What do you think about news reporting in the US or wherever you are?

[Ian]

The link seems not to be available here. Further, to be honest, his competence is probably not as important for me as for you and other Americans. Not saying he is not important, but equally there isn't much people here can do about it if he isn't.

[matty]

The news has turned into a monster on both sides. It's either too far right or too far left. I tend to use more-so liberal news networks on a regular basis, but I usually check the right side as well and find the middle-ground between the two.

[Rita]

We have kiddie news in Australia, very little international news. Everything is a major drama, from a storm to a house fire. Not only that, they think we are all six years old and can't understand what they are saying, so they re-tell it over and over ad nauseum.

[Ian]

My view of the news is it has degenerated to opinions, usually of a small clique. Somewhere along the line, facts seem to have become irrelevant.

[Papaphilly]

JustAnotherBibliophile wrote: "The news has turned into a monster on both sides. It's either too far right or too far left. I tend to use more-so liberal news networks on a regular basis, but I usually check the right side as we..."

Wow you are a rarity.

[Papaphilly]

Ian wrote: "My view of the news is it has degenerated to opinions, usually of a small clique. Somewhere along the line, facts seem to have become irrelevant."

Echo chamber reporting

[J.]

This one has me rolling. YouTube news reader, Tim Pool, used Twitter to play the press by tweeting, "Impeach Queen Elizabeth".

https://youtu.be/rl32Yas16_c

[Papaphilly]

J. wrote: "This one has me rolling. YouTube news reader, Tim Pool, used Twitter to play the press by tweeting, "Impeach Queen Elizabeth".

https://youtu.be/rl32Yas16_c"

Gotta love this.

[Jen from Quebec :0)]

The American news is IN YOUR FACE, imo. There's so many title graphics, sound effects, dramatic cliffhangers at ad times, and more shouting than civilized discussion. Also, the 2 sides of any story never seem to actually be together on the same show....

Just some thoughts from Canada. --Jen from Quebec :0)

(PS) My father always says: "The Americans are crazed with their political news the same way we care about sports and hockey- they're fanatics!"

[[deleted user]]

Jen from Quebec :0) wrote: "The American news is IN YOUR FACE, imo. There's so many title graphics, sound effects, dramatic cliffhangers at ad times, and more shouting than civilized discussion. Also, the 2 sides of any story..."

That's the impression I get too, Jen. The problem is that what happens over there, always ends up over here (UK).

By the way, forgot to mention to JAB regarding reading the news from the other side of the debate, I like to do that too. Who says you can't enjoy The Guardian and The Telegraph? :)

[Papaphilly]

Jen from Quebec :0) wrote: "The American news is IN YOUR FACE, imo. There's so many title graphics, sound effects, dramatic cliffhangers at ad times, and more shouting than civilized discussion. Also, the 2 sides of any story..."

Do Canadians even create news....8^) Sorry it was just too easy. Although I do think Canadian hockey and American Political journalism has much in common. It is a blood sport...8^)

[J.]

Now I want to watch a CNN vs. Fox News hockey game. Don Lemon would definitely get checked hard into the boards.

[Scout]

We have a new president making major changes to our democracy. Why is he getting away with not answering questions about his policies? Don't the people deserve to hear him defend what he's doing?

[Ian]

I am not sure about major changes to democracy. Sure, he is spending money big-time, but I don't recall that being a surprise so my feeling is, you might argue with bis policies, but there do not appear to be serious changes to the Republic. The senators and the representatives are still doing as much (or as little) as they used to do.

[Papaphilly]

Ian wrote: "I am not sure about major changes to democracy. Sure, he is spending money big-time, but I don't recall that being a surprise so my feeling is, you might argue with bis policies, but there do not a..."

Well,

There seems to be a push from the Dems to make major changes. Not a fan. I expect it to fail as always. Biden is in an odd position. He will get a economic bump in the short run as the country opens back up, but there is talk of raising taxes and gas prices, that will cost him big. He may actually be a good guy right now for the both the Republicans and Moderate Democrats. He is a Senate traditionalist and will end up holding against some the worst abuses the progressives are pushing. I suspect he will let them do the studies and do nothing with it because it will cost Democrats everything.

[Ian]

Traditionally, at least here, voters seem to remember more strongly the bad outcomes than the good ones, so parties have a life in government, then get sent back to opposition.

[J.]

I think that Biden is an old man. Old men have a bad habit of worrying about their legacies. Such men are capable of causing much damage. All that I see from him and his party are more government, which needs more taxes, and takes more of our rights and property. And they'll do it all with the conviction that it's for our own good.

[J.E.]

I had the misfortune once of being involved in a story that made national news in the early 1990s. The reporting was factually accurate, but entirely unbalanced and injected an insane amount of bias into the story. I kind of stopped watching the news until Fox came along.

At first, I became something of a Fox News junkie, but soon found it was biased even worse than what I left behind.

What I finally came to realize was that the longer someone talks about a story, the more biased it is, whether it is left-wing, right-wing, or indifferent. The shorter the story, the more reliable the reporting. At this point, I check the headlines and if I feel I need more, I will try to figure out who would have the best information. If I need to know about climate, I'll look up meteorological sources. If I need to learn about Covid, I'll ask a doctor or an organization that specializes in medical research.

