Look to Eastern Europe to see your future?

[Berkut]

CNN is a rather crappy source of news from the standpoint of the quality they put out. But it is very objective.

I don't know where to go with that. An assessment of "objectivity" is itself highly subjective and depends on your perspective. Someone from a communist perspective would see rife pro-capitalist biases in CNN--and justifiably so, imo.

That would be relevant if we were discussing objectivity in contrast to communists, I guess. I don't think we are though - we are talking about US Left/Right objectivity.

In an event, poor quality discredits the news source in many ways more than political bias.

Sure, but the quality of CNN is actually not poor per se - in that I don't think their reporting is mis-aligned with their attempt at quality. They are as good as they set out to be, which isn't very in depth of serious, but basic news with plenty of crap to appeal to the barely thinking.

They hit the mark they are aiming for, they just aren't aiming very high.

But their mark has very little, if any, Left/Right US bias, and I think they generally at least try to be honest about their reporting.

[alfred russel]

That would be relevant if we were discussing objectivity in contrast to communists, I guess. I don't think we are though - we are talking about US Left/Right objectivity.

Aren't communists part of the US left? At the very least socialists are a decent chunk of the left, and Ayn Rand followers on the right.

I'm calling out CNN because of the 24 hour news networks it is the only one with any claim to credibility, and it is, imo, abominable.

It is far less of a news network as it is political entertainment. Especially during the primaries, Donald Trump got almost all the coverage on the Republican side. That wasn't because CNN was biased toward him personally, but because he was the most sensational candidate that got the biggest ratings. So when he had a big stupid rally, CNN would often cover it live.

For years if there was a big policy proposal or new initiative, CNN talking heads would spend the night speculating on the political implications, and inviting on hacks to scream talking points at each other.

If your media is constantly promoting sensational candidates and superficial policy debates, you shouldn't be surprised if you get sensational politicians and superficial policy. It is a bias that may be far worse than one to the right or to the left.

[grumbler]

Aren't communists part of the US left? At the very least socialists are a decent chunk of the left, and Ayn Rand followers on the right.

I'm calling out CNN because of the 24 hour news networks it is the only one with any claim to credibility, and it is, imo, abominable.

It is far less of a news network as it is political entertainment. Especially during the primaries, Donald Trump got almost all the coverage on the Republican side. That wasn't because CNN was biased toward him personally, but because he was the most sensational candidate that got the biggest ratings. So when he had a big stupid rally, CNN would often cover it live.

For years if there was a big policy proposal or new initiative, CNN talking heads would spend the night speculating on the political implications, and inviting on hacks to scream talking points at each other.

If your media is constantly promoting sensational candidates and superficial policy debates, you shouldn't be surprised if you get sensational politicians and superficial policy. It is a bias that may be far worse than one to the right or to the left.

I think that you are correct that the news media can be "played" in the sense that they are looking to cover stories that will get eyeballs on screens/pages, but that has been true forever.

What is new is the second factor you noted, which is that new media now have a lot more bandwidth to fill, so to speak, and so their signal-to-noise ratio is way, way down.  That makes it easier for the Trumps of the world to make their lies seem just more of the same low-signal-to-noise news people hear anyway.

My analysis deliberately ignores the anti-intellectual "news media" like right-wing talk radio.  That stuff is just the same poison political hackery has always been.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

A more objective news source will be one that strictly reports facts and doesn't comment upon them.

it'll still need to decide which facts to report, which is again subject to bias...

[crazy canuck]

The US is too big to simply buy all the media up, but it isn't too big to setup a completely biased, no-credibility media, have it grab massive market share appealing to its own echo chamber, and then marginalize the rest of the media by chanting a mantra that the non-biased media is just as bad as their creation, and hence destroying the ability to see the media as a credible source of information.

I think the US is already there.  Watching the Fox News channel when the appeal court upheld the lower court ruling on the ban was surreal

[DGuller]

A more objective news source will be one that strictly reports facts and doesn't comment upon them.

That's misguided on many levels.  First, you have to decide which facts are relevant, so algorithmic objectivity is already out of the picture.  Secondly, facts don't speak for themselves for the most part, they need to be paired with context. 

There no way for jouranlists to do their jobs without opening themselves up to bias.  They just have to try their best to avoid it if they want to be regarded as legitimate journalists.

[Fate]

The right has done a scarily masterful job of discrediting the media among their own followers.

I would suggest the media mostly did this to themselves.

That is exactly what the right has been selling us.

Personally, I am not buying it.

I think the right simply didn't like objective news, because when your message is objectively terrible, objective reporting is to be feared.

This has been going on for as long as there has been media. This is not new.

The demonization of objective media is a necessary condition to normalizing objectionable stances.

The right has convinced their followers that Fox News is objective, and CNN is radical. They've been so good at it, that even plenty of people not in the crazy right are starting to believe it...

I would caution against discrediting Fox News. Its news side is main stream with a right wing establishment slant. Pundits like O'Reilly and Hannity aren't sold as objective. They're entertainment. But their news guys like Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, etc. can credibly claim to be objective.

I worry more about the likes of Breitbart, InfoWars, etc. and their future demon spawn who live in an alternative reality. A world where Trump saying the murder rate is the highest it's been in 47 years isn't questioned because all they're fed are stories about black and brown people behaving badly daily.

[11B4V]

You forgot Shepard Smith....

[alfred russel]

My analysis deliberately ignores the anti-intellectual "news media" like right-wing talk radio.  That stuff is just the same poison political hackery has always been.

That isn't news media--it is propaganda made entertainment. A major problem with establishments like CNN is that they have turned their programming over to those voices. They just have an "objective" moderator in the middle of hack from the right, and hack from the left. The moderator sets the topic, then wears a shit eating grin while the other two scream at each other on a split screen. It has infected the coverage of major news events. See the election--where CNN had a team of hacks in the studio ready to propagandize in real time.