hitting the unsubscribe button is totally fine, actually

[amw]

Goddamnit, i have managed to avoid venting my spleen about US politics on LiveJournal for a long time because, honestly, nothing has changed since this time 8 years ago, when almost half of country's voters got whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy and cast their ballot for a celebrity conman who has spent his entire, privileged, elite life

Comments

[amw]

Your comment mentioning Fox being right and MSNBC being left also made me think about television news and how this framing of either of those outlets as serious news sources is not helpful, imo.

The issue with America media right now was already well-defined by Stephen Colbert in a joke he made at the White House Correspondents' Dinner almost 20 years ago: "reality has a well-known liberal bias!"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2X93u3anTco

The sad thing is that reality actually doesn't have a liberal bias, but the American media ecosystem has become so deeply centered around sensationalist reporting of absurd nontroversies that whenever someone tries to discuss a serious issue without cherry-picking a few facts to construct a BS narrative it's dismissed as elitist, simply because it's not low-brow trash. The Daily Show pointed it out yet again just the other day in a skit where Ronny Chieng was trying to get Jordan Klepper to report on policy proposals but instead he kept derailing the topic into "LOL, Biden made a gaffe".

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wdBDpSUEoV0

Or John Oliver, whose team recently did the legwork to explore exactly how JD Vance was the source of the entire dumb weeks-long news cycle about Haitian migrants in Springfield.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_hIOdiYYSnc

And who benefits from all the sensationalist reporting on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Facebook, X, Reddit etc? Investors, advertisers and/or billionaire owners, which is to say not we, the people. The goal is not to inform or even to entertain. It's to keep people engaged and outraged, because that's what makes money.

As usual I recommend watching PBS Newshour if you really must watch television news.

And if you're wondering why I am including social media alongside cable news, it's because social media is the same but worse: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-instagram-meta-deceptive-political-ads-election Who stands to gain? Those following Trump's example: scammers and grifters.

In my current job working to identify and take down abusive use of computer systems it has become painfully clear just how widespread fake/bot accounts are on social media. The scale of the problem is massive, and it's backed not just by con artists and organized crime but also state actors seeking to sow discord and undermine democracy altogether. These are the kinds of people benefiting from trash media organizations that are not transparent about their editorial policies (conveniently misrepresented as "the algorithm" in social media so as to absolve the owners of taking responsibility).