For headlines, I seek out the BBC, AP, Reuters, and NPR (News, not commentary).

[Graeme]

Ian wrote: "Traditionally, at least here, voters seem to remember more strongly the bad outcomes than the good ones, so parties have a life in government, then get sent back to opposition."

Same in the Australia. Incumbents lose, rather than the opposition win elections.

[Scout]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we have legal requirements for immigrants to enter the country? The flagrant flouting of those policies at the southern border seems to me to be changing our country. Thousands of people are coming in with no background checks and are being allowed to disperse into our country with no means of keeping eyes on them. They don't have SS numbers, no way of tracking them, no means of requiring them to pay taxes. Yet, they'll have free health care, add stress to our law enforcement agencies which are losing funds, and flood our school systems. Biden welcomed them during his campaign, and now they're here and he doesn't know how to handle it. But the news outlets are reporting that he inherited this mess from Trump. Ridiculous, as Trump had the border under control.

[Papaphilly]

This is a self made crisis, but Nancy Pelosi is blaming Trump. Go figure.

[J.J.]

Rita wrote: "We have kiddie news in Australia, very little international news. Everything is a major drama, from a storm to a house fire. Not only that, they think we are all six years old and can't understand ..."

That's ok. Here in the States, whenever our news has an Australian speaking, they have to add subtitles as if they're speaking a foreign language...same thing when they're running a clip of an African speaking English...

[J.J.]

Jen from Quebec :0) wrote: ""The Americans are crazed with their political news the same way we care about sports and hockey- they're fanatics!"
..."

Probably because politics has a profound impact on our everyday lives. We understand the impact of all the migrants flooding over our borders due to Biden's open border policy - from their impact on wages to the uptick on crime wherever they're relocated to. we saw in our pockets the impact of Trump's tax cuts - whether we lived in a low tax state where the higher standard deduction made up for the loss as an itemized deduction, or we live in a high tax state where our tax bill went up because we could no longer deduct the state taxes. We were drastically affected by Obamacare - whether it's the middle class that watched their health insurance become unaffordable, or the loser class that received tax incentives making it affordable for them. In my lifetime, even the Carter administration was destructive - his poor handling of foreign affairs and the economy meant a lot of people lost their jobs, and everyone else watched their daily expenses rise because oil stopped flowing into the country. When the ability to buy gas for your car so you can go to work is like winning the lottery, yeah, we get intense about politics because bad policy and bad politicians can literally ruin a lot of lives.

[Graeme]

Cable News across the board have taken a massive ratings hit post the Trump era.

REF: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/without...

[Papaphilly]

What is Joe going to do? Send him to his room?

[Ian]

Graeme wrote: "Cable News across the board have taken a massive ratings hit post the Trump era.

REF: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/without..."

And this is bad why?

[Graeme]

Neither good not bad, but illustrative of the attachment the news desks had to the Trump era.

[J.]

The cable news networks have been in decline for years because cable TV has been in decline for years. For consumers, it is a simple cost/benefit analysis. Why pay for 100 channels when you only watch five to ten of them, and you can get those five to ten channels cheaper, over the Web? The people who keep cable are mostly less tech savvy folk (read, "old"), who don't want to be bothered with computers. They just want to kick back in the recliner, tune in, and tune out, like they have for forty years. How many more years do you think that they'll be customers?

[Papaphilly]

There is talk about bringing back the fairness doctrine. What a joke. Guess who it is aimed at?

[J.]

Sharyl Attkisson, the author of Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism spoke on the state of the media, at Hillsdale College.

https://youtu.be/4bxI803q6i8

[Scout]

J., thanks so much for this video. I highly recommend it. I watched all of it, but for those of you who don't want to spend that much time, watch the first 5 minutes and the last 10 minutes. She makes so many good points and backs them up with evidence. Her final statements summed up what I've been feeling: "I think we should all be cognizant of not being bullied out of using our common sense . . . and saying what we think. My own view is only that which is illegal should be censored and the rest is fair game. It's up to us to figure out what we want to believe. And by the way, if we want to believe something that's false, we have a right to do that in this country. It's not up to somebody else to say you shouldn't be thinking such things, or talking about such things."

I totally agree. We don't need thought police, but it seems that that's where we are.

[Charissa]

An article from the Epoch Times (a news outlet that actually tries to keep the bias out, they criticized Pres. Trump just as much as they've criticized Pres. Biden) has a reason for the thought police. Don't have the link with me at the moment, but they are seeing a lot of the Big Tech CEO's as extremely specialized individuals. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that means that their understanding of computer systems, don't translate to how people actually work.

[Graeme]

The Sicknick (Capitol Riots) narrative just imploded.

REF: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status...

[J.]

Graeme wrote: "The Sicknick (Capitol Riots) narrative just imploded.

REF: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status..."

