6 ms·

Your point about "regime" is dead on. I never heard the phrase "Obama regime"; it was always "administration". Our media has a sickeningly blatant leftward bia

by mises 7y ago

Your point about "regime" is dead on. I never heard the phrase "Obama regime"; it was always "administration". Our media has a sickeningly blatant leftward bias, unless you go to fringe conspiracy sites which are no news at all. There are a few good ones, but not many.

moccachino 7y ago
I don't want to get into politics much here but I have to respond to this. I'm not American but from where I stand I see that Trump is trying his best to turn his presidency into a dictatorship. He also admires and enjoys the company of actual dictators. So using this word as a form of criticism is not unfounded. Also, it's not the general rule, most articles I see use 'administration'. And I don't think it's the media who has a leftward bias, rather the Republican Party has moved way way out on the fringe. If you look globally, the average Democratic office holder would be a right wing politician in most other countries.
- xibalba 7y ago
  > And I don't think it's the media who has a leftward bias Leftward bias has been repeatedly demonstrated in the literature. Your belief that there is no media bias may in fact be evidence of your own biases. This too is supported in the literature. I.e., there is evidence that media which confirms our beliefs is viewed as higher quality than that which disconfirms.
  - orwin 7y ago
    I think his point is that what's considered "leftward" in the US is actually not really leftward for the rest of the word, so for him, the "left bias" is actually a "normal bias".
    - bin0 7y ago
      When you say the rest of the world, I assume you mean that Europe is much further left than America? If so, that has no bearing on how we judge American media. Other nations are farther left or right; we judge bias based on the political center of the respective nation. American media does not have a "normal" or "center" bias just because politics in your nation are farther left; American voters determine where the American center is (not those in europe).
      - moccachino 7y ago
        Sure, but the shift is also within the U.S. over time. To support a strong public education system and hold a sensible position on gun control used to be something Republicans did as far as I can tell. There has been a definite shift to the fringe. Both in the plutocratic direction, with the one-dollar-one-vote philosophy, and also in just a general nutcase direction (see the NRA).
        bin0 7y ago
        That's not a fair assessment. Your opinion of a "sensible position" on "gun control" is almost certainly different from mine. I would take the perspective that people openly supporting socialism is a much further-leftward lurch than any thing on the right. [0] You also brand the NRA as "fringe" and as "general nutcases", which is again unfair. Your political opinion is not the single source of truth or the center of the political spectrum. Your implication here is that the right has become fringe, but the graph linked above shows otherwise. [0] https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left-the-democrats-are-going/ https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left...
        moccachino 7y ago
        >That's not a fair assessment. Fair point. >Your opinion of a "sensible position" on "gun control" is almost certainly different from mine. A sensible position can be anywhere on a broad spectrum. It does not include arming teachers and does not include selling guns to diagnosed mentally unstable people. >I would take the perspective that people openly supporting socialism is a much further-leftward lurch than any thing on the right. [0] I would have to disagree. I think for-profit prisons, money-is-speech, on-your-own healthcare are three examples of extreme individualism and anti-social-ism that it seems the Republicans are proud of. >You also brand the NRA as "fringe" and as "general nutcases", which is again unfair. Your political opinion is not the single source of truth or the center of the political spectrum. The NRA is fringe, it has recently been shown how it has been hijacked over the course of a decade or more by the Russians to sow discord and destabilize your country. That's why I chose to use such inflammatory words. >Your implication here is that the right has become fringe, but the graph linked above shows otherwise. This may be true, I honestly did not have time to read the whole article. I don't disagree that the left has a bunch of issues and idiotic positions, hyper-sensitivity and a general vicious lack of tolerance for momentary lapses in judgement being the main ones in my opinion.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Leftward bias has been repeatedly demonstrated in the literature. No, it hasn't, and if it had, the Right wouldn't keep spinning findings of a predominance of Democratic Party membership among media employees as if it were the same thing as a finding of leftward bias.
    - xibalba 7y ago
