this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Don't shit on journalists. If the media is your enemy then you're no better than MAGA.
I have no issue with journalists, but you're not going to find them on an entertainment channel. The Washington Post was rubber stamping war profiteering before Bozos bought them.
The majority of outlets are owned by an ever concentrating number of billionaires. Blind trust is the last thing you want to give them.
Random counterexample, John Oliver probably agrees more with you than me and he runs a comedy news show on HBO. There are tons of people just like him.
The fact that Washington Posts' Harris endorsement which Bezos prevented from printing was immediately leaked means the editors and owners do not have complete control of the narrative.
Bro... John Oliver is a comedian and doesn't consider himself a journalist: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/12/466569047/is-john-olivers-show-journalism-he-says-the-answer-is-simple-no
He's also not a billionaire nor own the show or the network it's on.
Like you're agreeing that the media outlet is under orders to shape the narrative... But then somehow take the individual journalists leaking things they were ordered not to as some perverse reason to still trust the outlet?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say as your defense of the American press is a British comedian and an admission a billionaire shapes WaPo's narratives.
You are all over the map.
When corporate media is primarily concerned with profit. That's not free press.
Which isn't to say journalists don't have a right to earn a living. But rather that shareholder profits have way more influence in what gets published then they should.
What you fail to realize is accruement of capital of many opposing businesses isn't the enemy at this juncture.
The unchecked power of an elected fascist dismantling democracy is.
There is no all consuming hivemind that connects to people more as their wealth increases, they're all competing against one another.
Elon Musk's media machine and unchecked wealth is a large part of why we are even having this conversation.
And in 2016 it was Fox News.
And while you are correct, that businesses are competing against each other and there is no overarching hive mind. They also have an incentive to compete against the working class. And in that regard, many corporations are aligned.
Folks can compete with each other and still have common interest. And in a capitalist society, the common interest of capitalists is to suppress and oppress the working class.
Edit: also, I didn't down vote you for your opinion. I down voted you for presuming to know what I realize and what I don't. Because frankly, it felt rude.
The way I see it is they've got more incentive as rational actors to promote security and equality. What is interfering with that is irrational primal instincts that make some of them want to hoard wealth and attack those who are physically or culturally different from them.
More billionaires supported a candidate who promised to tax their unrealized gains than they sided with Trump. Trumps billionaires just happened to capture enough social media to tilt things his way.
Oh yeah I agree there.
And I admit the original comment that started mine in your conversation was too broad. There are enlightened business interests who understand that security and equity is good for business in the long term. I did undergraduate business administration studies, and they teach DEI. Not because it's the ethical thing to do, but because it is good for the bottom line in the long run. Especially in a diverse globalized economy.
But I also get their knee jerk reaction about the media. Billionaires operating on those primal instincts have captured a lot of it, and it is frustrating.
The actual Journalists have mostly been fired from most mainstream media in the US.
It's now mostly Propagandists and Click-bait Enhancing Specialists.
You can blame Liberals as much as the MAGA crowd for moving newspapers away from Journalism and into Propaganda.
We still hear about Trump dismantling government offices with interviews from employees, we still hear about hospitals shutting down, we still hear about environmental disasters, we still hear about the ICE in military gear going door to door.
You might not like whats in the news, but Journalists are working for your benefit.
Being selectively informed by a media outlet isn't the same thing as factual journalism.
One of the huge roles of Fox News is to lower the bar for what's considered 'actual' journalism by different outlets owned by the same billionaire class.
The Overton Window has been shrinking and drifting right for decades. There is no left in the United States. https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2004
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/
Viet Nam was very unpopular directly due to front line coverage we don't really get anymore as a result of Reagan nuking the fairness doctrine and birthing Fox News to drag all other media right filing it with ads and misinformation.
Democrats are not left because "left" starts at identifying capitalism as a net bad rather than net good.
Fox News isn't even news at this point, I'm pretty sure they even made that exact argument in court in some of their many many lawsuits.
The fact that you chose that as the example is laughable, makes you seem crazy.
That was entirely the reason I used it and I'm surprised you can't digest what I'm saying.
It's not news yet it's the most popular "news" network on television. Despite poling showing people that watch it are less informed than people that watch no news at all, nothing has been done specifically because it's serving it's intended role: misinforming the gullible and setting a lower bar for MSNBC and CNN to be seen as real news instead of telling you how to feel about what you're told about.
The shocking obvious superficial shit that brings in lots of clicks will always be published.
That's what gave Trump lots of proeminence from the very start - say something outrageous -> have the Click Enhancers put your face and your words in front of everybody.
The actual real Journalism (especially Investigative Journalism that dig down into the details and dug out things like closed-door agreements to tilt things just so in favour of a few) has long moved out of the big news media, as has actual Journalistic Ethics ever since newspapers started to be expected to do things like side with a candidate in Presidential elections.
You're confusing companies owned by billionaires which historically, decades ago, did have actual Journalists on the payroll, with present day makers of Journalism.
Just note how little Corruption or at the very least Conflicts of Interest of people in positions of power is mentioned in the big newsmedia publications.