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Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either. It's always funny

Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either. It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...

silisili 2y ago
I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively. If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings. Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
    - kernal 2y ago
      The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.
  - silisili 2y ago
    Like it or not, the Overton window in the US did shift last election. So many comments trying to compare to Europe, or try to excise liberal from left seem to miss the point. When an election so divisive picks a side, there's your new baseline. Not what it was last year. Not what CNN did in the Clinton years, or what it's claiming to do today.
  - kernal 2y ago
    That’s comical considering CNN is the same network that promoted and pushed all of the Trump hoax stories. They also claimed Biden was mentally fit up until that lie was also exposed. CNN has no credibility in the news space.
- pj_mukh 2y ago
  And therefore, any argument that there is some kind of liberal bias is false (whether from Trump or Bezos). That's my point. In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).
  - silisili 2y ago
    Well, from your viewpoint, sure. But if we pretend that only those three exist(obviously they don't, you have ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, and many, many more), it's not necessarily wrong to say that media has a liberal bias, since '67% of stations are left leaning.' It just leaves out the fact that nobody really watches them in numbers.
    - saghm 2y ago
      If a bunch of news outlets all share a certain viewpoint that doesn't actually help them get viewers, maybe it's just because that viewpoint reflects reality and not because of some grand conspiracy. Assuming reality is consistent, you should expect news sources to agree on most of the facts on most things, and not because of a bias towards anything other than what a "fact" is
    - harimau777 2y ago
      The problem is that none of those stations are left leaning. At most they are centrist/liberal.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  CNN owned by TimeWarner/Discovery is also pivoting toward not publishing anything negative toward Trump. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-potter-scheppele-orban-trump-hungary-media-punish.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
  - zfg 2y ago
    What's an example of that pivot from CNN's website today?
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      From the citation > What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
      - zfg 2y ago
        Okay, but what's a real world example of that happening on CNN's website today?
        scarface_74 2y ago
        A real world example would f what didn’t happen? Putting your thumb on the scale is a lot more subtle. That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.
        zfg 2y ago
        Or you could simply find plenty of criticism of Trump on CNN's website which would invalidate the concern.
        scarface_74 2y ago
- timeon 2y ago
  > MSNBC as left leaning Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
  - t-3 2y ago
    They're leaning left from the perspective of the extreme right. To everyone else, they're just the leftmost portion of the rightist blob.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      This is clearly incorrect. MSNBC is pretty strongly left / progressive.
      - harimau777 2y ago
        Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.
        jlawson 2y ago
        If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results. I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob. In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.
        harimau777 2y ago
        If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.
- harimau777 2y ago
  CNN definitely isn't left leaning. Debatably even MSNBC is largely more liberal than left leaning. As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times. However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing. So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    And American left is pretty right by European standards. The democrats as a whole would definitely fall under the right camp here. Mostly the neoliberal one. Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America. No he wouldn't, have you seen his policies? He is more left wing than even Scandinavian countries, he wants the Employee funds that Sweden tried in the 80s and never went back to because it was too extreme left for them.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Employee ownership isn't that weird though? Most top execs get paid mostly in shares and options. Employees often have this option too. In a socialist view there would be no stock market at all. The Scandinavian countries aren't very left wing. They're just very rich so they have lots of money for welfare programs. But they're pretty anti immigrant. I would consider Spain more left wing.
    - spacebanana7 2y ago
      That was true 15 years ago - especially with Merkel/Obama/Cameron - but a lot has changed since then. The European right and American right essentially speak from the same ideology. As the Republicans have moved away from free markets, free trade and immigration. Trump, Farage, Weidel and Le Pen could all work happily in coalition together. The European left has become so fractured that it's hard to make clear comparisons. Which German political party would Bernie Sanders want to join of SPD, Greens, or Die Linke? In the UK would he work with the SNP, Labour or Corbyn?

silisili 2y ago

I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively. If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings. Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
  - kernal 2y ago
    The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.
- silisili 2y ago
  Like it or not, the Overton window in the US did shift last election. So many comments trying to compare to Europe, or try to excise liberal from left seem to miss the point. When an election so divisive picks a side, there's your new baseline. Not what it was last year. Not what CNN did in the Clinton years, or what it's claiming to do today.
- kernal 2y ago
  That’s comical considering CNN is the same network that promoted and pushed all of the Trump hoax stories. They also claimed Biden was mentally fit up until that lie was also exposed. CNN has no credibility in the news space.
pj_mukh 2y ago
And therefore, any argument that there is some kind of liberal bias is false (whether from Trump or Bezos). That's my point. In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).
- silisili 2y ago
  Well, from your viewpoint, sure. But if we pretend that only those three exist(obviously they don't, you have ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, and many, many more), it's not necessarily wrong to say that media has a liberal bias, since '67% of stations are left leaning.' It just leaves out the fact that nobody really watches them in numbers.
  - saghm 2y ago
    If a bunch of news outlets all share a certain viewpoint that doesn't actually help them get viewers, maybe it's just because that viewpoint reflects reality and not because of some grand conspiracy. Assuming reality is consistent, you should expect news sources to agree on most of the facts on most things, and not because of a bias towards anything other than what a "fact" is
  - harimau777 2y ago
    The problem is that none of those stations are left leaning. At most they are centrist/liberal.
scarface_74 2y ago
CNN owned by TimeWarner/Discovery is also pivoting toward not publishing anything negative toward Trump. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-potter-scheppele-orban-trump-hungary-media-punish.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
- zfg 2y ago
  What's an example of that pivot from CNN's website today?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    From the citation > What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
    - zfg 2y ago
      Okay, but what's a real world example of that happening on CNN's website today?
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        A real world example would f what didn’t happen? Putting your thumb on the scale is a lot more subtle. That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.
        zfg 2y ago
        Or you could simply find plenty of criticism of Trump on CNN's website which would invalidate the concern.
        scarface_74 2y ago
timeon 2y ago
> MSNBC as left leaning Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
- t-3 2y ago
  They're leaning left from the perspective of the extreme right. To everyone else, they're just the leftmost portion of the rightist blob.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    This is clearly incorrect. MSNBC is pretty strongly left / progressive.
    - harimau777 2y ago
      Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.
      - jlawson 2y ago
        If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results. I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob. In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.
        harimau777 2y ago
        If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.
harimau777 2y ago
CNN definitely isn't left leaning. Debatably even MSNBC is largely more liberal than left leaning. As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times. However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing. So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  And American left is pretty right by European standards. The democrats as a whole would definitely fall under the right camp here. Mostly the neoliberal one. Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America. No he wouldn't, have you seen his policies? He is more left wing than even Scandinavian countries, he wants the Employee funds that Sweden tried in the 80s and never went back to because it was too extreme left for them.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Employee ownership isn't that weird though? Most top execs get paid mostly in shares and options. Employees often have this option too. In a socialist view there would be no stock market at all. The Scandinavian countries aren't very left wing. They're just very rich so they have lots of money for welfare programs. But they're pretty anti immigrant. I would consider Spain more left wing.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    That was true 15 years ago - especially with Merkel/Obama/Cameron - but a lot has changed since then. The European right and American right essentially speak from the same ideology. As the Republicans have moved away from free markets, free trade and immigration. Trump, Farage, Weidel and Le Pen could all work happily in coalition together. The European left has become so fractured that it's hard to make clear comparisons. Which German political party would Bernie Sanders want to join of SPD, Greens, or Die Linke? In the UK would he work with the SNP, Labour or Corbyn?