Also the word mainstream has lost its meaning. If that term is to apply based on audience size, sites like InfoWars were bigger than some of the traditional outlets.

The idea of leaving "mainstream" outlets to seek truth on sites like InfoWars is more about people just wanting to hear their biases and not really interested in news per se.

I feel that we agree aside from semantics. I still would choose dying over killed because it looks like a gradual year over year trend rather than a giant, sudden change.

> Also the word mainstream has lost its meaning.

To be clear, I wanted to differentiate sane & plausible media outlets from the fringe outlets like Infowars or upstarts like The Intercept

> The idea of leaving "mainstream" outlets to seek truth on sites like InfoWars is more about people just wanting to hear their biases and not really interested in news per se.

This was true in decades prior. However, it's starting to snowball with continued polarization of the both left and right, eventually resulting in political moderates being a minority. Isn't it strange that Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone are now covering stories on both COVID-19 and Wall Street? imo it's out of necessity because the media outlets, who traditionally cover these topics, refuse to cover the stories with the same depth.

"Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...

I think part of the problem is BOTH political parties demonize their opponents rather than make intellectual arguments on policy. This makes politics feel existential at the federal level, because it's framed as being about good vs. evil rather than the substance of the policy.

The public's trust in institutions will continue to erode until there is no trust remaining soley because every eight years or so BOTH political parties equate losing to the end of the world.

The path we're on leads to radical defederalization of the government.

This started with Newt. Newt Gingrich is primarily responsible for modern partisan politics

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...

I still strongly feel that the mainstream media deserves a larger portion of the blame.

Take the Hunter Biden laptop thing, for example. I don't know too much about it, but my understanding is that it revealed nepotism/influence peddling, which I totally agree should be prohibited. I mean most people are in favor of preventing members of Congress from trading stocks, for example. It's something pretty much all of us can agree on.

But instead of the story of the laptop being used as a jumping off point to talk about these issues, the news organizations decided to squash the story, thinking its readers/viewers were not sophisticated enough to be able to digest it, and that it would simply be used as a weapon by the Republicans (sad to say with, I agree).

Personally I feel like they should have fully covered the story. I also believe that Trump would have been re-elected, and that this would have been a bad thing for the entire world. Squashing the story might have led to a short-term win, but maybe perpetuate the problem longer.

I really hope things turn around. I want to have hope for the future. It's pretty hard though, I don't have much trust that we are up to the challenge.

On the other hand, it’s such a shoddy setup I doubt any half way decent intelligence agency would plant the laptop there. But maybe blind computer repair people just aren’t that common?

It is unreasonable to think that he left it at the computer store with someone legally blind, and left no contact information.

It is unreasonable to think that this legally person recognized the customer as Hunter Biden.

It is unreasonable to think that Hunter Biden then completely forgot about it.

And that the owner of the store, who apparently has political connections including Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, could not figure out how to reach out to Hunter Biden.

And then, three years after it had been left with him, decided to snoop on it.

And then was able to reach out to Rudy Giuliani to tell him all about it.

And that Rudy Giuliani was "protecting his life" from the Clinton campaign, to stop them "killing him, too" (referencing Seth Rich).

And then that despite the owner of the store saying he backed up a copy of the drive, delivered it to Steve Bannon, who delivered another copy to the media... when it came time to handing over the laptop, it was put in a USPS mail envelope - no tracking, no certification, no insurance. Where it was then lost.

All that? That's unreasonable.

> It is unreasonable to think that Hunter Biden then completely forgot about it.

Hunter Biden is a known drug addict. It is reasonable to assume that he can forget something as crucial as his personal laptop given his history of abuse.

> Where it was then lost.

At this point, everyone has accepted that it is Hunter's laptop. Most people have also accepted that the contents are also genuine. It was also never contested by either Hunter or President Biden.

"There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-reports-int...

