After making it about halfway through the comments here, I flagged TFA. It is probably "hypocritical" for me to say this, since I also have political opinions. Here it is anyway: despite the widespread understanding that "mainstream" news media leans Democrat, the fact that USA president is controversial and drives increased viewership has added tens of millions of dollars to their bottom lines. This would make a thoughtful person wonder just how committed to the Democrats (or "the truth"?) they really are. Similar observations about other media firms are left as an exercise for the reader.
Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
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Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine this is why you lost your flagging power, then. "You are obviously some sort of activist" is not a valid justification for removing someone from the discourse.
Not sure I ever had flagging power. I have never desired to flag anybody before now. If you want HN to degrade into rabid political name-calling, don't flag the people who do it. This person took the opportunity to level multiple refutable accusations at Trump, on a topic that had nothing to do with Trump. Would you rather I had engaged him at his level?
> This person took the opportunity to level multiple refutable accusations at Trump, on a topic that had nothing to do with Trump.
Of course this topic has to do something with Trump. In fact, Trump is at the core of it given the role of his administration in the upcoming merger of Sinclair to include even more local stations!
As for "multiple refutable accusations", I could provide you with many examples for each one, but that would be off topic indeed.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and reco…
If all news is biased, then what Sinclair is doing should be no big deal. They have a message they're pushing, just like everybody else. Do you believe that? And if everybody has a bias, it also shouldn't be a big deal for me to ask you: What's yours?
If they had to put a disclaimer in front of every local news anchor saying "the following content was produced by Sinclair Corporation in collaboration with President Trump", there would not be a problem. Just like we do with other kinds of political advertisements.
The problem is not the bias. The problem is the deception about who is responsible for the content. And yes, this falls into the same category as government employees in St. Petersburg masquerading as US citizens while publishing political propaganda.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is the corporation. Sinclair has it's own political agenda. Forcing anchors across the US to recite something is bad enough, but when that something is of questionable truth, and orchestrated to minimuze Sinclair's own propensity to push its right-ist agenda, it's downright scary.
Yeah, just about as scary as GE, Disney, Time Warner et al. pushing their left wing agendas via CNN, MSNBC/NBC and ABC. See, everyone can play this game in the Postmodernist world.
Citations please? Preferably from sources located near the middle of this diagram.[1]
1 - https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2016/12/15/Photos/NS/M...
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#215In my eyes, this is a clear set/spike play. A huge corporation, enabled by their corrupt allies in the FCC, buy up hundreds of "local" stations. They then use the local cred/reputation of these stations to suggest that fake news is rampant on other sources (not controlled by Sinclair). They then tilt the dialogue nation-wide. Meanwhile, the average citizen is unaware that their trusted local anchor is bought/sold, th…
How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly? It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's…
> It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are.
CNN reporting negatively on Trump doesn't make them "fake". He's a bad president and a bad leader; reporting on that means you're telling the truth. Fake mean lying, not reporting truth you don't want to hear.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all news is biased, why bother watching any it?
Because nothing in the world is perfect, and by acknowledging that you and others all have implicit and explicit biases you can use your critical thinking skills to learn about the world without blindly accepting other people's biases as your own?
When people say something is biased, they usually mean to an unreasonably high degree. As you say, the nature of the universe dictates that everything is biased in some way. While a news source inevitably has to pick and choose what stories it's going to report, most people would not consider it "biased" if it simply reported what events occurred and did not take place in writing opinion pieces. On the other hand people consider news to be biased when it skews too far towards editorializing content and telling people how they should interpret reality.
Take for instance every time the POTUS makes a speech, and I'm talking about presidents long before Trump; as soon as they stop speaking, every new station cuts to a group of pundits to tell you how you should interpret what the president just said. It's not journalism at all, and anyone who pays attention to politics a lot would be just as qualified to be a pundit. Why should anyone trust that level of bias over what was actually said? If the opinions of political junkies are more important than what was said, then we're basically screwed because it's not the people who decide how to view events, but it's news organizations who pay people to dictate opinion that create the narrative around events.
Yes, you can certainly sift through bias using critical thinking skills, but this only gets you so far when the news itself becomes more bias than actual reporting. We don't live in a perfect world where everyone is capable of critical thinking. If we did, then almost everyone would shut off the TV as soon as the president is done speaking. Instead, we live in an imperfect world where having highly biased news is really dangerous for a society that hasn't proven to be capable of coming up with its own perspectives when other perspectives are being foisted upon them by the press and the state.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#217Nothing new. I worked in a newsroom as an intern and most major news stations rely (maybe, relied, it's been a few years) on a tool like ENPS. It's made by the Associated Press and has a "wire" feature where new stories come into. So, e.g., if there was a plane crash, that message would be pushed out to all newsrooms that rely on ENPS. The news producers were lazy, too. They'd literally take the script that ENPS push…
Where do you suggest people go to get their news instead ?
