They can all do this to each other because they are all guilty of it. Cable news is a tower of partisan propaganda.
Traditional media definitely has flaws, but rejecting them in favor of social media because of it is an absurd and incredibly destructive reaction.
There seems to be some kind of law that the larger a media outlet is, the more partisan it gets. Which is why social media is like the Exxon Valdez crashed into Deepwater Horizon and caught on fire.
On any given day, two different perspectives agreeing to intellectually consider why the other side is objectively incorrect (as in, not just agreeing they are simply different) is a serious undertaking. If you casually take any topic, every single day, and allow people to do the thought experiment that one argument is more valid in a casual manner, you will 100% have to cut corners because you did not seriously approach the task. The most obvious way is you paint an enemy, or the notion of the other, an idea of a threat.
The average person in NYC really has no business having a dinner time objective discussion with someone from Missouri about gun ownership. Really the discussion should come down to ‘we have a lot space and gun culture in Missouri and it’s something we enjoy’, followed by ‘Interesting, it’s not the biggest thing here in NYC actually’. That’s about it.
But if there is an institution, I don’t know, let’s call it a fight club (the media), that says ‘you two at dinner, get ready to fight’, the two contestants will fight in an inexperienced way. Hair pulling, throwing rocks, no real jabs, conditioning, submissions, no fight experience.
It is not a casual ordeal to debate, and this is what the media is making people do.
We are not ready amongst ourselves to debate constitutional law and the rights of man, and the compromises needed to maintain society. It’s a serious thing to enter into that discussion.
The only take away I see in all of this is that there is a market for the un-serious, and there are some serious people (media) interested in that market.
Fox (to say nothing of the absolute swamp that is OANN or Newsmax) are an order of magnitude worse than the so called "left" channels (only in the US would CNN be considered a left wing news channel).
The reason that CNN, etc are "biased" against Trump is because reality is bisaed against Trump. He's just a terrible president, a lousy business man and an awful human.
Again, only in the US would that be considered a controversial statement.
And yes, all the news channels are equally terrible. This is not at all hard to find, but it may be hard to accept.
And only in the US would someone be so insular as to make such a statement :)
The US is still the largest economy in the world. As much as the rest of us would love to turn a blind eye when they elect an incompetent sociopath, unfortunately, we have to deal with his bullshit.
The rest of the world is not a single monolithic group either so I don't see the point of your sweeping generalizations.
signed,
A Brit.
Nonsense. Of course, people’s opinion of internal politics is relevant. If it wasn’t, we’d still have apartheid in South Africa, for example.
And no, the rest of the world is not a single monolithic group, but the vast majority of it (especially in comparable western democracies) thinks trump is a laughing stock.
The good news is that your cognitive function is not permanently lost, it can be quickly recovered by just turning off the TV and reading a book, playing with the dog or going on a long walk.
Yes, keeping up with current events is an important part of being a good citizen but there are quickly diminishing returns on that and it’s never worth sacrificing parts of your life and livelihood for.
Sometimes, there just aren't two sides to a story, or more accurately one side is true and the other believes they had the biggest inauguration crowd ever.
The rest of the world clearly sees this. I'll openly admit to being a left-leaning liberal, but even my friends who vote right wing think that Trump is an embarrassment.