Argento Surfer wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:40 pm
Ming wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:19 am
MrErnie wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 9:46 pm
Trust in the MSM remains at very close to record lows. Most of Wikipedia's "current thing" articles almost exclusively use MSM as sources.
It remains at record lows because right wingers only trust a somewhat limited set of right wing mouthpieces.
Take a look at this analysis, which looks at individual sources. Normal people trust the evening news; far lefties never trusted anyone anyway.
I won't speak for all right wingers, but I've always noticed a difference in the way ideas are discussed/presented on NPR.
There's three different things going on here.
First, no daily news service of any kind, except maybe AP (and Ming doubts they do either), has the depth of staff knowledge to report accurately on any specialized subject. you may be lucky and the
Daily Planet has someone on staff who happens to be up on comics, but it's not likely and that sort of assignment often is handed out to the lowest person on the totem pole. When breaking news is involved the time crunch makes all of this worse. Conversely, the one thing they all do have a grasp on is routine politics, so the temptation to use this as a framework about everything is great. This is a general reliability problem which cannot be gotten rid of entirely and which in the current state of the business isn't going to get better soon, but since it applies across the board it just means that for specific things one needs to go to those that specialize in them.
Second, a lot of what you see is as much social class prejudice as it is anything else. This is particularly obvious with NPR and some of the major dailies, and most especially the
NYT. It's chattering class people talking to what they perceive as an audience of other chattering class members (and "important" people), so the tendency to assume a certain class consciousness. It's just as strong on the conservative side: Fox for example evinces a strong bourgeois (in the Marxist sense)
attitude. Again, this is normal and just has to be lived with.
It's the third point that is something of a novelty. Explicit positioning of the various policy journals (
National Review vs.
The Nation, for example) is age-old and nobody has a problem with this beyond ridiculing the opposition. Also back in the day one expected the
Chicago Tribune to espouse a pretty conservative perspective on things, but tightening standards tended to make things converge, at least off the opinion pages. What arose in the 1980s were news organizations explicitly set up to present a conservative news perspective. This commitment in practice put the
Washington Times in a bad spot from the start because the
Post was never as badly biased as the right claimed; therefore the
Times mission became to defend conservatives, whereas the
Post was not particularly kind to politicians as a group. The parade of Reagan-era problem people didn't help things, since they needed to be raked over the coals.
Fast-forward several administrations and we get to obviously fake stories like Obama's birthplace, in which we saw these right wing organs keeping the story going even though it was known to be false from the beginning. And the number of these outlets continued to grow, increasingly without the pretense of imitating MSM values and presentation. There are some liberal counterparts, of course, but one can also see some of the more centrist and even moderate conservative journals being pushed to the "left" as the RINO accusations ramped up. Yeah, MSM are "biased", but it's not the same.
2350:20F0:9C5A:901D:149A:4D05 (talk) 16:20, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
