As education increasingly becomes the political dividing line in America, liberal politics are where the valuable ad dollars are.
Edit: upon reflection, I would be remiss to not also advance the fact that the mainstream media is inescapably caught up within Twitter and it’s discourse. As much as Twitter “is not real life” and it is not representative of Americans views as a whole, it is representative of an outsized fraction of elite media attention.
Curious to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250026
As for my opinions on what the hacker news community believes. We know that certain demographics skew certain ways politically, empirically. It’s not surprising given the demographics of HN that certain beliefs are predominant here. That has little to do with money, at least not in the way it does for media products.
Advertisers are picked and closely vetted.
Tbh I don’t really know what your point is.
Yeah, NPR and CNN exist, but none of them draw near the audience of their conservative counterparts do.
It would be more accurate to say that conservative media is highly concentrated while liberal media tends to be much more diverse, but draws far fewer people.
If that doesn't sound incorrect to you then I think it's down to the market. If the market willed the conservative voices to have a larger audience the market would so deliver. And if everyone dislikes market driven news sources then how the heck did we ever manage to defund NPR and similar programs?
Wouldn't there be a bias on what ads get accepted in general? Especially when Facebook is largely human monitored and Google caters marketing to populous beliefs, with AI augmenting this effect?
I find this to be a rather bizarre statement. While internally, both companies (as well as the other tech companies) are populated with highly educated employees, who tend to lean liberal, their public corporate behavior is neither particularly liberal or conservative until they are publicly embarrassed.
(Facebook and Twitter were an important component of Trump's election campaign in both runs, and at least the former is a big part of the COVID-denialism movement, right?)
1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
2 - https://www.wired.com/story/document-reveals-more-google-ant...
Liberals in 2022 are more like conservatives in 1970/1980 when it comes to nudity, community and free speech.
At a really basic level I think it's important to remember that corporations are not people (not just in the citizens united manner) - anthropomorphizing them is dangerous since (except when wholly controlled by a single unimpeachable entity like a founder or single person business) their actions are dictated by consensus and consensus decision making is incompatible with human morality.
After the American Civil War, slavery became illegal. After WWII, antisemitism became verboten. After the Civil Rights movement, open racism had to be suppressed. After the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality entered the public sphere. Each of those steps represented a loss to conservatism. But they were not caused by some liberal conspiracy, rather the "better natures" of people (most people really do believe in things like fairness and justice, at least in the abstract) were forced to confront behaviors that were just conservatively accepted.
Showing law enforcement using firehoses, batons, and dogs on people seeking to register to vote is not inherently liberal or conservative. The response, however, was liberal.
(Using liberal in the American sense here)
The forefront of culture is what's new and exciting. You have to actually be willing to try it out though. It's inherently not conservative.
Edit: the sibling's post about ad dollars is a fantastic point as well.
Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!
The "liberal" party voted for the most centrist choice in their primary, and America picked him as their president. Americans today see Biden as more moderate than Obama, not more liberal [0]. I don't see how one can make the case America is getting more liberal when even the liberal party isn't.
The media is also absolutely not largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. Nationally, Fox News dominates the ratings and had the top 3 rated cable news shows last year [1]. That doesn't even touch on SBG's well documented reach in key markets or conservative talk radio (which you can also find all over the top of the ratings lists [4]).
As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.
It's hard to take such a claim at face value. On the one hand, conservatives like to play the victim against an undefined boogeyman, like we see here. On the other, conservatives are the ones wielding actual political power to enforce ideology through censoring educators and banning books [2], [3].
0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/100-days-american...
1 - https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/top-cable-news-shows-of-2021...
2 - https://www.businessinsider.com/virginia-school-board-member...
3 - https://www.wfft.com/news/education/indiana-teachers-push-ba...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...