      > No, it hasn't This was a 2 minute search of Google Scholar: ^1 "...the mainstream press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs... only a narrow band of liberal thought is supported by the press" ^2 "Our results show a strong liberal bias" [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kuypers/publication/318990476_Press_Bias_and_Politics_How_the_Media_Frame_Controversial_Issues/links/5a8e207faca272c56bc40dc2/Press-Bias-and-Politics-How-the-Media-Frame-Controversial-Issues.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kuypers/publication... [2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/1926642 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/192...
      - aNoob7000 7y ago
        The sad thing about left or right bias is that it is all the same thing. The left doesn't care about what the right says, and the right doesn't care about what the left says. Unfortunately, there is no more compromise in today's world. People just want to win because even giving up even a small amount of ground to an opponent is considered a complete failure.
        bin0 7y ago
        I personally blame social media for a lot oft this. Mob mentality has been a problem since forever, but Twitter has created a nation-wide 24/7 mob which is angrier than ever and never disbands. I blame that for the elections of President Trump, Congresswoman Ocasio, and other such divisive figures. I also think it's responsible for the phenomenon of each "side" seeing the other as morally wrong, inuhame, and almost not people. It's been known for a while we're meaner on-line because we can't see any one on the other side; I think that's a significant part of the problem. This, of course, begs the question: how do you fix it? I don't know.
happytoexplain 7y ago
You're implying that treating two politicians from the left and the right differently is intrinsically a symptom of "sickening" political bias, when in fact truly unbiased objectivity will always make one of those people look worse than the other. What I find more sickening is how often people hide behind the idea of neutrality when, hypocritically, expressing their hatred for the media and people of the opposite political party. I think it's a much worse problem.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
Please, using your favorite search engine, search for "Obama regime" and see how often it was used. You will find that it was used a lot more than you remember.
- playing_colours 7y ago
  I did. And the top results are from Obama critics, or quoting Trump said that. There is also that web page https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-the-obama-administration-be-called-the-obama-regime https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-the-obama-administrat...
Angostura 7y ago
> I never heard the phrase "Obama regime"; it was always "administration". Presumably because the Obama administration didn't work quite so hard to subvert the US system of checks and balances. I don't recall Obama sacking the head of the FBI for refusing to give a pledge of personal loayalty, to give one example. I don't. Neither do I remember Obama declaring a national emergency, in order to circumvent Congress's spending powers and get money for a pet project.
- bin0 7y ago
  This is a political opinion. Whether the presidency is doing something good or bad is one. Half the nation disagrees with you. By expressing this in an implicit sense in media, the media is biased. Also, you're wrong: obama was Mister "I've got a pen and a phone". One party spent eight years centralizing power in the executive, then complains when the other side gets elected and uses it.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    I'm not American, but I don't recall anything similar. Feel free to post specifics, rather than generalities.
    - bin0 7y ago
      https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/30/hey-barack-obama-donald-trumps-got-your-pen-and-ph/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/30/hey-barack-...
      - Angostura 7y ago
        Again, I'm not seeing any specific measures been cited there. Oh, while we are on the whole regime thing. How many members of his family did he appoint to substantial executive roles in the Whitehouse? That's another mark of a regime, I think.
        7y ago
dragonwriter 7y ago
> I never heard the phrase "Obama regime" That's seems to be a sign of either extremely limited reading (biased to left-wing sources out of the mainstream) or extremely selective memory (rejecting or inventing facts to fit a right-wing narrative). While both “Obama regime” and “Trump regime” seem to be used mostly originally by outside-the-mainstream media (the right and left fringes, respectively), the uses of the latter don’t even seem to get quoted much in mainstream sources, while the former (though not particularly frequently) do, at least from reviewing and, in the case of mainstream results, reading through results from the obvious phrase searches on Google News.
pazimzadeh 7y ago
The Obama Regime https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/obama-regime-deroy-murdock/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/obama-regime-deroy-mu... "The president has become dictatorial in nearly every area of governance" https://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22obama+regime%22&s= https://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22obama+regime%22&s=

