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Fake News Stories and Facebook

Its always humorous to see the Left misunderstand the root of the issue in this dilemma. The media's conscious choice to depart from unbiased reporting that started this mess. The right capitalized on it with Fox News beginning in the late 90's, and ever since then it has been a battle to the bottom. CNN has attempted in some ways to stay left/center, but lately (especially this election) they shifted completely left (or perhaps more categorically, they shifted Hillary).

This is from election night, from CNN. I remember watching this live and thinking, this isn't what news reporting should be. Ana starts out great by listing facts, and analyzing potential election results, and then she completely loses it the last 30 seconds of the clip. I don't speak spanish so one of you who does will have to translate for me (took 4 labored years of German at WFU), but she ends with some sort of excited spanish shoutout (perhaps a call to action for latino voters?). Not sure, but this is just a small sample of what the right has seen for years.



Eventually you get tired of that. Eventually you start your own biased network. Eventually people further to the right get tired of Fox News and decide they need to creep further from the center.

But do not be fooled, it started with the mass media's systematic departure from unbiased news reporting.

post script: I think Trump ended up with a higher latino vote than Romney, which again shows a narrative pushed by the MSM that never existed. They simply assumed it existed because it fit their preconceived notion of how THEY would react to Trump
 
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And that shows your bias. Why would anybody expect Hillary to do better with Latinos than Obama?
 
Wow.














Your friends sound terrible!

:) my core friends are awesome, great group of people. It the outer concentric circles of acquaintances and casual friends and their friends whose noise I found myself having to constantly weed out and ignore. It's great meeting people and making friends, but having them all concentrated into a news feed was a little much for me. I prefer the natural flow of friendships and hanging out to the millennial instant data version.
 
That's ambitious. None of us will ever truly attain that ideal.

aka "Why try?"

Proper argumentation is less about systematically removing your biases and more about admitting your biases while you make an attempt at being impartial.
 
I still think you're super light on facts and heavy on feelings. I took 3 minutes and found 4 articles that at least pay lip service to the concepts that there are problems with immigration in America and elsewhere.

It seems to me that people are generally basing their ideas about biased news media from 24 hour news networks like CNN. My guess there is that the people on TV on networks like CNN for most of the day are liberal. Their producers are probably liberal. Maybe their line editors, writers, directors. Rarely even their ownership and executive management.

They also stopped producing hard news on 24 hour news networks because they decided that quantity was far more important than quality. True investigative journalism has no slant. Nor should reporting. What frustrates me more than blind, unsourced claims of bias is actual bias. I think Megyn Kelly has come out the best of any media person from this entire election cycle, save maybe the dude covering Trump at the Post (who again, got that beat not because the Post is a liberal paper--they assigned a veteran to cover Hillary, Wikileaks, etc).
Lots of truth to that. There is SOME hard core investigative journalism out there that is pretty solid...and it looks like that is happening more and more in response to lower ratings and loss of $$. Both CNN and MSNBC started moves from the far left a couple of years ago...which just showed to me they knew the bias was there and had probably gone too far.

That said, a lot of the bias problem is not what is there, it's what is missing. I can find lots and lots of examples of MSM completely trashing Trump's immigration policy (or pick a conservative concept). I bet you can't find many articles completely extolling the virtues and benefits of it, if at all (non Foxnews sources). Conservatives since the 1980s have read/watched/listened to the MSM and wondered where their views were..because they weren't and when they were, they were distorted and trashed. Something non-biased SHOULD have them and respect them, yes?

Then there are all the little assumptions and pot shots at conservative views all over the place. I stopped listening to NPR because of it...got ridiculous. As that article pointed out, ESPN keeps going that way, and I'm certain that's a large part of the NFLs ratings issue.

It's not our imagination. It's not been ginned up by "fake news", like people are trying to rationalize. Hell, is there a single PC viewpoint/rule that is conservative? They are all progressive.

