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[Frumple]

Pretty sure they do, if not fellate it like a ten penny whore in a desperate bid to excuse the shit rolling out of trump's lot.

[Trekkin]

They talk about it when it suits their purpose, but never when it could possibly help Trump. They don't really want to talk about it when it's the Obama era hold-overs.

Well, here's a Huffington Post article on Ohr:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bruce-ohr-donald-trump-russia-investigation_us_5b870d1ee4b0511db3d45866

That's not talking about it?

[EnigmaticHat]

Say what you will about their claims that it was used to spy on the Trump Campaign, Fox is one of the few media outlets actually talking about it. It's worrying that the other stations are so obsessed with their own agendas, they don't really talk about some of the corruption in the government. Or "The Swamp", as the Commander in Cheetos puts it. Bay12 is the only news source we can really trust.

No one is talking about it because its bullshit.  They went after Hillary for years because her employees were the victim of a terrorist attack.  Kept going even after it was clear there was nothing to find.  Now a former spy comes up with detailed documents and that isn't evidence?  Remember, the legitimate news outlets weren't questioning Steele's work.  Their beef was with Buzzfeed for releasing it early.  A good chunk of what was in the dossier has turned out to be true.

All of that ignores the fact that AFAIK the Steele dossier was never used to get any warrants whatsoever.  The FBI was already investigating several members of Trump's campaign before the dossier was released.  The reason for this should be obvious, Manafort was his caimpaign manager and he's made a career out of skirting the laws on treason and espionage.  The whole wiretapped without a warrant thing is bullshit made up by Trump; Trump himself was never investigated during the caimpaign, only his subordinates many of whom have already pleaded guilty or been found guilty of various crimes.

[PTTG??]

Spoiler: "Response to complaints about the media." (click to show/hide)

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Why? because it's about as relevant. We've got a profiteer and a traitor in the white house. We can deal with jurisprudence and Democratic malfeasance when that's actually a current, and far less serious, problem.

[wierd]

A good portion of why we have such filth in office, is because of the press's free coverage of the bombastic orange moron during the primaries.

Which is what precipitated this criticism in the first place.  They apologized for this role they played.  I pointed out that they are not actually sorry, and why they are not actually sorry.

In order to prevent another populist catastrophe, we need to remind the press that their obligation is to present the public with the facts they need to perform their civic duties, not to dispense an endless supply of pablum to get as many eyeballs as possible.

[Trekkin]

In order to prevent another populist catastrophe, we need to remind the press that their obligation is to present the public with the facts they need to perform their civic duties, not to dispense an endless supply of pablum to get as many eyeballs as possible.

"get as many eyeballs as possible" is literally their job, though, inasmuch as that's indirectly how they get paid. Moralizing about how people should do what we want to comply with other things we want may be an easy way to feel good about ourselves and demonstrate our perspicacity in seeing the problem, but if our only justification is "well this is how it should be" at some point we should probably recognize that we're probably deliberately choosing to do nothing worthwhile about it so that nothing gets better and we can just keep rehashing the same points about the same problems. Everyone knows "how it should be." It's an easy thing to know, because you need know nothing about the world to demand things (see Trump, for example), but ultimately it's just opinion all the way down, and we have an endless supply of those.

Ultimately, "should" is noise. The first step to actually doing something worthwhile is to figure out why things are as they are in a sense that aligns with our actual capacity to effect change and actually present a more attractive alternative to the people making the decisions. ("Everyone else is stupid and greedy and evil" is not that sense, by the way.) If the best you've got is that eventually someday they'll be sorry they didn't listen, you're not telling them anything they don't know or giving them any incentive to do what you want as opposed to what they think will help because, again, opinion all the way down.

People are surprisingly willing to change in ways they actually think will help, but for some reason we've just all collectively decided never to get beyond arguing with each other about whose demands are more offensive. Activism, I suppose.

[Reelya]

Yes to that.

The main problem with saying "civic duties" over "as many eyeballs as possible" is that the proces by its nature ensures that the ones you are reading are the latter, not the former. Sure, there could be papers like the previous, who favor being 100% valid journalists over chasing dollars, but they're so marginal that you probably haven't heard of them, and they lack the advertising revenue to actually invest in any meaningful reporting.

