DEEP as* discussion and sh*t

good enough?

That sounds a bit too much like two echo chambers coming together (you get a cacophony). How about, say… ‘deep discussions and stuff’?

done

American liberal here. I’m not sure what I was expecting in terms of policy, but I was ready to see him F**k someone over, so far those getting screwed have been a close mix of his radical base (those pushing for jailing Clinton, building the wall, draining the swamp, cutting foreign trade deals), the poor who hoped he would change things for the better for them, social Progressives, environmentalists, and wall Street reformers.

His picks certainly show a desire for change as, with few exceptions, each pick has had a public stance against some aspect or policy of the agency they were picked to run. ( That’s as nicely worded as I can be about it). I find myself hoping he fails out of petty spite and fear that he will out of a sense self and world preservation.

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This about echoes what I’ve been thinking, but didn’t want to speak on behalf of anybody who did vote for Trump, which is why I’m specifically inviting those who did to say their piece. Also, even more so after what’s happened in the last few months, I now take every source with a bigger grain of salt and even though they were direct Twitter screenshots of, say, the alt-right and the anti-establishments as well as the poor actual working class Americans complaining, alternately, about Trump ending up being “an establishment cuck” to “turning his back on our hopes and dreams”, the only groups that would spin all of that into a single narrative at this early stage would still be the liberal anti-Trump factions.

FWIW, the guy who keeps bothering me with empty Trumpisms and can’t say a true fact to save his own life is a pro-establishment, Old Money wealthy Wall Street type. The last kind of person I would ask for facts from, because as we well know, if you’re rich enough, facts don’t apply to you.

Especially during this election, this has never been sounder advice.

(oh, the irony of quoting a news website to tell people to question the news :joy:)

That’s another thing: the post-truth era. This terrifies me the most, because it amplifies the culture that we’ve been seeding, where a saturation of sources has us now susceptible to cherry-picking our sources to suit the narrative that we want to believe. And that’s why social media outlets are referred to as echo-chambers, because we’re just sorting ourselves into a mass-exercise of confirmation bias.

But the real victims of this are no single faction over another. I’m not about to point fingers at any one faction, or even the vehicle of these things, i.e. Facebook. That’s something that we can do during another debate on just how much responsibility as a surrogate Fourth Estate social media carriers are supposed to bear. I mean just a few months before this Facebook was copping heat for vetting their news articles using humans instead of relying on their algorithms due to an implicit concession that their algorithms couldn’t vet important news stories based on what was trending, which is not a surprising conclusion considering that despite what some AI enthusiasts like to think, we aren’t that close to that refined a model of so-called ‘machine learning’ (IMHO- something Microsoft’s failed experiment in a public conversation bot demonstrated so well).

No, the real victim is Truth itself. And that’s something that will contribute to the disempowerment of us plebians, which is to say, anybody who isn’t in the Establishment, or rich enough to exist above the law in some way or another. And you come across one of the more worrying things about this: for decades we’ve relied on ‘mainstream media’ to deliver news to us. (EDIT: For whatever reasons he had, intentional or otherwise,) Trump’s done a fantastic job tapping into the broad base of voter discontent and directed much of that anger at the media, essentially dumping fertiliser on the seeds of mistrust of our central information dissemination machine. We already knew it was breaking down, but the last thing we really need is an increasingly fractious population that can’t agree on what makes a good source when our ultimate defence against systematic subjugation is unity in perspective.

Open disclosure: I pay actual money to The Guardian. It is a partisan publication that absolutely does not disguise that it is written by social liberals for social liberals. But out of every source I’ve read (and I read across the spectrum, from The Sun and The Daily Mail, as difficult as I find this, to The American Conservative and The Australian and The Herald Sun, to The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, to The Atlantic, New York Times and of course The Guardian), the Guardian is possibly the only source that actively advocates bridging perspectives and investigating the perspectives of populations other than their target audience. And that’s saying something in this day and age. So if you do read it, in the full knowledge that it doesn’t hide its bias, I would claim that at least you can be sure it retains its duty to independent reporting with full fact checking. And that’s why I subscribed.

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Currently my favorite article about the “post truth” media age. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5829f25fe4b02b1f5257a6b7

Often shared with it’s headline “Bernie Sanders could replace Trump with little-known loophole.”

News outlets would be so much better if they stopped lying about their supposed neutrality.

Despite sounding like the typical /pollack/ I don’t actually read breitbart but I do appreciate that they don’t bother hiding the fact that they are partisan and are actively hated by the real racists such as StormFront or what not.

