Why are there so many more liberal news networks compared to conservative news networks?

[theeedude]

Conservatives like monopolies.

 

[hal2kilo]

wow, lot of new fake members telling people to start reading RT.

where the fuck have we seen this before, eh?

Yes, I'm also seeing a pattern.

 

[hal2kilo]

I see it this way

Lefties believe that they are smarter and better than the "average" deplorable American -- they can't be influenced because they know better than the masses. This explains their affinity for one source or one type of source which offers confirmation and amplifies their preferred sense of what is progressive. It is precisely the reason those sources can indeed influence group think positioned as heightened intellectual awareness. The influence requires denial. The denial results from this heightened sense of superiority and an eliticist culture of speaking down to and dismissing as intellectually inferior those they disagree with.

See what I did there.

There is no left wing or right wing media. Fox News plays to one demographic. MSNBC plays to the other. CNN falls somewhere in between.

CNN is just a joke anymore. Liberal bias not found , also news not found.

 

[OrByte]

I'm sorry, what is RT? and why should I consider it an unbiased news source?

according to FOX views, anything other than FOX is considered unreliable "lamestream media"

That should tell us everything we need to know about FOX and it's viewers.

Liberal news consumers do not do the "group think" as much as republican news consumers...but that is not to say there are no liberal "cool-aid" drinkers out there.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I see it this way

Lefties believe that they are smarter and better than the "average" deplorable American -- they can't be influenced because they know better than the masses. This explains their affinity for one source or one type of source which offers confirmation and amplifies their preferred sense of what is progressive. It is precisely the reason those sources can indeed influence group think positioned as heightened intellectual awareness. The influence requires denial. The denial results from this heightened sense of superiority and an eliticist culture of speaking down to and dismissing as intellectually inferior those they disagree with.

See what I did there.

There is no left wing or right wing media. Fox News plays to one demographic. MSNBC plays to the other. CNN falls somewhere in between.

Let's go back to "news". Either the events took place, or they didn't. Either there wasn't a cause to the events linked to an agenda or economic interest, or there was. And it is possible to manufacture an event and extend it in time and duration because the "manufacturers" have an agenda. The manufactured event is "real," but it was manufactured.

I think you really missed the point. If I assume or suspect that I might not be as smart as I think I am, then I'll be more inclined to look more critically at media, examine other sources, apply inferential logic to determine whether I'm getting closer or further from the truth. If I realize that media entities may coordinate a campaign to influence an "average of the mass," I'll be more suspicious of hidden agendas. I might "think" I'm an individual, but if I don't admit that I'm "average" enough to be targeted by a propaganda campaign, I won't see it for what it is.

A certified genius who fails to see these things, naïve to the science and practice of coordinated media influence and agenda, will be no less influenced unknowingly than those who score below "2-sigma." So the genius may be as stupid about some things as everyone else.

Liberals are as naïve about these things as are conservatives. Then one has to ask which concentrated economic interests choose as a vehicle for influence, and whom they choose for greater focus because it serves those interests. If a cabal of oil executives are interested in less regulation of their business even if that business is guaranteed profit anyway, they will appeal to a group concerned about their miniscule property rights, subscribing to myths of threat to them. There may not be a real connection of the dots, but the concentrated interests will promote a connection.

H. L. Hunt once controlled a whole string of media outlets throughout the southwest and west. Do you think those outlets ever highlighted things like environmental damage or the implications it may have had for greater regulation?

My own local newspaper is an example. On one day some years ago, LA TIMES ran a news analysis article about EXXON's failure to invest in Angola's infrastructure. Of course, one could want to evaluate the extent of that failure. Or whether it was a news issue in Angola. The article suggested that this shortcoming could push Angola back toward socialism. On the same day, my local rag ran an editorial entitled "Hands off Big Oil!"

The local rag at that time was run out of a Dallas penthouse. All the board members sat on other boards with either oil or tech-industry people with a big interest in environmental deregulation. And on all of those other boards -- some 9 or 10 -- there was one person they all had in common: Raymond L. Hunt, board member Halliburton, president and major owner Hunt Oil, chairman of the Dallas Federal Reserve.