If the papers that have your preferred viewpoint all focus on their civic duties over eyeballs, before very long you find that the papers with your preferred viewpoints have completely gone out of business, leaving only the papers who you disagree with. It's a competitive market, it takes being like that to survive at all. Really, the best you can hope for is that the eyeball-grabbing papers have an editorial staff who are aligned to the values you value and can slip some of that in, while still being relevant enough to what people want to read that the good ideas get spread around.

[wierd]

I see you both misunderstood the statement.

I fully agree that in order to accomplish their actual reason for existing (to educate the public with information about current events), they need to be able to reach the public (EG, they need to have eyeballs looking at their content.)  This was never criticized, though Trekkin seems hell bent on painting it that way. the criticism is that they prioritize it over their stated goal, which is to dispense news.

Rather, the statement should be taken exactly as written.

In order to prevent another populist catastrophe, we need to remind the press that their obligation is to present the public with the facts they need to perform their civic duties, not to dispense an endless supply of pablum to get as many eyeballs as possible.

EG, the following premises are stated:

1) the prioritization of eyeball seeking over their stated reason for existing (to dispense news) was at least partially causal in the election of the orange moron.
2) Their obligation is to dispense news, not to dispense populist garbage.
3) To prevent this from happening again, these priorities need to be inverted.

thus, the solution is to realign priorities such that being informative is given more weight than being appealing, rather than the other way around.  Doing so would prevent the near-monopoly on press coverage that the orange idiot had during the primaries, without completely cutting off the supply of sensationalism that seems to power the press these days.

But by all means, continue to misinterpret the statement on purpose.

[Dorsidwarf]

And unless you can mind-control every major paper into doing so at once, the ones that don't will overtake the ones that do, because the reason that "populist garbage" always bubbles to the fore over and over and over again is because papers need to make money. They're a business, not a public service. And "populist garbage" is popular which means that more people read the news which means the paper makes more money.

You can remind the press about their "obligation" until you're blue in the face, but any such shift, even from within, will inevitably be only temporary.

[Loud Whispers]

Lol I live in a shitty rainy socialist island and I find it fucking excessive how you guys find it offensive that you might have news as a public service, not a business with corporate hands so far up its arse you might as well call it a puppet show. Compare Reuters to CNN, BBC to Fox, NYT to the Guardian e.t.c., there is no defence for fake news made by news stations owned by half a dozen corporations.

You can remind the press about their "obligation" until you're blue in the face, but any such shift, even from within, will inevitably be only temporary.

Surrendering without a fight is a guaranteed way to ensure your inability to effect meaningful change. Especially when you surrender vital functions of the state to businesses, it ends with everyone getting fucked. The more monopolistic an entity becomes on vital state functions, the less "it's my business I can do what I want" exists as a viable defence, any more than the East India Company could decide what prices to set on grain while millions of Bangladeshis starved to death because hey, it's their business lol. Sure they can set the price however way they want, but it is a dangerous game to play to support such consolidation. Like you have Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Fox and CBS owning everything you read and watch in the news, all your films, television shows, radio shows, your papers and online articles and they have meetings together to discuss influencing public opinion, and that's not even beginning to mention all the shit with social media sites working with their competitors to destroy their political opposition despite apparently being impartial services - all the while society renders it increasingly impossible to be without social media. Madness fam
Absolutely madness

Point is, you're dealing with people who have more money than God, who all broadly agree that they hate you and think you're an idiot, and they control the majority of everything in popular culture you or the people around you enjoy. The response should be "oi m8 fuck this you are fake news" not "lol they can do what they want, punish me harder daddy."

Despite low unemployment and a booming stock market, the US saw trust in major institutions decline heavily over the course of 2017, and now just one in three in the US trust the government, according to the study. However, Americans displayed a higher degree of trust in businesses.
"The United States is enduring an unprecedented crisis of trust,” Richard Edelman, the CEO company that produced the study, said in a press release.
"This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it’s the ultimate irony that it’s happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs. The root cause of this fall is the lack of objective facts and rational discourse."

It's not even smart business sense, it's just oligarchs leveraging their immense schlongs into American thought. End result is people stop watching high production news and start watching shit made by a plague of gay internet frogs instead, because they find the latter more trustworthy. This is the future you chose

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah, if only we had a way to regulate things on a national scale.

