(July 2, 2018 at 2:12 am)ReptilianPeon Wrote: Here in England we have two things that the USA doesn't have:
1. TV news that has to, by law, be impartial (and by extension factual).
2. A well funded state broadcaster that does proper fact checking. Not to say that other news outlets don't do fact checking - they do.
3. Over here it's the newspapers who are the partisan hacks instead because they aren't subject to the same impartially laws. Still, society still doesn't feel anywhere near as polarised as the USA.
The BBC isn't perfect but it's far better than any of the TV news in the USA. I believe it has a status quo bias - pehaps a slight establishment bias too - still, they generally they do a pretty good job. Noam Chomsky writes in his book - Manufacturing Consent - that cooperate media in the USA is much better at propaganda than the state run broadcasters of authoritarian governments.
Yes, I agree the media in the USA is bad at their jobs. They also appear to be completely underprepared for the era of Donald Trump. Why does the likes of CNN still report the brazen lies of Donald Trump with a straight face? Why do they have to try and make things into a "he said this" but then "she said that"?
Here's something that I found:
Study links U.S. polarization to TV news deregulation
https://news.wsu.edu/2015/09/24/study-li...egulation/
Who is to blame for news deregulation? The 1996 Telecommunications Act which happened under Bill Clinton's watch. So the reason why we have such rubbish news outlets is because of the Bill Clinton.
Almost 4 decades of Reagan's deregulation has hurt our middle class and working poor, and our corporate media, is part of that. I still think local mom and pop stations and newspapers are still independent enough, but not big enough.
There were attempts to employ the "fairness doctrine" in our journalism, but with a corporate leaning SCOTUS has made that impossible.
