When we first started interacting today I asked you how many companies own 90% of the media in the US. You said you have no idea. It's five. So how you can state that it is not a monolith when it is almost entirely controlled by multi-billion dollar companies I don't know.
You yourself have alleged that there is a right-wing media funded conspiracy. I'm saying that you are right.
Think about what you are saying here. The mainstream media wasn't white-supremacist before, but now that Trump has come along they are down with it. I understand that what I'm saying but might be an ultimately tougher pill to swallow, but don't pretend like what you are alleging isn't (also) nuts.

Yeah it's real. It's how people like Tulsi Gabbard can get Ron Paul's support. Anti-intervention/anti-establishmentism works on the left and the right. Of course you have to recognize that there is such a thing as "the establishment" and that it isn't some super-factionalized thing where the bourgeoisie impose their will as if by magic.

It's objectively not a monolith. You need to think more seriously about, well, everything. But media specifically. Understand what editorial control looks like, what bylines are, and so forth.

Fox and Sinclair have a clearly distinct ideological bent from CNN or whatever. That's not a monolith. That the nonideological media will play ball with the right from time to time out of self interest or out of incompetence isn't a conspiracy, it's just how it works.

Oh for ****'s sake.

Also I don't know what you're saying, so it's not a tough pill to swallow at all. There was some nonsense about the two party system, I remember that, but there didn't seem to be any connection to anything or explanation there. So I'm still waiting. What is the critique you're making?

Where do you think Rashida Tlaib stands on the question of whether America has a white supremacy problem?

Yeah, he left for the other place because the far-right Trump fans who manage this website found his views unacceptable. But this horseshoe thing is super real.

That you think there is such a thing as a nonideological media is the cause for your confusion and your inconsistency. CNN will cheerlead for war just like any of the other networks. This isn't to allege that there aren't a variety of different viewpoints expressed but when it comes time to rally the troops behind the flag don't think cnn and msnbc and your local paper won't be right there. You basically are disqualifying yourself as a bona-fide leftist for not believing in a war-mongering media and any objective look at history shows this.
The thesis hasn't changed: that a lot of what we see regarding Trump and immigration is theater designed to feed people on both sides of the political spectrum back into the left-right divide, amongst other things.
We both agree that there is a right-wing media creating "white-supremacy narratives. Only you don't accept that the media that Kelhus et al would call the left-wing media--cnn, msnbc, the Atlantic, etc--are there spinning the counter white-supremacist-take-over-narrative. That is the tougher pill.

That you seem to think that echoing ideological ideas is non-ideological seems to be yours.

Also, legitimate cruelty is cause for legitimate outrage, as much as you seem to think that anything that is broadcast is illegitimate.

There are far-right and far-left libertarians, but there are also a far-right and far-left Catholic groups and far-left and far-right war mongers and various other issues where the far-left and far-right can possibly agree. Forgetting Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky can be against US intervention in Venezuela and agree on that, but for entirely different reasons.

Tulsi Gabbard who supports Medicare for All and getting big money out of politics is leftist on some issues, but I think comes at foreign policy a bit from a right-wing isolationist Ron Paul POV. It's costing too much money and too much damage to the US Military. Whereas someone like Bernie or Chomsky come at it more from the POV that we should not be killing tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people even if they aren't Americans.

The bolded there is a demonstration of your conspiracy illness. Not that there aren't conspiracies in the world, but not like you talk about. The world is complicated. Society moves based on millions of decisions and some people carry a lot more weight than others. Still, the collection of very powerful people is huge. They disagree on some things, but agree on most things. They arrive at similar political positions more because it's inevitable given their conditions than because they conspired to agree with each other. And often agreeing with each other, to some degree they act in concert without having to conspire. The bourgeoisie impose their will by behaving somewhat the same throughout the class because they have similar upbringings and similar interests.

Yeah man you voted for the guy who hugs the flag at rallies and is apparently gonna pardon war criminals, how about you simmer down on this ****?

I get the appeal of being a Independent Guy Who Sees Through the Bull**** like this, but if your clear eyed cynicism means that you can't tell the difference between Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson, that just makes you uninformed.

I never said I didn't believe in a war-mongering media, by the way, you skipped a step in that trap. (the rah rah flag waving ****, of course, is neatly explained by the vulgar Marxist explanation I gave for the racist ****... war is great for ratings. There are other explanations for it, as well, but that's a subject for another day).


First off, Both Sidesing **** is a classic beltway insider move. Second, there is a left-right divide! People disagree about ****! It happens. You disagree with me about a lot of ****, right?

Sit down for this one: sometimes the media reports about things because those things are true. And if those true things are bad, people with actual ****ing principles might get mad.

Not you, I understand that. But some people do actually give a **** about other people. I can't explain why, I don't have any real hope of convincing you to have that empathy if you don't have it yet, but you need to absolutely shut the **** up about doubting the sincerity of people who disapprove of concentration camps for children. Not everyone is a piece of ****.

The last time I voted was for Al Gore but good try.