[Loud Whispers]

The USA is fucking massive

[Trekkin]

Lol I live in a shitty rainy socialist island and I find it fucking excessive how you guys find it offensive that you might have news as a public service, not a business with corporate hands so far up its arse you might as well call it a puppet show. Compare Reuters to CNN, BBC to Fox, NYT to the Guardian e.t.c., there is no defence for fake news made by news stations owned by half a dozen corporations.

I don't think anyone found the idea offensive; it's just not the world we live in right now, and berating the world from our high horses will not change it. There's an apparently subtle difference between acknowledging something as resistant to change and claiming that it is preferable.

See, I'm not on weird's case for wanting more informative news that isn't incentivized the way our news currently is; I quite agree with him, and on point of fact with you, on that point. Unfortunately, we cannot simply wish that into existence, as the conditions required to produce it are incompatible with the larger context in which the news works here and it's not trivial to change that. I don't mean it's hard, either. I mean there's actual ambiguity about how best to reconcile what we want with everything else we want. That takes effort and expertise, but it's not impossible.

Unfortunately, there's this trap people fall into where they just opine endlessly about why people ought to have a moral obligation to consider their opinions, and it's a very comfortable cycle to be in; you get all the emotional highs of being morally right without any of the troubling ambiguity regarding how to actually do anything because everything should be as obvious to everyone else as it is to you and all the reasons why it's not should just go away and so forth all the way down, and it also lets you pretend everyone with real questions disagrees with you so it's pleasantly self-sustaining. It is also quite pointless.

Yes, capitulation is not helpful, but temper tantrums are scarcely more so. What is helpful is identifying a subset of the causes of undesirable conditions that are mutable with whatever means are available to the people who want them changed. Show people something concrete and it's amazing how many will at least identify specific reasons they don't want it, which is way more helpful than whining until no one takes you seriously.

So yes. Informative press is great. How do we get it given everything else?

[Rolan7]

Lol I live in a shitty rainy socialist island and I find it fucking excessive how you guys find it offensive that you might have news as a public service, not a business with corporate hands so far up its arse you might as well call it a puppet show. Compare Reuters to CNN, BBC to Fox, NYT to the Guardian e.t.c., there is no defence for fake news made by news stations owned by half a dozen corporations.

We *have* public broadcasting, TV and radio.  It's really good.  It's not as well funded as the BBC, obviously, but I'm okay with that.  The BBC seems pretty benign, particularly from my side of politics, but I think it's fair to be suspicious of government-run news.  Particularly when it overwhelms all other news agencies in the country.

I guess if they got too overtly political, people would literally riot over the 150 pounds/househould yearly fee for most people with a color television (blind people get half rate, apparently??)
Just as comparison, our Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which handles PBS and NPR) received 445million in government funds in 2014.  Neilson says there are 120million US homes with TVs in 2017-2018, so let's round up and say we're paying $2 instead of nearly $195 per household.

My actual conclusion from that is that our public broadcasting really needs more federal support.  It's always been a battle, here, despite PBS being fundamental to so many of our childhoods.  Shout out to Fred Rogers for explaining that to Congress in 1969...

CPB's funding shouldn't have to be bolstered by corporate grants and individual donations through member stations.  The first part kinda takes the "Public" out of it, and the latter, well... ain't fair   That's the "shouldn't" I'm focused on.

tldr; BBC is really cool, though wow it kinda dominates your airwaves, is that safe?  Maybe our public broadcasting should be a little less starved without getting that powerful.

[Loud Whispers]

I don't think anyone found the idea offensive; it's just not the world we live in right now, and berating the world from our high horses will not change it. There's an apparently subtle difference between acknowledging something as resistant to change and claiming that it is preferable.

I thought I was being unsubtly facetious there. Shitty rainy socialist island is not anywhere close to the moral highground lol

Yes, capitulation is not helpful, but temper tantrums are scarcely more so. What is helpful is identifying a subset of the causes of undesirable conditions that are mutable with whatever means are available to the people who want them changed. Show people something concrete and it's amazing how many will at least identify specific reasons they don't want it, which is way more helpful than whining until no one takes you seriously.

So yes. Informative press is great. How do we get it given everything else?

One temper tantrum is useless, a tantrum spiral is deliciously useful. Trying to identify mutable causes to organize a response on a Tanna Tuvan Dwarf ASCII iron mining simulator in a thread where you haven't established any consensus on whether it is even worth pursuing a change in the status quo is jumping the gun just a bit. It is like you say, activism - everyone arguing over whose proposals are the least useful and most offensive. Attacking media consolidation and partisan news harnesses this most delightful mind trap, getting people outraged over the identity of the brands, much in the same way that it's poor forum etiquette to cite the Daily Mail as your source. The most effective thing anyone can do online is discredit the authority of discredited news, perhaps with exception to attacking their ad revenue, archiving their articles to document their incompetence, corruption and bias and electing antitrust zealots into power.

