I think it is clear that they are not out there to inform the citizenry in any meaningful capacity. (Side note: I suggest watching the channel every now and then just to get an idea of what the largest “news” channel is feeding Americans.)
Television is meant to sell ads and blanket the nations with a haze of opiates in order to keep us pacified and distracted and far too stupid to make waves.
And people blame religion for this stuff ...
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1895597181945725304
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1905778768511406175
Clumping everyone in one group is actually one of the goals of this: to get people tired of trying to figure out reality and to give up.
As obvious as it is - when you think everyone lies, liars will be the only ones who win. When you think that everyone is the same - the worst ones will win every time.
NYT, CNN, etc are biased towards other things first (conflict, spectacle, consensus) and while the majority of their staff likely have a liberal bias, they are not actively partisan.
Someone should do something about that Stewart fellow if he keeps getting away with the stuff
It's very effective.
Eh, wrong is too weak. I think you fully understand the false comparison you are making and how it influences public discourse
You might not agree with Stewart's principles, but he has them and will fight his own party over it. Tucker flew over to Russia to kiss Putin's behind and even Putin made fun of how bad it was. He then tried to show how awesome it was in Russia and made it obvious that he hasn't been in a grocery store in ages.
Where Stewart has and does continue to work successfully with several mainstream media channels, Carlson is so dislikable he can only be heard because he founded his own podcast. Truly, it is a great country that has the laws protecting that man's right to keep being heard.
What is meaningful is the degree to which they are, and what else they are. I don't think we need a pedantic debate about Fox News.
Now, maybe this stuff wasn't all historically true, but in a sense it was better than true. It set an expectation for an ideal President. Serious dishonesty was taught as being disqualifying for the office of President, and honesty was taught as the deepest American value. Even if, in reality, prior Presidents hadn't always been honest, it created a tendency for voters to strongly prefer honest appearing candidates. Nixon's resignation was maybe the strongest affirmation of this principle that ever happened. I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests. Certainly the media environment, economic conditions, and the decline of mainline Protestantism had something to do with it too.
Or, more likely, when Fox News was launched (1996) during his tenure.
The lower production costs, higher reach, and nonexistent regulation of wide bandwidth cable TV created the space for Fox, and then also to a lesser extent, MSNBC.
In my opinion, the distorted information propagated by these outlets had a synergistic effect with the changes in the emphasis of the educational system in the late 80s-early 90s to deemphasize honesty as a core American value.
Not a great comparison obviously, but education was great in the Weimar republic as well, with a diverse and thriving press and near 100% literacy. The United States can't match those numbers.
It seems its always about something else besides educational level.
"NATO secretary-general tells Trump he’s motivating alliance members to spend more on defense"
It doesn't say anything about Greenland. It should have because Trump continued to push it:
""We've been dealing with Denmark, we've been dealing with Greenland, and we have to do it. We really need it for national security. I think that's why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security. It's very important," Trump said."
From Reuters, which seems to be doing a moderately better job.
"Trump wants to control Greenland" along with "Trump threatens to annex Canada" should be at the top of every headline because its complete insanity. No one voted for this, no one wants this, if Biden had said it or Obama had said it or any president had said it at any time every they would have become a laughing stock and every politician and voter would have risen up against them.
But it gets swept under the rug, in the same way all his insanity gets swept under the rug. Where were the headlines when he openly admired Arnold Palmer's penis? Nowhere, instead we got "Trump attacks Harris on immigration".
I've got my explanations but they all make me sound like a raving conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, its my only explanation. This is what happens when its us vs. the billionaires. They can always outspend, and everyone really only cares about the bottom line.
But Wisconsin was wondering because people hate Elon Musk.
My worry is that billionaires would fund anonymously both political media and they also own their own social media and so citizens would kind of less vote ... Or billionaire power would overcome that of citizen.
I think we need citizens to be aware of this but I also understand politics is a shitshow and i have so many hassles, why take another one.
And to that, I have no answer. i myself am stuck on this dilemma. I am really going to stop reading news because I don't think I personally can do anything. I have better things to do like studying or building software which can do better impact.
Though it also doesn't sucks to know about politics except I have seen people are really set in stone of politics, myself included.
For this therapeutic session there is no room for looking beyond the absolute surface of the issue, like you did.
But unfortunately these narratives don’t just get trotted out among apolitical libs. The political scientist Rachel Bitecofer had a social media meltdown when Trump won. And again the analysis was “who pushed the Republican button”.
