Getting The “Good” Stuff
Where is Your Pharmacy?
The 4th Estate has failed the American public. Driven by their insatiable lust for cash, the “Mainstream Media” sold out the country and, in the process, have dug their own graves.
Cable news is dying with viewers fleeing to independent media. Newspapers have cratered and local newspapers are a quaint thing of the past.
Partisan politics is the main reason for the death of the 4th Estate as readers/viewers fell into their respective bubbles. However, the MSM trying to ‘both sides’ the dialog, sold out their consumers by publishing stories that are just insanely out of sync with actual reality.
An example is USA Today. What used to be an extremely generic, milquetoast publication began running “Opinion” pieces that are far afield from reality. They seem to have forgotten the idiom; “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.”
Take, for example, Nicole Russell. Russell is a far-right, MAGA who writes hit pieces on Biden and fluff pieces on T***p…even though she claims to be a ‘former supporter.’ OK, gurl. Like the talking heads on Faux, Nicole has been in full gloat mode since November 5th.
Russell recently posted a piece entitled: “Biden's sad, failed presidency is even worse than T***p's first term” In contrast, Politico recently put up an in-depth report: “30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed” While Russell took some good drugs and banged out a bunch of insane ‘opinions,’ Politico just laid out the actual data.
Clearly, Biden had some stumbles, and yet he will have accomplished more than any president in decades in terms of legislation…in particular, legislation that affects the day-to-day lives of citizens. A perfect steward? No. An accomplished steward? Yes. Blunders? They all have them.
Consider a headline from (right wing) “The Western Journal” following the jobs report last Friday: “New Job Creation Explodes 630 Percent for Month After T***p Elected.” You might say, WTAF? Biden is President and October’s low numbers followed two massive hurricanes on the East Coast. But then you would not be able to stay uneducated.
Or how about Faux Noise running a piece on the “Oval Office,” where they stated both Monica Lewinsky and Abraham Lincoln stood. The problem with that information is the Oval Office wasn’t a thing until 1909. Don’t tell the Faux viewers though. This is now reality to them.
The Truth Tellers
“None of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America than the press.” –John Adams
The press used to be the arbiter of truth, truth to power. Now, six major media corporations own 90% of the media that Americans consume.
When it comes down to holding those in power accountable, there are very few voices and those are all independent. Listing a few of them:
These are historians, people who understand autocratic regimes because some of them have lived within those regimes. These are NOT Opinion writers.
One of the first things autocrats do is go after the media. Today, less than 32% of the country trusts the media. These same people ‘trust’ un-moderated sources like Facebook and TikTok as ‘sources’ for news.
As expected, a recent Gallup Poll shows that trust in media is harshly divided along partisan lines as well as age with younger Americans much less trusting in ‘news.‘
Cutting Through Bias
“News outlets have an incentive to be partisan — it helps them to earn ad revenue, especially if they use sensationalism and clickbait. But when we stay inside a filter bubble, we may miss important ideas and perspectives from the other side.”-- allsides.com
The reality is there are very few sources of information that are not siloed or heavily biased. While it is true that MSM prior to the 21st century may have leaned more ‘left,’ or pro status quo, the onslaught of right-wing media in the past two decades has dwarfed that truth.
For nearly 40 years the U.S. had the Fairness Doctrine, which meant media outlets were required to have equal airtime for political issues and politicians. Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 under the same argument used by Elmo Musk for Twitter, “Free Speech.”
One year after the Reagan Administration killed the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh made the scene and the rest is history. We were on our way to “Barack the Magic Negro” and T***p giving him the “Presidential Medal of Freedom!”
When Musk took over Twitter he said he was a “free speech absolutist.” Musk then re-platformed vile and abusive accounts, Neo-Nazis and avowed antisemites.
The result was advertisers fleeing in droves as they were not happy having their ads appearing next to posts regurgitating Nazi rhetoric. At first, Musk tried to protect the platform, but when advertisers refused to return, he unthrottled the platform and it became a raging cesspool of hate, misogyny and vulgarity. “XChan” (mimicking the bulletin board sites such as 4Chan and 8kun).
Musk removed the trust and safety personnel at Twitter, branded it “X” and then he removed the block feature which meant that anyone who was blocked could still see your content and you could see theirs.
Twitter became unusable causing the “European Federation Of Journalists To Leave Twitter.”
Now reputable ‘unbiased’ sources are foreign news outlets such as the BBC and Sky News. The rest of the media sphere is biased or heavily-biased. Thus, if one wants to simply digest information that is not skewed heavily in either direction, the best bet is something like Sky News.
There are a handful of legacy media such as Bloomberg and Financial Times that still offer mostly unbiased news with very little “opinion.”
A review of the top podcasts for 2024 shows the same bias skewing. Basically, anything that is labelled as “Free Press” now needs to be vetted for slant. Do your homework.