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember Trump saying he would sign literally any immigration deal brought to him by a bipartisan group, and when they did what he asked he rejected it, thanks to Stephen Miller. Then Chuck Schumer basically told Trump to name how much he wanted for the wall, which Trump refused to do. Then the government shut down and Trump relished in blaming Democrats. > The left refused that compromise Why was a compromised nee…
Democrats should be willing to compromise because they value the DACA fix more than their opposition to border funding. They are instead doing the same thing Republicans did to Obama, refusing to compromise in order to whip up their base. Any politician that compromises an inch these days will be portrayed as an immoral enemy and attacked by some vocal part of their own base.
They literally offered DACA in exchange for a wall. Trump administration then tried to change the deal and push for the RAISE Act on top of it.
That's called negotiating in bad faith.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#219Trump recently took DACA off the negotiating table, announcing it in a tweet, citing a Fox News & Friends segment on 'caravans' of inbound immigrants: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration/trump-say... The President is watching this same garbage and making policy decisions based on it. Let that sink in for a moment.
What are my best and quickest options to legally expatriate out of the US?
In case your question was not a rhetorical device, or a troll, there are almost a dozen nations that enable US expatriates to stay indefinitely on non-work visas. Hang out in digital nomad forums and you will discover that with a few exceptions, most fund their lifestyle through remote work and do not declare to their host country their intention to remote work while on a non-work visa. Most nations aren't set up to handle the vagaries of remote work, anyways.
You sit in Thailand, contracted to a client headquartered in San Francisco, whose servers you solely work on sit in Montreal, and the team you work with offices in Berlin; if you try to go legal in such a situation, you will either quickly go broke on attorney, CPA and FX fees, the taxes every jurisdiction levies because there are no reciprocity agreements for many of those inter-relationships yet, or both. The situation is ugly even in supposed "streamlined" situations like NAFTA between the US and Canada; I've seen firms with offices in both nations, employees in both nations, and employees from one are still denied entering the other to do face-to-face work with co-workers, and it's gotten to such a ridiculous level that Legal just verbally signs off on a "don't ask don't tell" policy to declare upon entry that the visit is only for a (or series of) business meetings.
It's not difficult to perform the physical expatriation act. It's difficult to navigate the logistical tail of expatriation though, because movement of labor is still far more constrained than capital movement. Time-wise, it is like 2-3 orders of magnitude. I can flip a year's worth of even high-end labor in USD to CNY under all the capital controls in both host nations in 10 days give or take and make the transfer permanent. Whereas permanently moving my labor in compliance between the same nations is on the order of thousands of days, semi-permanently (residency) moving the same labor is on the order of hundreds of days, and moving labor within 90 days involves all sorts of strings attached that capital doesn't bother with. Issues surrounding healthcare, education (if you have or intend to start a family), cultural and social fit, language, taxes, housing, transportation, forex, etc. pop up when you really dig into the expatriation process, and an amazing amount of what you put up with are purely political constructs and not intrinsic to the actual move itself. So the question becomes not "What are my best and quickest options...", but more "here is my situation and anticipated future desires in lots of pretty intimate personal detail, now what are my options?"
I used to subscribe to the Church of Globalization, but once I delved into the actual practice of expatriation and realized just how much capital movement is favored over labor movement, that was the start of the crack in that edifice, and now I want Capital Globalization rolled back to reciprocity with Labor Globalization, and then roll both forward in tandem. When it gets as easy to move around the world and vote with your feet as with your financial tokens, then I'm fully on board with progressing globalization.
Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention rigging the presidential debates by providing the questions ahead of time to its chosen campaign.
Anyone who thinks that this "rigs" a debate in any meaningful way is watching too much Hannity. Debate questions are not some big secret surprise; the candidates drill for MONTHS on all the likely sorts of questions that could be asked. And there weren't any "gotcha" questions asked in the debate in question; just straight-up stuff that any prepared candidate could answer in his/her sleep.
Can you skip the ad hominem attacks, please?
There is an obvious difference between knowing the range of questions vs knowing the exact questions on, eg, a qualification exam. The full list of questions is usually public beforehand, the exact questions you get is not.
The same logic applies to the debate. Knowing the exact questions gives an advantage, allowing one side to tailor and concentrate their message. Once you know what is going to be asked, you can prep more extensively in that space, while the other side is spreading out their efforts, being less efficient.