Cerebralbore101 said:
The news should report the facts, all of the facts, and nothing but the facts. If those facts support one candidate over another, then that is not propaganda. It simply means reality is biased against one candidate over another. All opinion pieces in newspapers, and cable T.V. are propaganda to some degree or another, unless the outlet gives equal time, representation, and space to both sides of an issue. For example: Let's say Fox or CNN, or NBC decides to gather up a panel to talk about global warming. Now let's say they bring in a ratio of 5 to 1 either for or against global warming. The minority (whichever it may be) gets hammered by the other five people on the talk show. That is propaganda. A better approach would be to bring in just two experts, one that agrees, and one that disagrees. In the 80's and 90's broadcasters were stuck with a fine for doing this. Republicans and a few Democrats decided to do away with those fines. That gave rise to Fox News, with its reporters that scream over any liberal guests, and cut their mikes. Anyway I hope that answers your question of what we should do. Simply go back to fining offenders. Any outlets saying that Clinton had a 99% chance to win the election were blatantly lying. The real odds were more like 33% for Trump and 66% for Clinton. That's what sites like 270 were reporting based on detailed analysis. It's not about censoring left or right outlets. There should be no left or right outlets, and before 1996 all news networks were simply news. If any network decided to start making propaganda they were struck with fines. But again, after these fines were done away with Rupert Murdoch started Fox News and ran a 24/7 propaganda network. Slowly other networks joined in as a reactionary tactic, and news became more about ratings than actual news. Nine times out of ten, whenever a right winger says that mainstream media is biased, what they really mean is that reality is biased. Some things such as evolution, man made global warming, price controls, and the success of communism are not up for debate. Ninetynine percent of climate and evolutionary scientists agree, because the facts overwhelmingly line up with their assessments. It doesn't matter what religious idiots, or oil companies think. Nintetynine percent of economists agree that price controls, and communism are terrible for the economy. It doesn't matter what New Yorkers with rent control, or Bernie supporters think. The difference here is that you won't hear liberals complaining that the MSM doesn't report on the successes of extreme socialism, because they know that's crazy talk. They secretly know that their extreme positions have been rejected by reality, and understand why the MSM doesn't give their ideas the time of day. |
I agree with this in principle but I think it's quite naive to assume political outlets would ever do that. Politics is a battle of ideas, just as much as a battle of facts. You can never have absolutely objective politics, it doesn't work. Also, you seem blinded by your political - wait for it - agenda. You talk about Fox News doing propaganda and I absolutely agree with that. But left-wing media also does that and in Germany (where I live) the two biggest TV channels are run by a committee put in place by the biggest political parties. Did you see the example where some news outlets reported Trump committed a Faux Pas while feeding Japanese fish - even though Trump followed the example of the Japanese Prime Minister (which those news outlets conveniently cut out of the picture)? Or my other example about Huffington Post distorting studies about domestic violence, by basically saying "women only hit back, so it doesn't count"? Both sides do it equally and assuming "reality" is biased against one side is just not true. A conservative could simply say the same - which one of you would be right? It's just that you are blind to the distortion of facts of "your" side - just like any conservative is, as well.
What seems fair and unbiased to you is not fair and unbiased to a conservative person because conservative people value different things: left-leaning people value fairness more than anything else, while right-leaning people put more emphasis on things like structure and order. Neither of this is "correct", it is a matter of personal belief and opinion.
Edit: Oh and about Clinton's odds in the election - it depends on your interpretation of the facts! If you thought the "Blue Wall" was real (which could be backed up by statistics from the last 25 years) then a chance higher than 90% for Clinton absolutely made sense. I mean, that's the point really: We are not just dealing with simple numbers here! There's dozens of variables going into these estimates like which pollster is biased in which way and how to interpret past elections and the data collected in them or predictions to be made like how the black vote will turn out if a white woman runs for president compared to the years before. You can't just look at this stuff in hindsight and say these outlets were lying. It was way more complicated than that and the mainstream media outlets - the ones you defended in your post! - all believed Clinton's chances were a lot closer to 99% than 60%.