That, or he's just a recognition of reality: resources and being a dick get you everywhere, whether it be business, politics, international relations, or the courts. Being authoritarian didn't stop China from becoming a near-parity superpower. Europeans were more than happy to start working on Nordstream 2 and attend both the World Cup and Winter Olympics in Russia long after it became apparent that Putin and his ilk were going to return to being imperialistic autocrats. Why does it matter if the US does the same if you're willing to fall in line?
Really, if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, I don't think Europeans would particularly care about those problems in Russia. It only really became problematic when the order of the continent was threatened, and even then it took some serious arm-twisting to get certain members of NATO and the EU to commit to measures to do something.
That's proportionate. Equally, though, I'm sure they would be pleased to find Russia wanting to join a rules based order. Bolsonaro was just recently found to be plotting to kill his political rival in Brazil. What should we who are not Brazilians do about that?
If not, and no one else is, then there's a chance that someone like Trump might try to do something like that himself. That's what he does. He sees someone else getting away with something bad, tries to do it because he thinks he'll get an advantage, gets caught, and complains about how unfair it is that he got caught.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/paus...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
Trump forgets the US, and most other major nations have a cryptocoin. a loss of confidence in an emerging currency market is a great way to torpedo your nations hegemony.
You're assuming people _want_ to be "informed." You could build the best news apparatus in the world, the most accurate reporting, with full scale third party auditing of your results.
It likely would not change very much. Humans are not designed to lock into large scale groups and then make coordinated long term decisions together. In my opinion we should avoid doing this as much as is possible.
We're all clear Disney, Star Wars, TV is entertainment. People are not clear that Rush Limbaugh, opinion makers on podcasts, Fox, CNN, Tick-tock is also entertainment.
The straightest venue for news proper has got to be CSPAN. They're clearly there to inform not to push a point, piss you off at the other side, or any other shadow-boxing goals.
Getting people pissed off to own the liberals, the neo-cons, to own the Trump supporters is ... entertainment and it doesn't hurt (I write this cynically) it helps drives up ad-revenue.
When the president gets away with all sorts of crime. When he openly mocks people. When he indulges in racism. When he complains about being treated unfairly. When he lies. When he defrauds, or grifts, or flip-flops. When he's misogynitic. What's he saying is "you too can do these things and get away with it".
People like that. People like that there's no accountability for bad behavior.
Sure, we can talk about policy, or economy, or whatever (how's that working out?) But deep down the democrats ask us to be the best version of ourselves (or else) and Republicans delight in us being the worst.
Human nature being what it is, we end up here. Just remember folks, we voted for this.
I think what it comes down to is that the average person in our society is just an aggressive basic shithead who isn't burdened by an abundance of thinking, and so to them Trump appears as a successful businessman rather than a hollow snake oil salesman.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/bloomb...
No it isn't. It's just a hand-wavy way to say "this is no longer a serious conversation".
What? Trump University [1]. Atlantic City [2][3].
> any successful business person will have those in their portfolio
Most businesses don’t have this sort of widespread rap sheet. And most businesses aren’t headed by a felon.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/spin-deride-attack-h...
[2] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-trump...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Rock_Hotel_%26_Casino_A...
Not getting into the cryptocurrency rug-pull he just pulled during his inauguration 2 months ago.
Not even getting into his lie about election fraud.
Here's just a small smattering of the civil and legal judgements Trump has lost in regards to defrauding people.
> In December 2022, two entities of the Trump Organization were found guilty on 17 counts, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. The scheme involved providing executives with off-the-books perks to evade taxes
> In May 2024, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The charges were related to hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign to conceal information.
> In February 2024, a New York judge ruled that Donald Trump and his companies had engaged in a years-long scheme to inflate his wealth on financial statements. The court imposed a $355 million penalty and barred Trump from serving in top roles at any New York company for three years
> In August 2022, Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's former CFO, pleaded guilty to 15 felony charges, including grand larceny and tax fraud, admitting to a scheme that evaded taxes on $1.7 million in income.
> In November 2019, a New York state judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $2 million in damages for misusing the Trump Foundation's funds to further his political and business interests.
> Trump University, a for-profit real estate training program, faced multiple lawsuits alleging that it defrauded students by making false claims about the value of its courses and the involvement of Trump himself. In April 2018, a federal judge finalized a $25 million settlement to resolve these lawsuits
> Trump and his companies have been accused for decades of refusing to pay contractors, workers, and small businesses after work was completed
He has never committed "fraud", besides all those times he had to pay fines for committing fraud and settling class actions for fraud. But beyond that, he's fine. It's just TDS haters talking about "reality" and "facts".