by mises 7y ago

moccachino 7y ago

I don't want to get into politics much here but I have to respond to this. I'm not American but from where I stand I see that Trump is trying his best to turn his presidency into a dictatorship. He also admires and enjoys the company of actual dictators. So using this word as a form of criticism is not unfounded. Also, it's not the general rule, most articles I see use 'administration'. And I don't think it's the media who has a leftward bias, rather the Republican Party has moved way way out on the fringe. If you look globally, the average Democratic office holder would be a right wing politician in most other countries.

xibalba 7y ago
> And I don't think it's the media who has a leftward bias Leftward bias has been repeatedly demonstrated in the literature. Your belief that there is no media bias may in fact be evidence of your own biases. This too is supported in the literature. I.e., there is evidence that media which confirms our beliefs is viewed as higher quality than that which disconfirms.
- orwin 7y ago
  I think his point is that what's considered "leftward" in the US is actually not really leftward for the rest of the word, so for him, the "left bias" is actually a "normal bias".
  - bin0 7y ago
    When you say the rest of the world, I assume you mean that Europe is much further left than America? If so, that has no bearing on how we judge American media. Other nations are farther left or right; we judge bias based on the political center of the respective nation. American media does not have a "normal" or "center" bias just because politics in your nation are farther left; American voters determine where the American center is (not those in europe).
    - moccachino 7y ago
      Sure, but the shift is also within the U.S. over time. To support a strong public education system and hold a sensible position on gun control used to be something Republicans did as far as I can tell. There has been a definite shift to the fringe. Both in the plutocratic direction, with the one-dollar-one-vote philosophy, and also in just a general nutcase direction (see the NRA).
      - bin0 7y ago
        That's not a fair assessment. Your opinion of a "sensible position" on "gun control" is almost certainly different from mine. I would take the perspective that people openly supporting socialism is a much further-leftward lurch than any thing on the right. [0] You also brand the NRA as "fringe" and as "general nutcases", which is again unfair. Your political opinion is not the single source of truth or the center of the political spectrum. Your implication here is that the right has become fringe, but the graph linked above shows otherwise. [0] https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left-the-democrats-are-going/ https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left...
        moccachino 7y ago
        >That's not a fair assessment. Fair point. >Your opinion of a "sensible position" on "gun control" is almost certainly different from mine. A sensible position can be anywhere on a broad spectrum. It does not include arming teachers and does not include selling guns to diagnosed mentally unstable people. >I would take the perspective that people openly supporting socialism is a much further-leftward lurch than any thing on the right. [0] I would have to disagree. I think for-profit prisons, money-is-speech, on-your-own healthcare are three examples of extreme individualism and anti-social-ism that it seems the Republicans are proud of. >You also brand the NRA as "fringe" and as "general nutcases", which is again unfair. Your political opinion is not the single source of truth or the center of the political spectrum. The NRA is fringe, it has recently been shown how it has been hijacked over the course of a decade or more by the Russians to sow discord and destabilize your country. That's why I chose to use such inflammatory words. >Your implication here is that the right has become fringe, but the graph linked above shows otherwise. This may be true, I honestly did not have time to read the whole article. I don't disagree that the left has a bunch of issues and idiotic positions, hyper-sensitivity and a general vicious lack of tolerance for momentary lapses in judgement being the main ones in my opinion.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Leftward bias has been repeatedly demonstrated in the literature. No, it hasn't, and if it had, the Right wouldn't keep spinning findings of a predominance of Democratic Party membership among media employees as if it were the same thing as a finding of leftward bias.
  - xibalba 7y ago
    > No, it hasn't This was a 2 minute search of Google Scholar: ^1 "...the mainstream press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs... only a narrow band of liberal thought is supported by the press" ^2 "Our results show a strong liberal bias" [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kuypers/publication/318990476_Press_Bias_and_Politics_How_the_Media_Frame_Controversial_Issues/links/5a8e207faca272c56bc40dc2/Press-Bias-and-Politics-How-the-Media-Frame-Controversial-Issues.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kuypers/publication... [2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/1926642 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/192...
    - aNoob7000 7y ago
      The sad thing about left or right bias is that it is all the same thing. The left doesn't care about what the right says, and the right doesn't care about what the left says. Unfortunately, there is no more compromise in today's world. People just want to win because even giving up even a small amount of ground to an opponent is considered a complete failure.
      - bin0 7y ago
        I personally blame social media for a lot oft this. Mob mentality has been a problem since forever, but Twitter has created a nation-wide 24/7 mob which is angrier than ever and never disbands. I blame that for the elections of President Trump, Congresswoman Ocasio, and other such divisive figures. I also think it's responsible for the phenomenon of each "side" seeing the other as morally wrong, inuhame, and almost not people. It's been known for a while we're meaner on-line because we can't see any one on the other side; I think that's a significant part of the problem. This, of course, begs the question: how do you fix it? I don't know.