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After saying this and citing Breitbart as a lone example, perhaps you should go further and analyse which news sources are guilty of this to what degree, if you are so inclined. You should also think about which news outlets actually fact check their sources and which ones let this bias get in their way (I’m pretty sure Breitbart doesn’t exactly feel obliged to fact check and the way it has evolved in the light of the Trump campaign and exactly where Bannon is positioned right now is quite telling and you should never forget that).

You should also consider that different countries have different expectations of their papers, for example, in the UK, it isn’t just usual, it is expected that the rag you read is partisan. In Australia, it is also well known, but what was notable is that in recent times, both the left leaning papers moved to the left, and the right moved to the right, but the ones that copped the most heat for it were the SMH and The Age because they purported to have at least a modicum of neutrality, which, admittedly, they were increasingly prone to losing.

As for the US outlets, let’s see if this image I stole from a post referencing the Pew Research Center helps:

I feel that criticism that the NYT and the New Yorker aren’t just for liberal readerships, but are liberally biased to the point of missing the point sometimes, is warranted this is a charge my girlfriend especially objects to, similar to my repeated jibes that it’s okay to be social liberal as long as you don’t get blindsided by a huge dose of population reality from disappearing too far into the culture bubble. I honestly also am fairly wary of the Huffington Post (sorry niall), though that article was well played :joy:

On the flip side I have an especially hard time taking anything that comes out of Fox News seriously, and I’m pretty sure they take themselves seriously. When I think of partisan divides and polarisation, I think pitching them as the lone bastion against just about every other mainstream media outlet, considering the manner in which they, uh, conjure their narratives, was the start of the end. Feel free to counter that, I’m not American, I only have an American plutocrat trying to control what we think, how we vote and who we hate to deal with.

in a lighter vein, this is what fox news has made of themselves :joy: (sorry for the clickbait title, not my vid)

I always wondered what the ‘speechless’ meant. Sounds like they were doing a whole lot of talking though… a whoooooole lot.

Title shoulda been ‘Millionaire Leaves Fox Host THOUGHTLESS’, except that would have been so par for the course that nobody would have bothered.

I want my ten minutes back :frowning:

Now then it’s only a short fall before our debates over fake news devolve into another political fight yet again given the incredibly high amount of media involvement in the last election, so I won’t exactly fight anything given that I don’t really know that much bout everything. :laughing:

I do however believe, that the MSM has lost the trust of the general public and will never make a recovery.

yeah nah I’ll do my best not to start any fights here. If I was gearing up to start something, I’d actually start citing my sources properly instead of spouting my opinions :stuck_out_tongue:

So true. I don’t know what the best way forward after this is, but the MSM were due for a decent shakeup anyway.

Also man it’s so confusing seeing that abbreviation, in my line of work, MSM means ‘men who have sex with men’.

that is a VERY important extra note, right there.

Oh I don’t trust them either, in fact I skipped over the headline a few times before a few pages I follow (Tysonism, the daily cosmos) started making jokes about people commenting without reading which peaked my interest. I attempt to keep S open a mind in regards to news as possible, even so I can’t bring myself to read most of those conservative sites, I can stomach some articles occasionally especially if I’m actively looking for a counter point to some issue, but I stick to BBC, NPR, the Atlantic group, ACLU, southern poverty law center, pro publica, for main stream LA Times, Washington Post, and yes NYT, I used to follow all Jazeera America before they folded. Bias in reporting is to be expected and you should never trust something just because it made it to print, but you shouldn’t distrust something just because the mainstream covered it. There always has to be a element of common sense in regards to information, as Carl Sagan once wrote about we should all develop our " baloney detectors" and use them often, especially if we see things that confirm things we suspect.

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Sorry for intruding, but i have to say that i feel like i’m being late to the party and have to recap everything… I’ll be back with a deep as* thought in a day or two :wink:

Intresting discussions

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I’ll throw up a relevant clip:

It is from Fox News (so grain of salt), but I do think they raised some good points about media bias, In particular the bit about how many news publications endorsed certain people.

Given, though, that most of the big publications are based in large cities, I would expect a slight bias towards Democratic views, as people living in cities have shown to hold more democratic views over republican ones.

Edit: Page link
(it seems others are having problems with the vid, so just the page link.

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It appears whatever you uploaded is making Discourse servers shit itself, keeps trying to download some video_player.swf

weird? all I need to do is activate flash.
I’ll update with a webpage link