The reason I began to track this down arose from an article printed in the paper trying to argue that perchlorate groundwater contamination wasn't a threat, that it had been played down by some science council -- while it avoided the simple fact that the materials would be absorbed by lettuce and other crops. I was just interested in the money behind the paper, and I found that money.

 

[stormkroe]

It seems more accurate to call those liberal news sources 'left leaning', it's just that there are a few writers in each that skew perception of them to hard-left (ESPECIALLY huffpo).
Also, FOX is huge. I would wager that if you look at actual news output, it would be a lot more even than counting how many names it arrives from.

 

[FIVR]

That's got to the be the stupidest thing I've read here in months, and with some of our resident trolls that's really saying something.

You are either a complete moron or a paid shill.

Unbiased? lol

RT is excellent source of wikileaks info. Where do you go to read your Podesta and HRC email leaks?

 

[trenchfoot]

Sure, there are left leaning and right leaning media sources.

But what matters to me most is which of these media sources have to boost ratings by lying their asses off 24/7.

Now, ANY sensible person who can face the truth of the matter knows which fair and balanced news sources they are, right?

IMO, the only sources of information that matters to me at all are the ones that base their news, and especially their commentary on straight up facts without the spin that turns them into lies. Again, we all know where that leads to media-wise.

 

[baydude]

I guess it does pay off to be the only conservative appealing news network:

Fox News tripling CNN, MSNBC in viewers since Election Day

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/309087-fox-news-tripling-cnn-msnbc-in-viewers-since-election-day

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Here's an example for further analysis.

"No fooling -- fake news is hard to resist"

Let's give it some useful empirical labels.

First, it's "editorial opinion" which is fair game for any distortion or slant the authors may incline.

Second, it is "meta-communication" -- just as is this thread: a discussion about the nature of communication.

The paper has always been right-wing, despite the more recent phenomenon of a Dem majority in the county. This Dem majority has been boosted by millennial voter registrations over the last couple years.

You can further characterize more than one target audience. In addition to "preaching to the choir" of folks in the county hinterland, the paper must balance that with an agenda of barraging the city-dwellers with exclusively right-wing journalists like Sowell or Krauthammer. Specifically, though, there is a university campus here (jam-packed with millennials) of some 20,000-plus students.

This latter category dovetails with the content of the article, which cites a study about "young people" and their gullibility for either fake news or media distortion.

In a campaign year in which the focus has been on Drudge, Breitbart and other entities, every single example in the editorial fits the improbable category of "Leftie" propaganda.

I don't have time now to vet and verify these items. I could suspect that they are even "made up," but I won't go to that conclusion without fact, and gathering the fact takes the time at this moment that I don't have. that's not the point -- at this point.

But the examples cite a phony poll that supposedly showing "NRA out of touch with its members" on gun-control; a story that Elizabeth Warren -- whose mantra and agenda paralleled that of Sanders -- had indeed "endorsed" Sanders. Just about every example in the editorial highlights purported left-wing attempts to influence a target audience. There is no mention of the other examples -- many of which we'd recognized on our own during the campaign season, without the paternalistic hand of "Liberal media."

And of course, you could ask -- why is the Sanders/Warren story so useful? the argument targets two groups: Millennials who were more likely to support Sanders, and women who may have supported either Sanders or Clinton. Now . . . you can tease more out of that, or disagree.

But there's no doubt that the paper is using a discussion of media distortion to distort public opinion about media distortion.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Sure, there are left leaning and right leaning media sources.

But what matters to me most is which of these media sources have to boost ratings by lying their asses off 24/7.

Now, ANY sensible person who can face the truth of the matter knows which fair and balanced news sources they are, right?

IMO, the only sources of information that matters to me at all are the ones that base their news, and especially their commentary on straight up facts without the spin that turns them into lies. Again, we all know where that leads to media-wise.