And you still never actually ****ing explained the why. Why does the media want to "designed to feed people on both sides of the political spectrum back into the left-right divide"? What do they get out of it? You fall into the same trap as Kelhus' explanation for race traitor SJWs, cui bono is a necessary component to any explanation, you gotta start with that instead of working backwards for why it's bad that the TeeVee makes you feel bad about supporting Trump.

Edit: OK so you didn't vote for him? Who cares. You wrote that you believed him! Imagine falling for that transparent con and then trying to talk down to other people about how the world works.

luckbox microbet is like a million times nicer to you people than I am so you need to read this part over and over until it finally gets through. Rich people are still people, they respond to incentives, they have flaws and virtues, there's no hidden meetings necessary.

The question is, if you hate them, if you want them to be worse off, there's one and only one political position that they work very hard to suppress. And it ain't yours. Why is that?

If both parties are the same, and voting doesn't matter, why the **** do Republicans work so hard to prevent poor people from doing it?

Fly you really are pretty special but I like you. I think we'll end up getting along well but first you need to stop thinking that you know everything and put your righteous indignation away.
You are really going to try to lecture me about "believing Trump" when presumably you actually voted for HRC. It is too bad that she didnt win and the roles could be reversed.
You are here arguing that the mainstream media has decided to get in on some "white-supremacists clicks" and you argue that the NYT introduced IDW is part of a right wing conspiracy all with a straight face and then drop-expletive laden posts at me when I suggest it might be deeper than that. It is hilarious.
You have argued that the idea that the two parties are corrupt is a plot by the Republicans. Think about that.

I'm curious why you think the bolded is true. This perspective is one that I've heard before of course--or variations of it at least--and we could probably get a little further without having to introduce additional evidence. We already know that actual meetings amongst the world's "movers and shakers" exist--the corproratists that we talked about before. You yourself have said they have no allegiance but to profit. And given that we know the media is in the hands of a few companies, why should it be that millions of decisions are going into things?
Overall I think there are lots of problems with your narrative and I'll argue that your last sentence amounts to the magic that i was talking about. You'll freely admit I'm fairly certain that the media can mobilize to shape public opinion when it comes to war I'd guess, but if it comes to anything else the signal is getting lost through the noise.

There's no reason for them to conspire on war either. The instant shift from talking about war to supporting it the second a bomb is dropped is more about their fear of their viewers and sponsors than fear of or cooperation with the government. Both of those things happen, but no one needs to tell any of the major media players that they are in trouble with their audience if they don't support the troops and that always means cheering them on and not wishing they were safe at home.

The general inclination for supporting the military in relative peace has a lot of reasons including sponsors, owners, access to power and the audience.

Allegiance to profit is a systematic problem. It's a big part of why there doesn't need to be a conspiracy. It's also why liberal and left leaning people can manage some of these organizations and make the decisions they do. Fiduciary duty is the excuse a lot of people have for doing immoral things.

A good explanation is one that actually explains the phenomena that we see.
Your theory is that there are two different media, a "nonideological media" and a right wing media.
My theory is that there is no difference between those. In order to justify your position you require your theory to dance pretty hard. These are amoral billionaire companies and they'll do anything but white-supremacy....nah...wait some extra views, ok sure. You think that means then that they are opposed to theater?
You are basically agreeing with me is the funny thing. Given that we are in agreement about most of the facts the only thing we are arguing about is interpretation. And that is pretty rare.

fly is a great poster

Well, your interpretation has you handwaving away actual atrocities as theatre. It leaves you completely unable to distinguish any objective reality if something was covered by a news organization. That seems kind of important from my perspective at least.

The fact that both CNN and Fox make (different) billionaires richer is trivially true, but "ergo they are both the same" doesn't at all follow and is disproven by looking at them.

A strawman and a tautology.

The only evidence for calling different media companies the same that you supply in that post is that they are run by amoral billionaires. If you got something else, OK, spit it out.

You realize that I spent a whole day posting on this topic yesterday and that more than one post went into my argument? It's a little too early still for me to take this back up today.

I think the maxim is something like "if you don't read the paper you'll be uninformed and if you do you'll be misinformed".
You are right that based on what I'm saying you can throw away thinking that you are getting objective reality from msm news sources. It doesn't mean you "are completely unable to distinguish any objective reality if it was covered by a news organization". It means that you have to work harder at it.
Trusting them on sports and weather is still fine though.

*I'll add that I find it heartening when I see posts from liberals saying things like "I can't stand NPR nowadays", because turning from NPR was a part of my own "wake up" processes to the controlled nature of media.

I can't say that I trust you or whoever you get your news from when it leads to you distrusting first hand accounts.

Well it's a crazy world we live in but in this thread I don't think I've done any distrusting of anything other than broad narratives.

And as fly pointed out, you can’t even work out the qui bono part of the crackpot conspiracies you peddle —why should anyone take you seriously as a media critic when you uncritically swallow whatever lizard people narrative Alex Jones tells you to believe?

Like, yeah NPR takes money from Mobil Oil, but your boy Alex sells magic Brain Force pills.