stubbornness aside, if your grandfather fought actual fascists it is doubtful he defined the term.

All that is immaterial, of course, to your current incorrect claim that Fox News somehow became liberal recently, which I can only assume is established in your view by the idea that Trump presently dislikes them.

(Also, those of us who have "showdead" turned on can see your posts, even after they're flagged. That's how I knew you were repeating yourself.)

That said, any bias (including corporate influence) is worse than an agnostic information reporting machine (which C-SPAN or the BBC approach best).

I agree that education is becoming a major dividing line, but in my opinion that's because the "left" is moving towards elitism, whereas the "right" is slowly embracing populism. "Only dummies vote for the others" is just a snobby way of saying "we lost the working class".

read William Dereshevitz' "Excellent Sheep", it's the best book on the subject.

https://www.businessinsider.com/roger-ailes-blueprint-fox-ne...

No, it wasn't. First, because it's part of the corporate media created by what was already a media megacorp, so at best it might participate in the corporate media hegemony on thought, not provide an alternative.

edit: downvotes with no response is really weak, especially given what we see going on in the world today which completely backs up my point.

I do think it's fair to describe fox as openly embracing conspiracy theories - the first really big example for me was how they popularized "the caravan" for months.

I think we're seeing a sort of religious phenomenon here in regards to the corporate media. They're pushing narratives everyone know are untrue, but no-one can come out and say it publicly due to the religiosity of the mob.

If you look at surveys, people understand Fox has a bias. But it’s very hard to listen to news from people who don’t appear to share your basic values.

Consider this summer. We can debate the merits of whether violent rioting, setting police stations on fire, etc., is a justified response in certain circumstances. But the public has divergent opinions on this, and journalists have a pretty uniform opinion on this issue. This is a divergence that didn’t exist during the 20 years between when CNN was started and when Fox got popular. But it does now. And it’s very hard to watch coverage of this issue when the person behind the news desk obviously sees the world very differently than you.

Fox didn’t create this divergence. It responded to a divergence that grew. And it’s a divergence that’s become more extreme as media consolidation has resulted in most media being beamed from the coasts into the rest of the country.

Film Review: ‘Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes’

https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/divide-and-conquer-the...

Really hoping you mean "public discourse" :-)

Although, intercourse is often used as short for "sexual intercourse".

But you are pretty much asking for that joke (like when you still use "ejaculate" with the "blurt out" meaning).

TIL, thanks. I've never heard the term "public intercourse" before, always "public discourse", so I thought it was a typo.

Intercourse: noun: communication or dealings between individuals or groups.

I mean how you choose to communicate or deal with people is clearly different than me. :-)

The FCC will have close to zero impact on twenty first century media.

I don't know how or even if we can fix this.

What happened yesterday in Washington, DC may prove a counterpoint to 1st amendment claims that all speech should be allowed, regardless of consequences.

Edit: I see I was wrong about Fox as it is a cable network and not broadcast over public airwaves. I still think their viewers are insulated from opposing viewpoints and that's part of the problem.

Some of those channels are spewing hateful horseshit, but with dozens of channels to choose from, you can't blame the medium for people being insulated. They keep the dial tuned to Fox News because they like it.

This doesn't absolve the viewers from responsibility, but it also doesn't place it entirely on their shoulders.

is different than

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

which is not available on any terrestrial OTA channels

It would require the FCC to apply to content produced outside of the US and consumed within. That will never fly. The age of where the fairness doctrine was needed is long gone.

With the democratization of the media which was completed with the ascent of the internet both governments and established media players; some of which were merely mouth pieces for various political factions; lost their ability to control the message but most importantly lost the ability to control the truth.

The issue faced now is insuring that people have the opportunity to identify information authenticity without having to go back to the situation where we were just expected to trust what we were told.

News, information, whatnot, is now world wide and governments all over will do their best to control what you can see and say and it is up to everyone to make their job harder if not impossible. the only way to a free society is by not allowing governments to control the truth

Yes, but city-wide local Fox-affiliate news channels broadcast over the public airwaves would not have been exempt. Those are often watched in their local environments more than their cable alternatives. See also Sinclair Broadcast Group: broadcasting over public airwaves is in the name!

Even when it's outrage I agree with, it angers me.

Down the line, I can read other people's thoughtful analysis of what people said and how people voted and evaluate it in the context of having seen it live, rather than from having heard Michael Barbaro's quick-cut package in the morning.

Regarding Facebook indefinitely suspending Trump, #bigTech can modulate exposure of politicians and aspects of their personalities and platform positions highly effectively - suppressing and amplifying for unknown 'fairness doctrines' of their own making.

An example is Gabbard's response to Clinton on Twitter, whose 'likes' are modulated down to circa 250k regularly. You can 'like' it dozens of times but each time you return your 'like' has usually been removed.

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1185289626409406464

The bigger point regardless of whether you approve of Gabbard or Clinton - #bigTech is able to amplify or sideline anyone as the Trump blackballing illustrates. This is alarmingly like the anti communist witch hunts and blackballing in the 1950's

230 renders the Fairness Doctrine moot. Even if it still existed today.

I think the word you mean is discourse not intercourse.

Their elections coverage was a disaster as well. I think they are in identity crisis of sorts.