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Originally Posted by Rococo
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So yeah, I think there's an excellent case that the US media is acting strongly contrary to the interests of the average US citizen and deserves the title "enemy of the people" and "fake news". The fourth estate is more powerful and more dangerous than the president; why should they get a pass from scrutiny and withering criticism?
Do you believe that the NYT or the Washington Post is more likely to misstate facts, or even worse, fabricate facts than Fox or Breitbart? Id be interested in your answer either with respect to reporting generally or reporting that is specific to the Trump administration.
Your question is interesting and very telling. Firstly, to answer your question, I do not know. I suspect that (non-editorial) Fox News and the NYT are about equivalent as far as "mistating and fabricating" goes. But your question is irrelevant since it doesn't get to the heart of what bias is. There's this (truly bizarre) modern belief that stating objective facts is sufficient to overcome claims of bias. This would be a howler to our forbears and it's a bit said that we'd declined so much in basic philosophical sophistication. Journalistic bias comes in many forms:
1. Getting facts wrong/mistating/outright fabricating facts (you covered this)
2. The choice of facts and stories that get told. To give an obvious example, the media barely reported on Obama locking up children but massively reported on Trump mostly continuing the practice, including using a 2014 photo (!!!!) of children locked in cages and blaming Trump for it. This is extreme bias against Trump. If Trump does 50% of things well, and 50% of things badly, and the media spends 95% of its time reporting the bad things for Trump and 25% for Obama, that is extreme political bias even if every fact is correct, and the media rightly deserve to get called "fake news" and "the enemy of the people" for inserting their extreme bias in what they report
3. The choice of writers and pundits. We already know the media leans hard left - 28% are Democrats and 6% are Republican, not even close to representative of the population. This changes the philosophy with which items are reported.
4. The use of language and especially adjectives. Trump "rants" about something, Obama "speaks" about it. Language about Trump is often highly charged, dismissive, choosing the negative adjective for actions that don't require it to report the story.
5. Taking the side of Trump-bashing when there's doubt. The Russia collusion story is a classic example. Any sane journalist would come down on the side of "it's probably bull****" as the CNN producer did.
6. Letting critical items go unchallenged while positive statements get challenged. An example is giving a hard grilling/skeptical faces to people who said the Russia narrative was nonsense, while letting pass (now proven false) claims from various pundits that Trump/Russia collusion was a real thing and the president was likely to be indicted by the Muller report.
So basically I think your view of the media is naive as demonstrated in your questioning. The media has heaps of ways of expressing extreme bias and thus presenting an entirely "fake news" image of a president while sticking to facts.