"MSM has ridiculous fuck ups every now and then" and "MSM outlets like WaPo and NYT consistently have the best journalism in the country" aren't mutually exclusive.

Right-wing politicians have to pretend the media is completely biased and corrupt to hide their anti-intellectualism and inability to govern.

Do you deny that many mainstream media outlets are very biased?

math and election-denying zealot ‘icepeon’ accuses anyone else of anti-intellectualism



the babylonbee on point of late

If we look at his approval ratings instead of the net approval (approval minus disapproval), the picture is much less clear:



Trump has relatively normal approval ratings. Certainly on the lower end, but nothing out of the ordinary. What's really dragging him down in the net approval category is the high disapproval compared to previous presidents.

Simply put, Trump is a uniquely polarizing president. He has a similar share of the population behind him as previous presidents, but his detractors oppose him more passionately.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 28 2019 05:44pm

hmm...

Yep, our little icemage has done a lot of growing up and acquired a much more nuanced view on media.

And if you paid any attention to his posts (maybe you don't? I don't know?) you would know that he regularly acknowledges bias in reporting.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 28 2019 06:09pm

Biased, absolutely. You'd just have to clarify what they are biased towards. There's a lot of different aspects of bias.

Major outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are insanely Washington focused. It's all about the political drama every day. There's also just a normalcy bias... if the president acts in a way that no other president(or even major politician before) has, it results in amplified coverage. The same bias applies for arguments... a person coming in as a libertarian who wants to abolish a bunch of government departments is not taken seriously. And there's a general bias in favor of treating left-leaning positions as more legitimate than right-leaning, particular with social issues like abortion/LGBT stuff.

It's just silly to think that all of these various biases mean journalists at MSM outlets aren't putting out great journalism every day, the overwhelming majority of it being true.

This post was edited by IceMage on Oct 28 2019 05:56pm

There's a significant bias on the right-wing side economically. If we had a bias-free media they would have been calling out every politician and pundit for the past 20+ years on global warming, but instead we had a long period of "here's both sides", or sometimes outright refusing to cover stories because it was about an advertiser. Similarly even the most libertarian organizations estimate the total savings for a national healthcare system would be in the trillions over ten years compared to what we are paying now, but they consistently have stories about "how are we gonna pay for it!".

So the bias can go either way to a significant degree depending on the subject. There are a ton of issues that would have been settled decades ago with an objective media.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 28 2019 06:06pm

I'm trying to think of a clever way to respond to this but I'm just left with disappointment at my intellectual opponents on PaRD. The idea that you think this response is an actual argument...

So right-wing politicians don't have to 'pretend' MSM are biased, because they clearly are biased.

Recognizing that some of their journalism is pretty good (even though they have a severe bias and have countless fuckups and scandals) is a valid observation.


I just thought it was curious that you would post those things and later try to claim people are anti-intellectual for calling out biased media outlets.