vivster said:
NightDragon83 said:
AHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh yes, "the people" would be like a flock of lost sheep without the all-powerful and all-knowing corporate-owned media to guide them through life and tell them how to think at every turn. Who needs all those constitutinal amendments anyway when we have billion dollar media corporations on our side?!?
Would this by chance be the same "media" who assured us Donald Trump had no shot at the presidency, and who wouldn't give Bernie Sanders the time of day compared to Hillary during the primary campaign either?
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It's not about guiding or shaping opinions. It's about amplifying voices. If a man is elected that the majority of the country does not want, voices apparently need more amplifying. Nobody expected Trump to win, not even Trump because nobody knew how far the stupification of the public has progressed. But yeah, without the media highlighting all the stupid shit the president is doing it would be a lot worse.
The media is just as broken as the political system as a whole. It's all about entertainment and the issues don't matter. In that regard politics and the media in the US are the exact same.
But now that the worst event has happened we might as well use something broken to defend against something broken. However disregarding as a whole is very dangerous when the vast majority of news media is perfectly fine. Defaming the media as a whole like a certain president and his supporters do is aching to book buring.
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Oh, but IT IS about guiding and shaping opinions. The problem is the mainstream media, both print and broadcast, gets to pick and choose which voices it wants to amplify to support its own narratives and push particular causes and points of view.
Take a look at the major broadcast and cable news channels in the US for example... with the exception of NewsCorp / Fox News which pushes an obviously pro-Republican / conservative viewpoint, all the other major outlets from the alphabet networks to the cable channels and their associated print / online media are decidedly pro-Democrat and progressive agenda with very few exceptions.
On top of that, you have a handful of mega-billion dollar corporations like Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that dominate the social media landscape and further serve to influence and shape public sphere of opinions even moreso than the traditional news media these days, and all of these companies from the top-down actively work to promote and support a progressive agenda while punishing those who stray from said agenda. Even traditionally non-political media outlets like ESPN have seen politics creeping into their daily programming and have taken to promoting certain views and social agendas in recent years due to the progressive agenda of their parent company ABC/Disney.
And let's not kid ourselves here, ALL of these companies are in it for the $$$ and will do whatever they can to keep themselves filthy rich while promoting and supporting their own causes and agendas in the process. It's not about "justice and fairness" for them, and they could care less if everyone's voice isn't heard just as long as the voices they want to be heard aren't being stifiled.