I've found that I have to carefully tailor my arguments depending on the audience, to a greater and greater degree lately. In many places it seems the only way to get someone to listen to you is to couch everything you say in the terms of their pet causes. If I argue for LGBT rights with a conservative I have to make it about constitutionality and government overreach. If I discuss male victims of sexual and domestic violence with a leftist I have to talk mostly about female victims. If I advocate for the free speech rights of racists I get called a Nazi and when I advocate for the free speech rights of Drag Queen Story Hour I get called a communist.
Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented. What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?
I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading. If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research. Instead,…
This should be trivially easy for proponents of that theory to prove it if that is in his emails. Just link to an un-edited, full context email thread relevant to that topic.
So does this exist? If so, just share that link. If not, stop pretending that "media bias" is an excuse to continue sharing the claim surrounded by unfounded conspiracy thinking.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#73I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things" - this is the number one fake news tactic in play. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a 2x2 matrix - If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never se…
> For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats,
Not true at all. Here's one critical about Democrats as being too beholden to progressives: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
Here’s one critical about the current Democratic VP largely for being too concerned with (and ultimately ineffective at) undercutting Republican talking points. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
And that's just one day.
Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power.
(When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#74I have been reading daily news for 50 years. When I first started reading the news, it was objective. It portrayed facts with little opinion. Then during the Reagan presidency, I noticed a trend towards liberal bias in the media. This is well documented by MRC.org. To counter this, conservative talk radio was born, and Fox news was created. In the din of infinite media outlets, the major media outlets must stand out…
What I continue to be surprised by is how the left-leaning sources keep denying their liberal bias. Fox news more or less admits to being right-leaning, but CNN is still insisting that they're unbiased, which is almost comical. I think that somehow left-biased types really, honestly, believe they're actually considering both sides of every issue, and just coming to the conclusion that "reality has a liberal bias".
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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#75AllSides buys wholesale into right-wing framing. By what measure is CNN's news coverage on the leftmost side of the spectrum? Is MSNBC really the equivalent of Jacobin or Mother Jones, especially when it devotes 3 hours each morning to center-right Morning Joe? https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
> By what measure is CNN's news coverage on the leftmost side "The latest Trump scandal shows how much we must still discover about his presidency's assault on democracy" "Trump's DOJ continued to pursue a CNN reporter's records even after a federal judge called the reasoning 'unanchored in any facts'" "A senate report reveals new details about the stunning security breakdowns ahead of the January 6 attack but omits…
This is the problem with concepts of polarization: when one side is completely corrupt, reporting on that corruption (that is, observing basic reality) becomes a political act easily described as 'biased.'
The Republican party is fascist.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#76> “We can’t pretend the Constitution doesn’t say what it says.” And then you read how some Supreme Court justices make a decision and you’re wondering if they are even reading the same document
We also pretend the law doesn’t say what it says. Look at the sanctuary states for illegal immigration and marijuana. Then the red states started doing the same thing with second amendment sanctuary states.
Looks like if there’s no political will to enforce the law it doesn’t get enforced.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing a lot of people miss is that there is a profit motive here. You can make money, sometimes a lot of money, by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. You can find examples of people doing this on all sides, especially at the extremes where outrage and other powerful negative emotions can most easily be stirred up. All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorshi…
Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump. No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them…
Ballots are secret in the Unites States. Therefore this person must have vocally supported Trump. Therefore you are being misleading about what incited his former fans.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#78I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…
I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim ; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious…
When they present those percentages does that apply only to Hollywood films, or films world-wide? And do foreign films represent their own populations proportionally, should we and they calculate national proportions or global proportions?
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim ; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious…
American media is a global industry and is serving a customer base of much more than the US population.
True, but they're making most of their money from western whiter countries. Which is reflected in their actors/stars. However this is already changing and will get better as the global market continues to expand.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#80My main issue with American news and commentary is the complete lack of skepticism of those on 'their side' of an issue. On the right, when Trump hadn't yet gotten control of the party, there was some persistent reaction against him from established conservative media. Once he got control, it was almost complete silence. On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's electi…
> On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants. This is bizarre. No such thing happened.
Fascists don't care about truth. It's that simple.
And people are that easy to mislead. At least for a while.