Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
It is far more monolithic than people realize. Folks think that only the Fox News if the world were being overly generous to Trump when he was just a candidate. The reality is that all mass market news outlets were.
I was a loooong time listener of NPR, a news outlets that most would probably consider as neutral or even left of center as you’ll get from US mass media. And I totally lost respect for them hearing them cover Trump as a candidate. Even now, I can just about hear Steve Inskeep chuckling after a Trump speech and simply never taking him as a serious candidate. This was someone who was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes. And these fucken reporters, who I had previously held in high regard, were just laughing at some of the insane antics that Donald was pulling. They were letting this shit slide while they would have roasted any other candidate if they had said the same thing.
And it’s not just NPR but any mass media news outlets acted the same way. That’s where the majority of Americans get their news and they were all doing the same things.
NPR = “Nice Polite Republicans”.
Among the left, it’s always been a running joke that outlets like PBS (Petroleum Broadcast System) and NPR are somehow agents of liberalism.
I seem to recall NPR’s own ombudsman said they rely too much on corporate/conservative sources. They are not nearly as “liberal” as the unhinged right wing declares they are.
This all goes back to Reagan. He’s the one who really popularized the term “liberal media”. In labeling the media supposedly liberal (which it really wasn’t), it made that same media shift to the right because they naively didn’t want to be thought of as being biased. Well you keep doing that for some 50 years and even mass media outlets are right of center these days, and that doesn’t even include the really right wing outlets like Fox.
Then there is also the whole issue of media consolidation and corporate media. So you have fewer media outlets and those outlets are richer and more controlled by corporate interests. Corporations by default will lean to the right. So they will tend to naturally paint stories with a pro business, anti worker lean.
It’s all a big mess these days, so when I see these stories when people deep within the industry bemoan Trump, I can only help but consider these people as part of the problem.
I refuse to give NPR any more of my time anymore. I used to have a very long commute so for many years my radio was locked in on them all the time (the fact that music stations are shit these days doesn’t help either). Not any more. I’ll look at their stories if they come across my news feed these days, but they lost their credibility with how they handled Trump with kid gloves and they lost even more credibility with how they tried to sink Bidens agenda more recently.
Our news media gives one free pass after another to Republicans and holds Democrats to impossibly high standards.
In terms of what I listen to now, it’s a random assortment of what comes through my feed. I really haven’t had a good “home” for news in a while and I don’t like that, but reading multiple sources is probably the best move regardless since you can see how various outlets spin the same story. I’d love to find some slick app that compiled many outlets so I could read them on my tablet that filtered out the noise but I’ve yet to find that solution.
Check out ground news. It’s designed to clearly and fairly show bias in news coverage and lets you compare multiple sources side by side. Their free level is not very good imo but the cheapest subscription adds a good amount of utility and the higher tiers even include media ownership breakdowns so you can see whose money is behind which coverage.
They also have optional emails like a “burst your bubble” newsletter that showcases blindspots for left right and center.
My one gripe is that they consider too many sources “left” when they are mostly just aligned with a center-progressive demographic, but that’s a minor quibble for me.
Conversely, I had to stop listening to NPR during donny’s tenure, they got so one sided it was disgusting. I’m a Democrat but I don’t need my news to hold my hand and tell me stories. Maybe it was extra bad becuase it’s the Seattle NPR station, but regardless I’ve not returned since.
It’s one thing to be Fox News and everybody knows what kind of bullshit you’re up to, it’s another to be a well of respected news station and try and pull the same kind of bs.
It means I’m aware that my party has problems and I don’t want the media that I watch to skirt around it, these issues need to be addressed on all sides.
We are never going to heal as a nation and start improving if we keep insisting on only “bettering our half of the equation”, or only “attacking the bad half of the equation”. That’s not realistic. Not every criticism that Republicans have of democrats is invalid either.
I had the opposite experience. I would listen to Mitch and others go spout blatant lies and receive absolutely no pushback from the hosts/journalists.
