This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. It doesn't matter if you are the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world, because almost no Americans know what Al Jazeera is, and the name evokes the image backdrop of a middle eastern city most Americans can't find on a map, discussing topics of primary interest to American Muslims and few else, while the female anchors are veiled. Not to mention it…
Americans know what Al Jazeera is. The problem is Americans no longer want their news from a viewpoint that doesn't have a bias in their direction.
It's a sad commentary on the state of America's appetite for intelligent analysis when serious journalism can't compete with attractive talking heads ignorantly spouting talking points. Obama may have said that the increased political rancor was one of the greatest regrets of his presidency, but I think this points to how little of that was attributable to him. Though I'd be willing to bet that their name was half th…
Serious journalism is way, way more expensive than the talking head stuff. Even if it costs a few rating points it makes sense to run the talking heads.
> Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison) Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.
> BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryi…
> The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven.
It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.
> They could and should have named it anything, but they really seemed to think their brand would carry any weight at all. I also wondered at the branding, but if they tried to hide their origins they would rightfully be accused of deception in a business, journalism, where credibility is paramount.
Kind of like how Fox News has news in its name but it's not news.
Every time there is news somehow connected to Gore, I can't help but think somewhere in a parallel universe, the supreme court stayed out of election politics, didn't hand the election to Bush instead of Gore then 9/11 never happened the following year because he actually paid attention to the memo about "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" - then Iraq was never invaded - then the TSA was never created - Gitmo wasn…
I find it really amusing that you noted "then credit default swaps were stopped in their tracks before they destroyed the economy" as one of the critical junctures in the US economy. It was, and most people dont realize that. CDS allowed large parts of the CDOs to become AAA and enabled all manners of craziness in 2002-2007.
Sadly, it often gets blamed on Clinton/Gore given the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 signed weeks before their term ended. The reality was all about how it was implemented/regulated/enforced, which was all during Bush's term. You note correctly, things would have been very different under Gore. For one thing, courageous individuals like Brooksley Born would have been allowed into the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born#Born_and_the_OT...
> It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time. That's a nice use case for multicast. Worked for me over a decade ago. I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.
I think that use case was implied by the OP: With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. W…
Does multicast see any actual use? I was under the impression that while it's theoretically great for a live video stream, nobody ever actually uses it.
Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.
This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds
Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.
> The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package. During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling accoun…
> an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. ESPN and professional sports are way over valued and forcing everyone to subsidize sports fans. This is literally the reason why people are becoming cord-cutters, they're tired of paying for things they don't want. Right now 1 in 6 cable sub…
"1 in 6 watches it, 6 in 6 pay for it".
Except that the marginal cost of providing ESPN service to people who do not watch ESPN is nearly zero.
A-la-carte pricing makes sense if the corporation is spending a-la-carte costs, but they're not: the cable hookup and maintenance costs almost the same either way. There are some issues with a cap on the number of channels that can be simultaneously transmitted in a cable pipe, but it's perfectly feasible to launch a few hundred simulcast channels on current tech. You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch; Providing the selection of things that you can refuse to watch, is basically free.
Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather. Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other…
You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.
Ever heard of "there's always three sides to every story"?
Apart from what the others replied(those networks will show stuff that isn't 'interesting' for some demographic), having the 'your' and 'mine' sides of the story is pretty much necessary to approximate the 'true' side.
> have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT? Yes. Additionally I didn't say Obama was running anything, I was more thinking the DoD. They likely fund, produce, or have produced specific bottled segments. Which isn't to say they have direct editorial control, just that propaganda is a common sight on US TVs. Plus I can back up what I am saying, here's a program from 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The US isn't run by an autocracy so there are competing interests in the government. It doesn't make sense to claim they are being controlled by the government, because they wouldn't agree with each other on what should be said. That said, there's definitely an implicit bias that America is right and North Korea/Iran/Russia etc are wrong but that's a nationwide problem, hardly evidence of some mass conspiracy.
You're replying to a comment that links to an article on the domestic PsyOps program run by the DoD, officially, since shortly after 9/11. The issue is not that people are patriotic. It is not even that political dissent is not tolerated in mainstream media. It is that propaganda pieces, manufactured with the expressed purpose to manipulate the electorate, are broadcast.
It's not like there is a party line on everything. You are allowed to have differing opinions on benign issues, such as cooking, celebrities, or football.