| Louie said: 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%. |
The problem here is that News outlets are not supposed to be political outlets. News isn't supposed to present the ideas or arguments (at least not themselves).
I have no idea how German politics works so maybe it is different in your country. The Trump fish thing was propaganda, by omission of important facts. The Huffington Post article was on point. People who defend themselves against domestic violence are not guilty of domestic violence regardless of gender.
Both sides do not do it equally. At least not in the U.S. Fox News' overwhelming bias has been well documented for years.
Your second paragraph admits that conservatives are interested in propaganda more than they are interested in real news. It basically says that liberals and conservatives will never agree on what's fair and unbiased, because conservatives don't value being fair and unbiased.
Yes, mainstream media is capable of lying too. The odds of either Trump or Clinton winning shifted as the election came near. Anybody saying that Clinton had a 90% or higher chance of winning the day before the election was either lying, or not able to understand the data. According to various polls around the midwest both of the blue wall states that Trump took had around a 33% chance of going to Trump. He only really needed one of them to stand a good chance of winning the election.