There's another aspect to this: implicit censorship. Any news organization with Reuters, AP, UPI or other feeds will cherry-pick those news-items and facts it chooses. So in order to get a wider idea of what is really happening in the world, you have to review multiple sources.

At this point, on any given news-day or week or month, you could tally all the news events given time on one channel or the other and compare. You could also simply weight those events according to the time given to them.

Here's another example. Back in early 2004, all the news stations announced that Ted Kennedy would appear at the National Press Club to make a presentation critical of Bush and the war begun the previous year. The announcement of the appearance was made on FOX, CNN, MSNBC -- just about everywhere.

When the scheduled appearance began, FOX gave it about 5 minutes coverage -- cherry-picking a small part of Kennedy's presentation. Other media covered the whole half-hour presentation.

 

[FIVR]

It's a corollary to the "Both Sides Do it" narrative, see? Because if high-achieving and high-functioning students at this prestigious university can be fooled, clearly anybody can. That is the unstated conclusion to that article. We are all fooled all the time, so who cares? It's all the same because both sides do it!

 

[umbrella39]

I guess it does pay off to be the only conservative appealing news network:

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/309087-fox-news-tripling-cnn-msnbc-in-viewers-since-election-day

This simply proves that the vast majority of liberals don't listen to AM talk radio nor watch cable TV news no matter what the source. That's why Air America failed. There is no audience, tried to listen to it a few times and it made me just as sick as trying to listen to Rush. We don't need to be told what to think. The liberal brain is clearly wired differently than its conservative counterpart... The conservative brain craves affirmation and its daily booster shot...

 

[kage69]

He's Russian. No, he actually is Russian, and likely paid to post.

RT is excellent source of wikileaks info. Where do you go to read your Podesta and HRC email leaks?

I wasn't expecting him to confirm it, but that's close. RT and 'excellent' in the same sentence, haha.

State media is of course bullshit, but it's hard to respect 'journalism' from a country where journalist are so regularly intimidated, assaulted, and assassinated for not toeing a political line. If I ever need lessons on how to sound sanctimonious after I kill a multitude of civilians and children I'll give RT my full and undivided attention though.

FIVR, go find a real job. You suck at this one.

 

[FIVR]

I wasn't expecting him to confirm it, but that's close. RT and 'excellent' in the same sentence, haha.

State media is of course bullshit, but it's hard to respect 'journalism' from a country where journalist are so regularly intimidated, assaulted, and assassinated for not toeing a political line. If I ever need lessons on how to sound sanctimonious after I kill a multitude of civilians and children I'll give RT my full and undivided attention though.

FIVR, go find a real job. You suck at this one.

My job is dishwasher at local Pizzeria, I don't know why this guy says I am Russian. I don't even know where Russia is on a map!

Why would you say these things to a poster just because you believe they are Russian, anyway? Are you Russophobic? I don't see posters who are ostensibly from the UK or canada treated so poorly.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If you can identify specific cases of blatant or subtle distortion, you can score the media sources. I have yet to try and do this: think about what a monumental task it could be.

But my consciousness to these things was slowly raised during the '90s when the front pages were reporting on the Clinton "scandals." If you might remember, the special prosecutor or whomever succeeded Ken Starr (continuing as a GOP-oriented investigation under a GOP-dominated congress) finally concluded at the very end of Clinton's term that none of those "scandals" held anything prosecutable. After eight years of barraging the public with the sensationalism, stamping in the public's mind that there was a "There" there, they got a clean bill of health.

So I've been quite inclined over the last five to ten years to conclude that the Right, identified according to their media sources, chooses to distort more as "advocacy journalism" than the so-called "Liberal" media of "objective journalism."

Digging deeper into that phenomenon -- I'm sure someone will come back to call it out -- it reflects an attitude from this political corner as opposed to the other corner.

