"Fake News" vs "Truth"

The emperors Hadrian, Trahan, Marcus Aurelius were not despotic. Same for several British and French monarchs, especially Louis IV of France.. (He originated the term "a chicken in every pot.")

I don't think any democratically elected president could have administered the Roman empire nearly as well as those three, and maybe Vespasian as well.

Obviously you had your Caligulas and Neros giving emperors a bad name. But even they could be, and often were, murdered out of office, LOL.

 

Now this is why I tune into the gateway pundit and OANN...they lay it on straight with impeccable journalism

 

Sadly, FOX, though still somewhat partisan in its straight news shows, is currently the most credible straight-news television programming in the U.S. Don't bother trying to conflate straight news with their OP-Ed or partisan talk shows. The Big Three? CNN, MSNBC? NPR, PBS, BBC, total manipulated partisan junk at this point as proven by the self-serving, heightened degree of COVID hysteria and many other facts that the public is well aware of now, more realizing it daily. Worse than watching nothing at all. At least with Big Brother, we KNOW it's Big Brother. Most people under 60 or so don't even get their news from the television or newspapers, and that's a very good thing.

 

Yep

 

Trajan. Spell check thinks I'm cajun. Which I am.

 

Lol...completely wrong. The fake news/rigged elections bullshit was promoted by trump to distract from his failures. You people have gone completely down the rabbit hole pandering to him and now you’ve thrown out the baby with the bath water.

 

I believe some % of society has given up trying to sort through the noise to find objective truth. No one makes the decision about what it is. Either it stands up to scrutiny or it doesn't.

 

It's no coincidence the pathological liar known as Trump makes the unfounded claim everyone else is lying in order to keep his followers from questioning what he says.

 

Okay...whose scrutiny? What ever "stands or doesn't" will depend on who is doing the scrutinizing.
So far there isn't much common ground to stand on.
But maybe tRump will finally fade away and we will have learned a lesson.....but somehow I doubt that.

 

No, as a matter of fact, and exactly as posted, "fake news" was coined to go after anyone who dared question MSM narratives. Anyone claiming otherwise is a liar. Trump and many others stole the term, turned it on its head and abused MSM with it mercilessly. Those are the facts of the term "fake news," and those facts cannot be conveniently revised by you and yours in the net age. Sorry bout that.

 

I suppose it depends on which personal liberties you're valuing. I tend to value them similarly as they're laid out in the constitution. Amendments 1 2 4 5 and 10 have all been substantially eroded by our democracy and are not fairing much better (or were long ago effectively anulled) in many of the other democracies in the world.

I get that you see no reason to worry about our elections, but I do. If this one was stolen as I understand it to have been, I have no reason to suspect the next one will be any more legit. The foxes are now in charge of the henhouse and the ballot box option has been exhausted.

A dictatorship is under no less constraint than an unchecked democracy. As far as I'm concerned, the democracy we're moving into now is just a dictatorship where the 51% are a council of dictators (that may be an oversimplification- I think that 51% is being both manufactured and led around by actual dictators/oligarchs using advanced psychological mass conditioning, but thats probably a debate for another thread, and of course I don't have any mainstream, peer reviewed, fact checker verified sources to provide as 'proof'...) generally interested in squatting upon the 49%. So my options at the end of day are try to join the 51% dictator-via-democracy who increasingly oppose my own values, or join the 49% who are 'dictators' only in their opposition of and resistance to the 51%.

 

The only problem with that is the high number of people who feel similarly as I do. If ~70 million people voted for Trump and ~2/3 of them believe the election was stolen, meaning they believe our democracy is now dead, where would you suggest ~35 million people be 'free to extract themselves' to?

 

But what, human, source is utterly objective? The mere choice of which stories to report, since ALL news will not fit into any presentation, is an editorial (subjective) decision.

There is a group that reports exclusively on under-reported stories; that is, they pore over all news stories to find backpage articles which are about what they propose (with transparent, well-reasoned arguments) should be front-page stories. The group calls itself, Project Censored.

https://www.projectcensored.org/

But that doesn't mean that EVERYONE, or even most, will agree with their judgements. Which brings us to the second problem: who is to decide what are, objectively, "just the most relevant facts?"