In the grand picture, the narrative of how they acquired the laptop doesn't matter, though I agree with you that it's likely from theft. It's akin to computer thieves encountering child pornography in one of their "scores". What matters more are the contents, which are disturbing. The drug abuse and sex are banal. However, the evidence of corruption is disturbing. To be fair, I'm confident both you and I can find documented instances of corruption in the Trump administration. The difference is that the mainstream media is only going to actively protect Biden during election season, which lends credence to the far right's accusation that the mainstream media is biased.

https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-quietly-deletes-claim-0218...

That isn't true at all.

2. It's not something ridiculous like "celebrities having sex with aliens". That's a bad comparison.

3. There is proof of corruption. Selectively ignoring it just because it's your side ie claiming it's "fake news" doesn't help society as a whole. It also adds credence to the far right's claims of selective and biased reporting. It furthers their narrative of persecution.

It's how we go to this mess in the 1st place. If the mainstream media wasn't corrupted through the 1990s consolidation circus, I highly doubt Trump would have risen to power. He rose to power because of fallen public trust in public institutions like mainstream media.

I'm not entirely sure what 'media literacy' means when you can get more accurate reporting from a late night TV comedian than from "the newspaper of record".

Too many people have been shaken out of their gell-mann amnesia by experiencing some respected media outlet telling something they personally know to be a lie, or worse-- seeing the hierarchy inverted by seeing the reputable place lie while an obvious tabloid tells the truth.

The laptop is a great example-- the google-sent messages to hunter pass DKIM validation: they're cryptographically signed by google, so anyone with appropriate technical skill can verify their veracity beyond reasonable dispute. But a tabloid published it and not only did the reputable places not do so, but there was widespread collusion to suppress any discussion of it.

> revealed nepotism/influence peddling

Well, it was strongly indicative of hunter involved in that stuff. It's a little more complicated because he's a known-and-admitted screwup. If hunter was going around selling his father's influence without his father's knowledge, that shouldn't necessarily reflect negatively on Biden Sr. The material from the laptop made available actually connecting Sr. to any of it appears to be extremely tenuous. That said, it's not an unreasonable heuristic to assume from the fact that its all been so aggressively suppressed that there is a smoking gun there, so I can't fault people for doing so. As you note, the broader issue is one that's worthwhile to discuss.

This is probably the best, seemingly non-partisan summary of the contents. (It's still partisan because it's so vague, when it doesn't need to be.)

"The Post and other conservative media outlets’ coverage of Hunter’s files partly involved lurid material about Hunter’s personal life. Hunter’s struggles with drug addiction were already a matter of public record, but the files contained further embarrassing details, as well as sexual material. The other focus of coverage was Hunter’s lucrative foreign work, most notably with a Ukrainian gas company and Chinese business interests. Trump allies had long claimed this work proved not just Hunter’s but Joe Biden’s corruption, and they combed through Hunter’s emails to try to make that case."

https://www.vox.com/22992772/hunter-biden-laptop

Here's another mainstream instance of late coverage

One infamous email purportedly detailed a business arrangement between a Chinese company and the Biden family. Tony Bobulinski, who is listed as a recipient of the email first published by the New York Post, offered further detail last year in a statement to Fox News on the correspondence in October 2020, which references a proposed equity split: “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” “The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much-publicized May 13, 2017, email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden,” said Bobulinski, who says he was brought on as CEO of Sinohawk Holdings by Hunter Biden and James Gilliar, the sender of the email.

https://news.yahoo.com/democrats-reject-gop-attempts-upload-...

This is from a tabloid style publication with published screenshots from media found on the laptop.

"It also reportedly contains a 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images."

https://the-sun.com/news/4923690/hunter-bidens-laptop-emails...

In light of this, I predict that impartial, objective media outlets will continue to be replaced by overtly partisan news outlets at a faster pace. When I think about it, I'm not sure an impartial media outlet has existed for years now given that it's so difficult for human beings to be fully objective.

Seems like you're engaging in a classic No True Scotsman fallacy, here.

Historically, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone covered the TV & movie industries and the music industry respectively. However, you're correct now because both Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair cover stories and topics that traditional mainstream outlets won't touch. The Matt Taibbi op-eds are good examples. Think about it. People are getting hard hitting news from Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair instead of ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, CNN, FOX, NY Times or WSJ; to name a few mainstream outlets.