happytoexplain 7y ago

You're implying that treating two politicians from the left and the right differently is intrinsically a symptom of "sickening" political bias, when in fact truly unbiased objectivity will always make one of those people look worse than the other. What I find more sickening is how often people hide behind the idea of neutrality when, hypocritically, expressing their hatred for the media and people of the opposite political party. I think it's a much worse problem.

JaimeThompson 7y ago

Please, using your favorite search engine, search for "Obama regime" and see how often it was used. You will find that it was used a lot more than you remember.

playing_colours 7y ago
I did. And the top results are from Obama critics, or quoting Trump said that. There is also that web page https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-the-obama-administration-be-called-the-obama-regime https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-the-obama-administrat...

Angostura 7y ago

> I never heard the phrase "Obama regime"; it was always "administration". Presumably because the Obama administration didn't work quite so hard to subvert the US system of checks and balances. I don't recall Obama sacking the head of the FBI for refusing to give a pledge of personal loayalty, to give one example. I don't. Neither do I remember Obama declaring a national emergency, in order to circumvent Congress's spending powers and get money for a pet project.

bin0 7y ago
This is a political opinion. Whether the presidency is doing something good or bad is one. Half the nation disagrees with you. By expressing this in an implicit sense in media, the media is biased. Also, you're wrong: obama was Mister "I've got a pen and a phone". One party spent eight years centralizing power in the executive, then complains when the other side gets elected and uses it.
- Angostura 7y ago
  I'm not American, but I don't recall anything similar. Feel free to post specifics, rather than generalities.
  - bin0 7y ago
    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/30/hey-barack-obama-donald-trumps-got-your-pen-and-ph/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/30/hey-barack-...
    - Angostura 7y ago
      Again, I'm not seeing any specific measures been cited there. Oh, while we are on the whole regime thing. How many members of his family did he appoint to substantial executive roles in the Whitehouse? That's another mark of a regime, I think.
      - 7y ago

dragonwriter 7y ago

> I never heard the phrase "Obama regime" That's seems to be a sign of either extremely limited reading (biased to left-wing sources out of the mainstream) or extremely selective memory (rejecting or inventing facts to fit a right-wing narrative). While both “Obama regime” and “Trump regime” seem to be used mostly originally by outside-the-mainstream media (the right and left fringes, respectively), the uses of the latter don’t even seem to get quoted much in mainstream sources, while the former (though not particularly frequently) do, at least from reviewing and, in the case of mainstream results, reading through results from the obvious phrase searches on Google News.

pazimzadeh 7y ago

The Obama Regime https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/obama-regime-deroy-murdock/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/obama-regime-deroy-mu... "The president has become dictatorial in nearly every area of governance" https://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22obama+regime%22&s= https://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22obama+regime%22&s=