Media Meltdown and also Media Bias 101

[Screwball]

36 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I don't know that Trump wants the Post to shut down, necessarily. I think he just wants to make sure that the local paper is on board with him. He can't have a major journalistic institution taking potshots at him from his own backyard.

As for serious reform of media ownership, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was the "Big Bang" of media deregulation ("television is just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures"), which led to The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the most significant ownership loosening in history. We had those rules for a reason. Now we can clearly see what those reasons were.

Strange, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law on this very date in 1996. Exactly 30 years ago by pedo Slick Willy Clinton.

[romad1]

38 minutes ago, Screwball said:

Strange, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law on this very date in 1996. Exactly 30 years ago by pedo Slick Willy Clinton.

Vince Foster would be alive today if he had owned a gun...etc. 

[gehringer_2]

4 hours ago, romad1 said:

AWS and Blue Origins contracts with the federal government were the most important things that needed to survive the Trump presidency.  If destroying the WaPo is the cost of that, well Bezos did what he needed to do.  

We need a new media and we need serious reform of media ownership.  

It's more than that though. If Bezos just wanted to be free of the liability that WaPo might have been to his government contracting, he could have just sold it. There was no need to disembowel it.

[romad1]

I am strongly considering subscribing to The Guardian.  Those pesky UK reporters do some work. 

[ewsieg]

22 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's more than that though. If Bezos just wanted to be free of the liability that WaPo might have been to his government contracting, he could have just sold it. There was no need to disembowel it.

You act like facts are important with this president.  Not having control of the Post is a bigger liability than watching it crumble and lose a little bit of money.  Even if he sold it to someone that Trump would approve of, what if the new owner 'allowed' an article critical of Trump to be published.  Let's say that happens the day that Trump is making a decision regarding Blue Origin.  Now Blue Origin gets screwed because 'weak Bezos couldn't keep the Post afloat and now the Post is posting fake news about me, I can't in good conscious approve Blue Origin.'

[gehringer_2]

15 minutes ago, ewsieg said:

You act like facts are important with this president.  Not having control of the Post is a bigger liability than watching it crumble and lose a little bit of money.  Even if he sold it to someone that Trump would approve of, what if the new owner 'allowed' an article critical of Trump to be published.  Let's say that happens the day that Trump is making a decision regarding Blue Origin.  Now Blue Origin gets screwed because 'weak Bezos couldn't keep the Post afloat and now the Post is posting fake news about me, I can't in good conscious approve Blue Origin.'

today's 'editorial' was a 'how to lie with statistics' piece from the Cato institute purporting to inform American workers how much better off they are than they think they are because Cato can cherry pick statistics with the best of them. The wife still wants to keep getting the daily inbox feed, I'm trying to convert her to the Guardian.

[ewsieg]

3 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

today's 'editorial' was a 'how to lie with statistics' piece from the Cato institute purporting to inform American workers how much better off they are than they think they are because Cato can cherry pick statistics with the best of them. The wife still wants to keep getting the daily inbox feed, I'm trying to convert her to the Guardian.

I used to listen to their 'Post Reports' daily just to get a high level of the days events.  Honestly I felt like it had a slight left lean to it still, but about 6 months ago I just couldn't do it anymore.  Bezos made a mockery the Post and I can't support it.  I have no problem listening to media that is clearly left or right slanted, but its clear he purchased it just to please 'dear leader'.  

[Edman85]

Ugh, RFK on 60 minutes tonight spewing MAHA crap.

[chasfh]

The best thing Bezos could do is to sell the Post to someone who would care about and for it, like Bloomberg. The worst thing he could do is hang onto it and let it disappear into the mist. Which do you think is more likely?

I know a lot of people here dno’t like the New York Times, but if we were to lose that too somehow, that would be a debilitating body blow to the independent press in America.

 

Edited February 16 by chasfh

[gehringer_2]

24 minutes ago, chasfh said:

The best thing Bezos could do is to sell the Post to someone who would care about and for it, like Bloomberg. The worst thing he could do is hang onto it and let it disappear into the mist. Which do you think is more likely?

