flip wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 10:09 pm
but you seem to think there's some inherent issue when cnn or nbc commentators support democrats. especially when the audience is aware of it, there's nothing wrong with journalists having opinions (and the 'alternative media' people gravitate to when they decide the mainstream media is biased is invariably just as opinionated, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone). some opinionated journalists are propagandists. most are not.
The inherent issue is that the range of allowed opinions is restricted and policed. They don’t support just any democrat, they support corporate/mainstream democrats, and are by and large hostile to anything that contests the status quo, even when it comes from people that are generally seen as operating on the left wing of the Democratic Party. See coverage of Bernie sanders for example. And the issue is not restricted to anchors/journalists who formulate opinions/commentary versus those who just ‘report the facts’. This reality permeates both groups. Just watch any five-minute segment from a defense/national security correspondent like Barbara Starr or some one like that - they just report talking points handed to them by the pentagon with no push back or reflection. Pure propaganda.
If these entities (cnn, nytimes, fox, msnbc, but also Twitter, Facebook, etc) were just one player among a wide host or range of possibilities, then fine. But so much money, power and influence is concentrated in their hands that they can effectively close off the range of possibilities. Alternative media (which is not inherently good, not at all, but that’s a different subject) only has a fraction of the power those networks and corporations have.
So just brushing this off as ‘people are entitled to their opinion’ is not convincing. Not when a whole range of opinions is actively silenced.