You sound completely neutral! Any interest in the job?

 

None. But we give press protections to the media in exchange for greater than average objectivity. When they don't deliver on even a modicum of competence, press protections shouldn't apply.

I could take several HS school news editors from my county and do a far better, less slanted job than MSM, which has become a propaganda arm of the gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-trial lawyer-MSM Aristocracy including large corporate cronies. Today I saw a live "on the scene" reporter whose entire reporting was showing newspaper headlines. I see this kind of stuff regularly. Seriously, that doesn't cut it, surely you would agree.

Yes, that's the kind of place my news comes from, together with professional journals and industry type sources. But average people should not be disserved by large media outlets that are supposed to be somewhat objective.

Fox straight news (that I don't regularly watch), not their Op-Ed shows, does a pretty good job of being an obviously partisan source that is still fair and doesn't ignore newsworthy counternarrative stories. Other MSM outlets are pure dreck today, Op-Ed in the guise of news reporting.

Look, I'm not advocating some ideal behind the shadows in the cave, but what we have now in the MSM is essentially a Ministry of Truth. Long way between that and a perfect ideal of news reporting.

My partisanship on this forum is 50% anti partisanship towards understanding the true division in U.S. politics, and 50% addressing the mountains, rivers, avalanches of ridiculous, almost totally LW partisan lie narratives and plain old lies here. Try to discuss a policy issue rationally and objectively, or even a political position or opinion, get drowned out with orangemanbad spam, endless fallacies and pure trolling/baiting, overwhelmingly LW posters doing it. That's no one's fault but the administration's. The discourse here could easily be made far more adult.

 

Well, I think your post goes to prove that it's all in the eye of the beholder, that is, a subjective assessment, because my own style is not to troll, I've never used the word orangeman or even tried to substitute something like that for an actual argument; nevertheless, almost all the trolling I've experienced has been from the right (though I 've certainly had strong disagreements with those on the left, & occasionally encountered a, "touchy," one). My point is that if posters on the left interpret your views to be rightist, & others on the right also feel that way, regardless of where you, personally, feel your views sit, you're gonna get more flack from the left, just as I will from the right. I can match troll-posts with you, if you like, though some of my worst were in threads I started in which the mods finished the trollers' work, by deleting my thread.

Anyway, I do agree that a lot of news programs are heavily stilted, & presented with a clear bias. However, most of these are also meant to have an editorial element to them-- that's what the people, on both sides, want! Ratings don't lie. People like to watch others (& vote for others, & buy cars who use images of others) that remind them of themselves (and they, apparently, are distinctly not neutral).

Maybe you are the rare exception who would actually watch a, "neutral bias," news show, but most who want that, get a reasonable facsimile, though without a lot of depth, from their local news program (which is typically 35 minutes long, including sports & weather).

For the rest of us, I think the best we can do is learn to pick out that bias, recognize what is a misrepresentation. And being on this forum certainly helps with that, both by getting better informed, by following all the links that are offered, as well as just being more adept at seeing the bogus argument coming from a longer way off.

But that isn't even necessary for spotting a lot of the subtly, "fake news." One need merely differentiate the facts, which are often part of even biased broadcasts-- through quotes, video footage, somewhat from interviews, & so on-- from the characterizations of those facts by the talking head.

I'll give a concrete example. Now, I was not a Trump voter though, after he won, I took a wait-and-see attitude (just as I have for the upcoming Biden Administration). As an aside, you must admit that a large portion of the posters here, farther to the right, have already judged Biden, and the excuse, "that's what the left did, with Trump!" should really be beneath anyone who's passed through puberty. Anyway, I did notice, while watching left-leaning news programs, the way things were presented in the most negative light, as opposed to how it would be done if it was a President from, "their team." But I filtered that part out. The only effect it had was to reduce any respect I might have had for the person, due to seeing this lack of objectivity.

I promised a concrete example, & I think a good one, because it is both familiar to most, as well as from early in Trump's Presidency, is the, "travel ban," on many countries from the Middle East. It was common practice, on MSNBC to refer to this as Trump's,"Muslim ban." But I wasn't brainwashed by hearing this, since I realized that there are a billion Muslims on this planet, & the vast majority of them were not covered by the ban. But the network DID relate this contention, by the Administration (even if it was clear that they weren't buying it). So the facts were there, or easy to ascertain, for any
viewer who had a mind of their own, & didn't watch news in order to be told what they should think about the news.