Righties are cynical. They play to fence-sitters, and in their propaganda it is implicit that they think the public can be easily misled, that the public is unsophisticated and easily manipulated. Instead of thinking that democratic decisions might ideally be intelligent decisions of a well-informed public, their media campaigns include just the assumption that a large element of the electorate can be fooled.

Of course, someone might find this or that politician or instance of a media source which might indicate a similar attitude from either the "center" or the Left, but I think the imbalance could be demonstrated. It is an issue of a cynical attitude about the public at large.

Go back to the time when Glenn Beck was on FOX. He gave a faux-lecture on propaganda. His repetitive argument was that his own audience was "smart, independent, cannot be fooled, aren't average or average-of-the-mass." That was his argument, and nothing underscored it further. It was an argument to insist that the real duplicitous sources of distortion came from the Left.

But if one had read widely a body of literature that included document declassifications, scholarly works on propaganda and psy-war which Beck's audience was assumed not to have read, they would all say that the reason propaganda or psy-war works is the assumption by a malleable public that "they're smart, they're independent, they're not average."

It was clear as a bell what he was doing and what he was trying to do, and there was no refutation for it.

Sooner or later, human progress requires that dialog end over this or that topic. "Whether or not the world is flat," for instance. If the dialog never reaches a consensus, you can usually trace the perpetuation to . . . . concentrated economic interests, seeking governmental rents, control of the government on behalf of those interests, influence of the government on behalf of the same.

Where do we derive our understanding of plutocracy? Concentrated economic interests. The 31-flavors Ice-Cream chain doesn't have a focused concern about FDA policies, and would simply be more inclined to comply and cooperate with Ben and Jerry's or myriad others. If the economy depends on one thing, held by a few players, owned by a plurality but concentrated mostly in the hands of a few, you more likely see that phenomenon of "unwarranted influence, sought or unsought."

 

[Moonbeam]

A liberal brain uses reason to determine the objectivity of data. A conservative brain arrives with an emotionally preferred understanding that judges the objectivity of data by the degree of agreement between the two.

The result of course, when you ask each group to judge media, is the farce we see in this thread, one side talking sense and the other shoveling shit. A person's opinion as to which side does what depends on whether your brain can accept peered review science.

All of these debates between liberals and conservatives can be boiled down to the simple fact that conservatives prefer lies over truth more so than liberals do and they will never be able to see it because they don't want to. They appear to be stupid or cowards who are afraid to face reality, but the facts are that what they are really doing is trying to protect themselves from more of the terrible traumatic pain they have already experienced. To deal objectively with truth for a conservative is to experience the fear of death. It's no wonder conservatives hate liberals.

Every liberal alive has been exposed to this madness of conservatives, the insanity of their denial, and that is the horror that conservative denial causes liberals to have to live with. It's no wonder that liberals hate conservatives.

I wonder where today is on the dooms day clock.

 

[IronWing]

My job is dishwasher at local Pizzeria, I don't know why this guy says I am Russian. I don't even know where Russia is on a map!

Why would you say these things to a poster just because you believe they are Russian, anyway? Are you Russophobic? I don't see posters who are ostensibly from the UK or canada treated so poorly.

It's because you suck at American idioms and American phrasing. You understand which buttons to push politically but your wording screams, "Russian".

 

[HomerJS]

Megyn Kelly begs to differ. Also Fox managed to offer the best moderated of the debates. What they are selling is not journalism.

I don't recall MSNBC ever doing a story damaging to Democrats but that is because MSNBC is the Fox of the left. Commentary and packaging.

The NY Times and CNN on occasion still provide true objective journalism. I would say the same for Rolling Stone were it not for their trying to push the rape culture narrative a bit too aggressively.

Yeah she's hot but again I don't recall her breaking any damaging stories about Republicans.

 

[kage69]

My job is dishwasher at local Pizzeria, I don't know why this guy says I am Russian. I don't even know where Russia is on a map!

Not the best comment on your powers of observation, is it? A puzzling admission from someone content to wade into international politics and the intelligence practices that support it.

Why would you say these things to a poster just because you believe they are Russian, anyway? Are you Russophobic? I don't see posters who are ostensibly from the UK or canada treated so poorly.