I know a lot of people here dno’t like the New York Times, but if we were to lose that too somehow, that would be a debilitating body blow to the independent press in America.

 

the thing is, what he he doing there now can't work for any length of time anyway - you can be half in with Trump. A quick survey of the Post Ed Board offerings for the last few days show them almost exactly split down the middle between old style GOP pro free market pieces and velvet glove anti-Admin critiques. That's nowhere good enough for Trump, who just barely tolerates Fox even with their 24/7 sycophancy. So at the end of the day, I'm sure he's not buying himself any useful favor anyway while he continues to drive off his potential reader base, because the Post isn't near MAGA enough for MAGA, and even if it were, MAGA don't do newspapers.

But he's probably too vain to let it close and be seen as a failure. So there is that.

Edited February 16 by gehringer_2

[Motown Bombers]

 

[pfife]

Why not let the interview air?   They said before no one watches him so what does it matter

[chasfh]

Someone thinks the neutering of the independent media is ****ing hilarious.

[Motown Bombers]

You would almost think Talarico orchestrated this. 

 

[Tigeraholic1]

11 hours ago, chasfh said:

Someone thinks the neutering of the independent media is ****ing hilarious.

 

[Tigeraholic1]

33 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

 

 

[pfife]

CBS hires and protects pedos.

[Motown Bombers]

 

[CMRivdogs]

 

[CMRivdogs]

Long ago in a land that seems far away

 

[CMRivdogs]

Just following the dictator's handbook. F--- Freedom of the press

https://bsky.app/profile/jayrosen.bsky.social/post/3mfk6cupxhc22

Quote

A thing to keep in mind in the Netflix vs. Paramount bidding war for Warner Bros.

Netflix does not propose to absorb CNN, TNT, TBS. It would spin them off in a new company like Comcast did with MSNBC.

Whereas the Ellisons want to show Trump they can bring CNN to heel, as they have with CBS. Clear?

 

[Edman85]

The @romad1 special

 

[chasfh]

 

In the survey, conducted in January, X users were the only group in which a majority, just barely over 50 percent, expressed “strong” or “somewhat” approval of Donald Trump. His approval was significantly lower among consumers of news from “podcasts and YouTube,” local television, and even Facebook. Among people reading “newspapers or news websites,” browsing Reddit, watching broadcast television or scrolling TikTok or Instagram to keep up with current events, the numbers were, as Jain described them, “catastrophic.” He noted, “If you’re largely getting your news from Twitter, you might not even know that Trump is unpopular, because you wouldn’t even see a lot of the backlash.”

Last week, in a study published in Nature, a group of researchers attempted to answer a sensible follow-up question: So what? People organize around news sources that flatter their beliefs, and in a fragmented news environment, you would expect different attitudes to be associated with venues that have developed a clear partisan identity. Well, it turns out that the engine of Musk’s X — its algorithmic “For You” page — is an ideological ratchet:

In addition to promoting entertainment, X’s feed algorithm tends to push more conservative content to users’ feeds. Seven weeks of exposure to such content in 2023 shifted users’ political opinions in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to policy priorities, perceptions of the criminal investigations into Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. The effect is asymmetric: switching the algorithm on influenced political views, but switching it off did not reverse users’ perspectives on policy priorities or current political issues.

The effect was surprisingly pronounced considering the comparatively less insane conditions on the platform, and across politics in general, in 2023. In the space of a couple of months, users consuming X’s algorithmic feeds were both “4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritize policy issues considered important by Republicans” and “5.2 percentage points less likely to reduce their X usage.” Taken together, these analyses offer a bit of data to support the notion that X has become a place that both attracts more conservatives and pushes them further to the right, resulting in an X-obsessed administration that often uses the bizarre language of Zoomer fascists when posting online.

The Muskification of Twitter into X — the MAGA platform of choice, where Musk’s tweets and the platform’s recommendations are unavoidable and the house chatbot is an outspoken rightist — may also be influencing the elites who still use it. Could it be happening to you, too? Are you … sure?