But I also think bias is just part of the cycle. I believe in generational dogma theory...4th Turning/ Strauss and Howe kind of stuff. They posit that a set of principles..dogma..becomes dominant for about an 80 year period, roughly a lifetime/generation. The dominant dogma takes over the debate, the way we discuss things, all the institutions including the media, etc. It's accepted as "good" for lack of a better term. We've been in a cycle that started with 1930s New Deal principles and it continued through today's progressivism...and that's what most of the media buys into as well. The MSM bias makes complete sense from that way of thinking.....so I came to terms with the bias 12+ years ago....one reason I stopped arguing with RJK all the time! LOL.
 
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I'm losing my mind here. I feel like we need to go back to basics and just reach a consensus on what constitutes a "fact" versus "opinion" versus conclusory statements that are peddled as facts but cannot be falsified.
 
I'm losing my mind here. I feel like we need to go back to basics and just reach a consensus on what constitutes a "fact" versus "opinion" versus conclusory statements that are peddled as facts but cannot be falsified.

2+2=???????
 
2+2=???????

MSM would say 4, but they buy into the concept of numbers, which is just a construct anyway. Does anyone know anything really? Alex Jones says Sandy Hook was an inside job, and you can't prove him wrong, can you?
 
It'd be disingenuous to write a piece praising it just in the name of being fair and balanced.

And this is what the MSM did this election. Had Trump surrogates on defending Trumps lies and countering facts and covering Hillary's issues as if they were equivalent with Trump's. This false equivalency and equal time sham in the name of being "fair and balanced, along with all of the fake news, is the story of the media this cycle, which is what helped lead us to Trump.
 
Why is bias such a dirty word? We are all being conditioned to react negatively whenever confronted with the idea that we might be biased about something.

That's ambitious. None of us will ever truly attain that ideal.

I'm losing my mind here. I feel like we need to go back to basics and just reach a consensus on what constitutes a "fact" versus "opinion" versus conclusory statements that are peddled as facts but cannot be falsified.

You know, I don't want to be completely neutral, but it would be helpful to know what the real FACTS are of a situation or an issue, so that I can then form an opinion and understand where I line up with the opinions of others. Climate science is a good example of this. I know that a lot of scientists believe that humans cause climate change. I also know that some scientists disagree, and some scientists agree but to a lesser extent, and some scientists think that other scientists are simply pushing an agenda to create work for themselves by alarming people. It's hard to know which of these people to believe, when most of them are reasonable people with legitimately formed opinions. Some people point to the majority approach and say that we should believe the majority. Others then respond with things like "Galileo and Copernicus say hello," or "how dare you quash scientific debate." Through all of this, I have four choices, none of which are attractive. I can educate myself thoroughly and form my own opinion; I can just go with the flow and let the majority decide; I can argue with the majority and be branded a fool; or I can simply quit caring.

I guess my point is that there is value in having a defined point of truth, so that we are at least able to align ourselves in relation to one common point.
 
so you feel like it's possible for a layman is going to get a good grasp on global climate science and make an educated decision?
 
Here's a classic example....Christine Amanpour like most of the MSM framed the entire Brexit situation as racism, hate, nativist, isolationist, etc. which are serious allegations....when there were real issues and most who wanted it wanted British independence from EU decision making, including immigration. Their control was getting abusive. She about falls out of her chair in disbelief when Hannon says they might indeed let the same number of immigrants into the country, that was up to Parliament. Why would she react that way if she knew their argument?

Trump was pretty much treated/covered in about the same way.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/06/27/amanpour-intv-danniel-hannan.cnn
 
so you feel like it's possible for a layman is going to get a good grasp on global climate science and make an educated decision?

I feel like I'm reading Gorgias again. Essentially you're making Gorgias' argument for rhetoric.
 
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I think it's a little strange to talk about the long term effects of identity politics on democracy when it's existed in the zeitgeist for, what, two years in the US and doesn't hardly exists outside the US (to his own admission)?

I feel like there are likely many OpEds about women's movement dated in the mid-70s about how focusing on equality diminishes discussions about war, poverty and the Common Good
 
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