We don't see posters from the UK or Canada so uninformed yet so ideological, certainly not parroting Moscow's favorite line of dismissal

I stand by my comments (and IronWing's for that matter); you're either not very intelligent, or the simplest of political tools.

Good luck with your dishes comrade.

 

[FIVR]

We don't see posters from the UK or Canada so uninformed yet so ideological, certainly not parroting Moscow's favorite line of dismissal

Much like the US, Moscow is often used as a scapegoat for many different governments. Their "line of dismissal" is similarly often used by Washington to dismiss specious conspiracy theories, quite understandably so.


I'm curious; what ideology do I espouse? AFAIK I am not ideological, will be interesting to see what you make up.


PS: Your blatant Russophobia is duly noted. I'm actually 100% American, born and raised. You ascribe nationality to random posters, and then accuse them of being "ideological" without providing evidence, merely because your own hatred of Russians is so endemic and pervasive it has clouded your vision to the point where you see Russians everywhere! It's actually quite comical.

 

[Commodus]

My job is dishwasher at local Pizzeria, I don't know why this guy says I am Russian. I don't even know where Russia is on a map!

Why would you say these things to a poster just because you believe they are Russian, anyway? Are you Russophobic? I don't see posters who are ostensibly from the UK or canada treated so poorly.

Russians are fine people. A Russian government that has political enemies assassinated, manipulates the news, illegally annexes parts of countries and may well have hacked the US to manipulate the election? Unacceptable.

Until Putin and anyone who thinks like him are out of office, any political stories about the US from RT must be considered suspect.

 

[FIVR]

Russians are fine people. A Russian government that has political enemies assassinated, manipulates the news, illegally annexes parts of countries and may well have hacked the US to manipulate the election? Unacceptable.

Until Putin and anyone who thinks like him are out of office, any political stories about the US from RT must be considered suspect.

I am aware that the Russian govt conducts assassinations, so does the US govt. Of course, the US prefers to do this from thousands of miles away using robotic drones that drop thermobaric missiles. The Russians are much more personal when they assassinate people, A. L. was killed with polonium-laced tea by a single SVR agent. These are not actions that I would condone, at all. IMO assassination is a criminal act that should never be sanctioned by the state. Sadly, that's not he world we live in.


RT does post propaganda and of course, it does take moscow's side on any controversial issue. That should be understandable, though, considering you have FOX parroting everything Trump says in a similar if not more egregious case of propaganda propagation. They are not trustworthy on Russian issues, but I would say they are more accurate about US news than most US news agencies.

 

[Commodus]

I am aware that the Russian govt conducts assassinations, so does the US govt. Of course, the US prefers to do this from thousands of miles away using robotic drones that drop thermobaric missiles. The Russians are much more personal when they assassinate people, A. V. was killed with polonium-laced tea by a single SVR agent. These are not actions that I would condone, at all. IMO assassination is a criminal act that should never be sanctioned by the state. Sadly, that's not he world we live in.

RT does post propaganda and of course, it does take moscow's side on any controversial issue. That should be understandable, though, considering you have FOX parroting everything Trump says in a similar if not more egregious case of propaganda propagation. They are not trustworthy on Russian issues, but I would say they are more accurate about US news than most US news agencies.

If anything, a site clearly being influenced by the Russian government should be immediately dismissed as a source for US news. RT has a vested interest in painting the US in a negative light; it can exaggerate the importance of a discovery or downplay valid American criticism. Finding a completely neutral news source is difficult or impossible, but you can do much, much better than RT.

 

[Puffnstuff]

success is that it embraced News as a form of entertainment from the start and thats why it took off. FoxNews is great at narrative building and engaging the viewer.

Hotties delivering right wing agenda cloaked as conservative views is one of the more ironic iterations of journalism. Complaining about liberalism whilst wearing a mini skirt and low neck top speaks volumes about the pseudo conservative movement that is really liberalism in disguise.