Fall of the Fourth Estate: A Critique of Mass Media

I gave TYT a chance years ago and never cared for them. One thing I remember from those early episodes was Cenk talking about how he used to be a conservative. I think he’s been pretending for a long time.

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He’s a sucker. He thinks Elon was actually listening to him.

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This. Cenk could suggest something actually progressive, let’s say shift some of the Pentagon weapon development budget to the Department of Education to pay off people’s student loans.

Elon responds, “Great idea, Cenk!”

Elon then goes on stage like it’s a Tesla product launch and says, “This suggestion came from lefty Cenk Uygur. We’re dissolving the Department of Education and shifting that money to a Starlink-Tesla joint development of electric networked killer space drones! Yay bipartisanship!”

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That always seemed like a dodgy interpretation, retconned during the Jim Crow era,

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

That doesn’t seem to imply that all punishment for crime is automatically equivalent to slavery or involuntary servitude, but that those remained as punishment options, if sentenced to it, like the death penalty. (Where are the Originalists, checking to see what the drafters of the 13th actually intended?)

Too bad that it’ll be a long time before there’s a SCOTUS willing to consider that argument.

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It’s how they justify forcing prisoners to work for pennies per hour and pocket the difference.

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Ah, financial policy reporting, not something more blatantly servile like the reporting of the run-up to the Iraq war*, then… /s

* Pretty much the “this is what Orwell meant in ‘1984’” moment for me with BBC News.

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Me, too. OMG, so much me too!!!

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And the right triumphed over the corporate media too. Like say, a certain famous example based in New York City. :roll_eyes:

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The Globe and Mail, Toronto’s national newspaper, owned by the extremely rich Thomson family.

At least it’s owned by local plutocrats, unlike Postmedia/Toronto Sun, owned by American right-libertarians.

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Like just about every other news outlet. Arrrrgghh

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The bit of that story that worried me most was this:

The authors said there was “widespread appreciation” of the BBC’s coverage, but they were “disturbed” by how many viewers, listeners and readers said they did not understand it.

“In our audience research, most had no comment about impartiality on fiscal policy because they didn’t know what the stories meant.”

Education, education, education!

Some of which might include the BBC getting reporters on this stuff to explain as much as report. But that would risk accusations of partiality, of course, given …

“Some journalists seem to feel instinctively that debt is simply bad, full stop, and don’t appear to realise this can be contested and contestable.”

Several such assumptions “seem to lurk like this either unnoticed or uncorrected”, they added. “Others that outsiders observed in BBC coverage were: ‘more public spending is good’ and ‘tax cuts are good.’”

If a BBC report ever said ‘debt is not bad, per se’ the Tory fuckwits would explode with apoplexy.

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Yet again, it’s the failure to recognise that “the left” is a broad and diverse collection of communities, where the only thing common to all of us is we don’t want to live in a right wing world.

Anarcha-feminists and girlboss feminists will never agree on much, neither will pink capitalists and queer socialists, or Marxists, liberals and anarchists, but when faced with a common enemy we will come together to fight it.

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Yes! Found it!

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As far as I can tell all the real leftist ideologies agree that human lives have value, even if they disagree on how to realize that. The right thinks only some do, and the far right thinks the rest have negative value.

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