4 ms·
Reduced diversity of opinion. Financial incentive to not cover or obfuscate news that would undermine their power. Case in point, Occupy Wall Street.
by dd36 6y ago
Reduced diversity of opinion. Financial incentive to not cover or obfuscate news that would undermine their power. Case in point, Occupy Wall Street.
- threatofrain 6y agoIs it obvious that we have reduced diversity of opinion?
- keiferski 6y agohttps://youtu.be/hWLjYJ4BzvI https://youtu.be/hWLjYJ4BzvI
- 542458 6y agoTo clarify, these are all stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is the largest television station conglomerate in the United States. They've been pretty aggressive in buying up local stations, and have a reputation for exerting fairly strong editorial control and enforcing "must-run" opinion segments. One study found that local stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local events, increase coverage of national politics, and shift rightward in tone compared to other stations of the same area. http://joshuamccrain.com/localnews.pdf http://joshuamccrain.com/localnews.pdf To be honest, I'm not sure this shows lack of diversity of opinion - but it does show how consolidation of news media allows a handful of people to use local stations as sockpuppets for their beliefs in a way that hides the origin of the message.
- azinman2 6y agoOccupy Wall Street was hardly not covered. If anything, it probably got a disproportionate amount of coverage given the small numbers of people and the lack of coherent demands.
- dd36 6y agoIt wasn’t a lack of coverage but the intention to make them all look silly by focusing on the silliest among them.
- duxup 6y ago>Reduced diversity of opinion. Is there?
- hh3k0 6y ago“The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.” Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
- duxup 6y agoIs that happening? I was really hoping someone was actually checking beyond quotes, sentiment, and their own topics not getting enough airtime.
- hh3k0 6y agoI take it that you didn't follow the Democratic Primaries? The mass hysteria that ensued on all channels when Bernie Sanders was leading the race, to be specific.
- duxup 6y agoI didn't see any mass hysteria.
- hh3k0 6y agoSeth Meyers is one of the few who addressed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjj7VJpqy1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjj7VJpqy1w. And that's just a minuscule fraction, the reporting was downright shameful across the board. You'd watch 10 channels and read 10 newspapers reporting on Sanders and you'd feel as if it was 1 channel and 1 paper. One has to wonder if that was due to Bernie proposing to break up internet and cable titans and to introduce a wealth tax. The cable titans own the majority of channels, after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States#Big_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U.... And the newspaper owning billionaires probably didn't like the wealth tax idea too much either.