3 ms·

Did it really start only three years ago? Or did you only notice it starting three years ago?

PaulHoule 7y ago
My take. For a long time CNN was the "School Shooting Channel" and the "MH370 Channel"; call it bias or not, but it was definitely focused on things that seemed to get a certain kind of person watching while biting their nails. Then Trump started running for president and CNN discovered that he was good for ratings, and surprising to them, Bernie Sanders was too. Trump was very good for CNN's ratings because for once you might watch CNN and expect Trump to say absolutely insane. Then once he got elected it was like every day was September 11. (One might say that CNN felt guilty for giving Trump so much attention that it led to his election. Contrast that to the very little coverage Bloomberg is getting despite a stupendous ad spend... I think the media wants to give him a chance to walk that one back!) What's great about it for them is that they can just sit in their Washington, DC and Atlanta headquarters and rap and not have to invest in travel, journalism, or anything inconvenient like that. So I think that CNN made a definite transition when Trump got elected.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > For a long time CNN was the "School Shooting Channel" and the "MH370 Channel"; call it bias or not, but it was definitely focused on things that seemed to get a certain kind of person watching while biting their nails. And before that it was the Scott Peterson channel. Personally, I think the invention of the 24-hour cable news network was a mistake. There just isn't enough breaking domestically-relevant newsworthy material to fill the airtime. IMHO, the only good solution to that problem is to increase the proportion of relatively mundane international news coverage or in-depth investigative documentaries. Unfortunately a lot of people aren't interested in the former and the latter is expensive. Instead the networks either fill the airtime with wall-to-wall coverage of stuff like the murder of Laci Peterson presented like it's 9/11 or Pearl Harbor or with wretched opinionating. If I were king, I'd limit breaking news programming to two hours a day per channel, and opinion to two hours a week.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    For the brief period I watched, it was the "service men and women surprising their kids that they're home from deployment" channel.
ben509 7y ago
An editorial agenda is normally very easy to hide. If you're a paper and you support an administration, you're going to do so by suppressing news that harms your side, and if you dislike an administration, you suppress news that is favorable to them. You can also see this in non-partisan coverage, such as the total blackout on the Epstein story and ABC previously spiking Robach's investigation into it. Suppressing news is an extremely favorable strategy because it's impossible to criticize something that isn't written as being biased. They can even bury a perfunctory story to deflect criticism of non-coverage. So, yeah, you wouldn't notice it because a lot of negative news was suppressed during the Obama admin. For instance, immigration is a huge topic now, but our issues at the border didn't suddenly spring into existence when Trump took office, those stories were spiked. One amazing case was this[1]: > GENEVA (Reuters) - A Nov. 18 story headlined “U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention -U.N. study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov. 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued. The story was, objectively, just as newsworthy, it's simply that Reuters initially wanted to run it because they thought it would reflect badly on the Trump admin. But hit pieces clearly out you as a partisan outlet. There's no way to spin consistent negative converage against a single party. That's why it's so shocking that outlets like CNN have gone absolutely ballistic in the sheer volume of hit pieces against this administration. The negative coverage is in the high 90s and appears obsessive and bizarre. I don't think Bush even got this level of negative coverage even while he was conducting a deeply unpopular war. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-rights-child/story-on-u-n-study-on-child-detentions-withdrawn-idUSKBN1XS1PC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-rights-child/story-on-...

My take. For a long time CNN was the "School Shooting Channel" and the "MH370 Channel"; call it bias or not, but it was definitely focused on things that seemed to get a certain kind of person watching while biting their nails. Then Trump started running for president and CNN discovered that he was good for ratings, and surprising to them, Bernie Sanders was too. Trump was very good for CNN's ratings because for once you might watch CNN and expect Trump to say absolutely insane. Then once he got elected it was like every day was September 11. (One might say that CNN felt guilty for giving Trump so much attention that it led to his election. Contrast that to the very little coverage Bloomberg is getting despite a stupendous ad spend... I think the media wants to give him a chance to walk that one back!) What's great about it for them is that they can just sit in their Washington, DC and Atlanta headquarters and rap and not have to invest in travel, journalism, or anything inconvenient like that. So I think that CNN made a definite transition when Trump got elected.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
> For a long time CNN was the "School Shooting Channel" and the "MH370 Channel"; call it bias or not, but it was definitely focused on things that seemed to get a certain kind of person watching while biting their nails. And before that it was the Scott Peterson channel. Personally, I think the invention of the 24-hour cable news network was a mistake. There just isn't enough breaking domestically-relevant newsworthy material to fill the airtime. IMHO, the only good solution to that problem is to increase the proportion of relatively mundane international news coverage or in-depth investigative documentaries. Unfortunately a lot of people aren't interested in the former and the latter is expensive. Instead the networks either fill the airtime with wall-to-wall coverage of stuff like the murder of Laci Peterson presented like it's 9/11 or Pearl Harbor or with wretched opinionating. If I were king, I'd limit breaking news programming to two hours a day per channel, and opinion to two hours a week.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  For the brief period I watched, it was the "service men and women surprising their kids that they're home from deployment" channel.

ben509 7y ago

An editorial agenda is normally very easy to hide. If you're a paper and you support an administration, you're going to do so by suppressing news that harms your side, and if you dislike an administration, you suppress news that is favorable to them. You can also see this in non-partisan coverage, such as the total blackout on the Epstein story and ABC previously spiking Robach's investigation into it. Suppressing news is an extremely favorable strategy because it's impossible to criticize something that isn't written as being biased. They can even bury a perfunctory story to deflect criticism of non-coverage. So, yeah, you wouldn't notice it because a lot of negative news was suppressed during the Obama admin. For instance, immigration is a huge topic now, but our issues at the border didn't suddenly spring into existence when Trump took office, those stories were spiked. One amazing case was this[1]: > GENEVA (Reuters) - A Nov. 18 story headlined “U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention -U.N. study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov. 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued. The story was, objectively, just as newsworthy, it's simply that Reuters initially wanted to run it because they thought it would reflect badly on the Trump admin. But hit pieces clearly out you as a partisan outlet. There's no way to spin consistent negative converage against a single party. That's why it's so shocking that outlets like CNN have gone absolutely ballistic in the sheer volume of hit pieces against this administration. The negative coverage is in the high 90s and appears obsessive and bizarre. I don't think Bush even got this level of negative coverage even while he was conducting a deeply unpopular war. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-rights-child/story-on-u-n-study-on-child-detentions-withdrawn-idUSKBN1XS1PC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-rights-child/story-on-...