3 ms·

I don't think the media abruptly changed at exactly the same time right-wing personalities started talking a ton about media bias, no. Yet I'm sure perceptions

I don't think the media abruptly changed at exactly the same time right-wing personalities started talking a ton about media bias, no. Yet I'm sure perceptions did. So yes, I think deliberate promotion of a view to a huge audience, whether it's correct or not, will result in more people believing it's true than people's "own eyes and ears".

convexfunction 5y ago
I think it's obvious and I haven't spent a second of my life voluntarily consuming any mainstream right-leaning news, but maybe I'm just way, way smarter than all those rubes who you believe have basically no connection with reality outside of when their propaganda happens to be accurate. shrug!!!
- handrous 5y ago
  [EDIT] removed mean sarcasm—poster engaging sincerely elsewhere and I felt this was unwarranted. Sorry.
convexfunction 5y ago
Let me be more precise: I think your claim that "The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results" is obviously very wrong. The truth of it does have a lot to do with this perception, especially given 1. the rather more "sincere" journalistic norms we see even in the paper of record in 2021 compared to a few decades ago and 2. the fact that social media makes it easy for people to organically show each other the most egregious examples of this stuff, and I would even go so far as to say that it probably matters more than whatever Fox and talk radio are telling their audiences. Obviously that does also matter somewhat even now, and perhaps it was even more important than the truth of the matter when these right-wing news outlets were first making this claim decades ago, but to think that this widespread perception is "merely accidentally" correct and mainly a result of propaganda is to give the typical right-leaning American far too little credit.
- handrous 5y ago
  I'm not sure "cherry-picking while removing context has been crowd-sourced" is a great argument for the victory of truth (of the idea of media bias, presumably) over propaganda, but I take your point that the initial drive over a few relatively-centralized media to promote and categorize a "left-wing media" is no longer the main source from which people are receiving that message. (FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)

convexfunction 5y ago

I think it's obvious and I haven't spent a second of my life voluntarily consuming any mainstream right-leaning news, but maybe I'm just way, way smarter than all those rubes who you believe have basically no connection with reality outside of when their propaganda happens to be accurate. shrug!!!

handrous 5y ago
[EDIT] removed mean sarcasm—poster engaging sincerely elsewhere and I felt this was unwarranted. Sorry.

convexfunction 5y ago

Let me be more precise: I think your claim that "The truth of it's almost irrelevant to the poll results" is obviously very wrong. The truth of it does have a lot to do with this perception, especially given 1. the rather more "sincere" journalistic norms we see even in the paper of record in 2021 compared to a few decades ago and 2. the fact that social media makes it easy for people to organically show each other the most egregious examples of this stuff, and I would even go so far as to say that it probably matters more than whatever Fox and talk radio are telling their audiences. Obviously that does also matter somewhat even now, and perhaps it was even more important than the truth of the matter when these right-wing news outlets were first making this claim decades ago, but to think that this widespread perception is "merely accidentally" correct and mainly a result of propaganda is to give the typical right-leaning American far too little credit.

handrous 5y ago
I'm not sure "cherry-picking while removing context has been crowd-sourced" is a great argument for the victory of truth (of the idea of media bias, presumably) over propaganda, but I take your point that the initial drive over a few relatively-centralized media to promote and categorize a "left-wing media" is no longer the main source from which people are receiving that message. (FWIW, I actually agree with you that many outlets have a consistently left-wing slant, for certain values of "left-wing", on a variety of issues, and I think most of what passes for news media generally is absolute garbage—but I also think that perceptions of that, on the right, tend to be only loosely related to reality, and that media coverage of media bias, to include social media, is itself ground zero for bias)