We *have* public broadcasting, TV and radio.  It's really good.  It's not as well funded as the BBC, obviously, but I'm okay with that.  The BBC seems pretty benign, particularly from my side of politics, but I think it's fair to be suspicious of government-run news.  Particularly when it overwhelms all other news agencies in the country.

The BBC has a tendency to waste millions of sterling on nepotistic projects and political garbage, while its political impartiality comes with an asterisk - there's lots of ways they can tilt the stage, so to say, without falling afoul of public oversight. Despite all that it's pretty good, and I'd say the lack of an onslaught of advertising and top notch journalism sans economic interest makes the occasional £10M interracial orgy* worthwhile.
*_{The BBC TV entertainment division is going through a phase where they are trying too hard to be HBO. It is an awkward phase to say the least.}

I guess if they got too overtly political, people would literally riot over the 150 pounds/househould yearly fee for most people with a color television (blind people get half rate, apparently??)

I'm surprised blind people don't get TV for free since... Well I'm sure some minister thought it was clever.

tldr; BBC is really cool, though wow it kinda dominates your airwaves, is that safe?  Maybe our public broadcasting should be a little less starved without getting that powerful.

Any State Media can be as useful, useless or harmful as the State it is a part of. Trekkin is correct in that I am being too whingy without providing enough of substance, and so my meaningful contribution is to suggest that one way to introduce meaningful change in all US media companies is to enforce existing US media regulations + reform media regulations to bring the FCC more in line with something like Ofcom.

Ofcom is the sexier, less known pillar of British media. Like the BBC it wastes loads of public money giving itself loadsa money, but it is also responsible for "incentivizing" private news into behaving themselves. The economic incentive is simple: If they misbehave, Ofcom can drive aforementioned media out of its own media.
It is an organization responsible for regulating and punishing all news media, including the BBC, should they be found to be politically biased and/or inaccurate. That is not to say that News in the UK does not have political leanings - just that they must fundamentally scrutinize and challenge everything political they present on their show. For example Fox News got pulled off the air a while back because they brought in a political commentator and Ofcom ruled they broke regulations for neither being critical (scrutinizing the assumptions and assertions of their guest) instead encouraging their guest's assertions (insinuating them as fact in narrative-building).

Due impartiality and due accuracy in news
5.1    News, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.
5.2    Significant mistakes in news should normally be acknowledged and corrected on air quickly (or, in the case of BBC ODPS, corrected quickly). Corrections should be appropriately scheduled (or, in the case of BBC ODPS, appropriately signalled to viewers).
5.3    No politician may be used as a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programmes unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified. In that case, the political allegiance of that person must be made clear to the audience.

The full regulations is a spicy list, well worth a read. They detail everything with far superior skill and clarity than I ever could. If Fox News had followed the rules set by Ofcom, Fox News UK would be a respectable and reliable news outlet.

What's more, all political advertising on radio and broadcasting is banned in the UK. This is easily one of the sexiest bans any democracy has made. In exchange the parties get like 2 broadcasts for free for each election, which basically means you have to sit through them once every 5 years or so. Compared to US Presidential campaigns spending the economies of small Asian nations every day on attack ads, it's heavenly bliss. It also means that the party with the most money isn't the one always guaranteed to win, since on paper the playing field is even between the smaller parties and the larger ones (as usual, there are loopholes, but the fundamental structure is sound).

tl;dr
1. Stop the FCC from selecting its leadership from the leadership of the USA's media giants. Changing the selection process of commissioners would be necessary. Senators and Presidents beholden to aforementioned media giants, commissioners beholden to their political party ensures that there will never be successful anti-bias media regulation, unless a Pirate Party managed to storm US elections and pigs fly.
2. Make anti-bias regulations in media.
3. Enforce them!
Making an independent anti-bias media regulator might be easier than reforming the FCC though. In conclusion; state media with dominant audience-share is fine and safe as long as it is beholden to powerful regulation which affects all equally well, to the benefit of the audience, with the objective of imparting unbiased and accurate information.