All that said, Trump's other statements (as about those in Jersey, celebrating on 9-11, for example) show that he does have anti-Muslim sentiment, and leaked communications w/ Giuliani, from the time of the development of this policy, showed that this bias played a major role in the policy. But part of that bias was a suspicion of Muslims as being terrorists and, even though that is clearly not true of most Muslims, the particular countries singled out were places that were both unstable & in which verification of people's info was problemmatic.

Put more concisely, I do not need a flash-card term to sum up an intermingling group of facts. I can understand them all, simultaneously w/o their being oversimplified to the point of being erroneous. Most Muslims in the world were NOT affected by the ban, hence it is just inaccurate to call it a Muslim ban, especially as it applied to non-Muslims from the countries that were specified. Pointing to other countries that, then, "should be on the list, that aren't," proves nothing other than that the Administration wasn't thorough. At the same time, I realized that our President did not care for Muslims, generally (unless, like the Saudis, they had a lot of money that they might send his way). Yet, I have always felt that, if one has a really STRONG argument-- as many clearly believed they had against Trump-- you should have no need to EXAGGERATE anything! So to add weaker speculations, as well as to plainly misstate things to make them seem even worse than they may be, only compromises the arguer's credibility and under-cuts the argument being presented, by the association of the most compelling parts of one's case, with any aspects that appear less-justified.

Nevertheless, in summation, many do not think the way that I just described. They apparently prefer oversimplifications: America, love it, or leave it. I have had a number of posters, for instance, take my citing of anything in our nation's past that does not reflect kindly upon it, as proof that I must, "hate," America when, in truth, wanting something to achieve its full potential is the kind of sentiment that a parent has for their child. And we all know that the method for being the best one can be is NOT merely to tell yourself that you are the best, ignoring all your flaws. But this is too subtle a perspective, for many. The same thing goes for the political opinions of many. THAT, I believe, explains the bias in the media, ultimately, & not the other way around. If one was to strip all the points of view from news, we might very well see people storming the network headquarter buildings.

 

Not going to read more, sorry. There's no possible way you could be -that- oblivious as to not know that "orangemanbad" is just shorthand for the hundreds of trolling, baiting anti Trump spam posts and threads here every day that preclude any actual political discussion on this forum, so will conclude that you are just baiting yourself.

 

Your loss. I put a lot if good time & thought into my response; I'm not now going to waste time & effort trying to dissuade you from your hasty conclusion, if that's the way your mind works.

No sweat, though, because it's still displayed for others to consider, comment on and, hopefully, appreciate.

 

Yes sadly it is fact. Every thing from constantly accusing Trump of lying to the supposedly illegal call to the Dems and bureaucrats overseas piggybank to the Russia hoax, have proven to be mostly bogus. Half the country no longer tests the Alphabet soup media nor should they.

 

I was referring to this.

Fact: The LW/Complex coined "fake news"

Trump was the one who started "fake news".

 

It seems for some folks, "being the best one can be" translates to parading around on the streets with assault weapons...trying to intimidate.
That is their definition of "patriotism".

 

Trump labeled it they'd been doing it for years.

 

That would certainly describe your BLM protesters in Seattle and Portland and more than a few other places.

 

And that is why we have "Alternate Facts" to prove that you can never be wrong...about anything.
We could spend all day here exchanging "facts" and get nowhere.

 

Well I believe many don’t quite understand our media landscape. There will always be editorial decisions but the problem with our media market is we’ve reduced those editorial decisions to a handful of entities. Local and independent media is essentially gone.

Many of the internet media sites and blogs linked on this forum are as elite as the MSM.

It’s fairly comical to believe any our media isn’t being filtered by an “elite” perspective.

We can introduce competition back into this market place but we need the will do it.

 

Yeah except your arguing the fact that BLM has shot to death in cold blood at least 4 people in cold blood and would likely have killed two others had they not been armed and defended themselves.