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I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they a
by nikkwong 6y ago
I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering.
CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.
Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.
- infogulch 6y agoInteresting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes. So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.
- cycrutchfield 6y agoFox News has been doing this literally for decades, to the point where they have zero journalistic credibility anymore. CNN is rather tame by comparison.
- nikkwong 6y agoSure, but their goal has always been to simply appeal to their base rather than to evangelize the gospel of the GOP. They're far too partisan an institution to be attempting a shot like that. The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.