And Representative Waters (https://youtu.be/tJCDe7vdFfw) promoted mob justice.
https://youtu.be/2H49Hsq1glQ
https://youtu.be/YB3Dg7Q9TrM

Something seems familiar about this. Something about the Democrat narrative surrounding the Capitol Riot...

[Scout]

My Black neighbor and I talked about what Rep Waters did, and we agreed that what she did was wrong. Not all Black people think violence is the answer.

[Papaphilly]

Scout wrote: "My Black neighbor and I talked about what Rep Waters did, and we agreed that what she did was wrong. Not all Black people think violence is the answer."

The vast majority of them do not think violence is the answer. Once again it is the loud few pushing the pile.

[J.]

Papaphilly wrote: "The vast majority of them do not think violence is the answer. Once again it is the loud few pushing the pile."

Personally, I think that the vast majority of politicians are the offenses to the concept of decency which the aliens will cite as the reason for wiping us out of existence.

[Graeme]

The aliens have a lot of cleaning up to do...

[Ian]

In my novels, the aliens leave us alone as long as we don't venture out into their domain. If we do, we have some improvement in behaviour to achieve.

[Scout]

Thinking about what you said, J., it brought to mind what Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness… it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

Jefferson took pains to argue that the right of revolution was a limited one, in the sense that one could not do this for weak or frivolous reasons (or “light and transient causes”). It was for this reason that he and his colleagues provided such a long list of grievances against the British monarch in order to prove to the world that their reasons for revolt were serious, longstanding, and many. In essence the grounds for revolution were two: the offending government had to have moved away from the very reason for its being, namely the protection of each individual’s life, liberty, and property (unfortunately too vaguely expressed here as “the pursuit of happiness”); and that there is a clear pattern of behaviour which proves that there is a “design” to create a despotic government over the people. In spite of these restrictions Jefferson obviously thought both conditions had been satisfied by July 1776 and that this therefore established the right to revolution on the part of the American colonists.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jef...

Just something to think about.

[Barbara]

It is always interesting when you know a story or talked to people who know a story and then see how it is reported in the press.
Several years ago, there was a sensational murder a few counties away from where I lived. A doctor's wife was shot in her bed not long after he left for work. She was a part time radio personality and pretty well known in the area and so was he. This became the subject of a couple books, a 20/20 segment and was talked about all over the radio, social media and in the news.
The arrest of the doctor was even on youtube a long stand-off with him holding a gun.
A lot of what people who knew the couple's backstory were saying was different from how the story was reported, bringing up things that the press left out. I know that when you have a sensational murder like this you "sell" it with a narrative - kind of like what Truman Capote started with "In Cold Blood." Unfortunately not all stories fit into a nice, readable blueprint.

[Ian]

Scout wrote: "Thinking about what you said, J., it brought to mind what Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are ..."

Scout, I think Jefferson was being mendacious here. Arguing that it is justified to revolt against a government just because you are unhappy? That, to me, is a licence for anarchy. Whatever else the problems were, the British government was not into the arbitrary taking of life or property from the Americans. As for the despotic government, I always thought the real gripe was the Americans were being asked to pay taxes for defence. As for all men being equal, think of the number of slaves he had.

Jefferson was actually very supportive of the French, now the British had stopped the French from occupying America, so in some ways he was colluding with the enemy :-) After the revolution similar behaviour brought in the Logan Act by Adams, which of course led to difficulties for Trump's men.

[J.]

Ian,

One of the reasons for the War of 1812 was British impressment gangs seizing American citizens and impressing them into service to the crown against their will.

[Ian]

As I understand the history (and in fairness my knowledge of the war of 1812 is a bit scratchy since it is not my history) the war of 1812 commenced with an American invasion of Canada. Am I wrong?

[J.]

Ian wrote: "As I understand the history (and in fairness my knowledge of the war of 1812 is a bit scratchy since it is not my history) the war of 1812 commenced with an American invasion of Canada. Am I wrong?"

While the US had been interested in Canada, no military action took place until after the Declaration of War. The major driver was the Napoleonic Wars which caused manpower shortages throughout the Royal Navy. Their solution was to conscript thousands of American sailors whom the British claimed were lying British deserters. The Brits even went so far as to fire upon US flagged ships that didn't heave to when hailed on the open sea.

It is noteworthy that while the US and Canada were adversaries during the war the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, led directly to Canada's nationhood.

[Ian]

Fascinating. I did not know there was so much niggling before 1812, which was rather pointless on the part of the Brits really.

[J.]

Ian wrote: "Fascinating. I did not know there was so much niggling before 1812, which was rather pointless on the part of the Brits really."

If a foreign navy were to board New Zealand flagged ships; kidnap New Zealand citizens; and enslave those kiwis as crew aboard foreign ships, would you consider that "niggling"?

[Ian]

Your point, but in the context of the bloodshed and turmoil of the Napoleonic wars it was less significant. As an aside, I wonder how many on board the American ships were British deserters?

[Lizzie]

The War of 1812 involved trade and embargos. It was also an internal struggle between Jefferson and other pro-French representatives in our government versus Washington, Adams and other pro-British. Then there was the frontier where Americans blamed the British and the Canadians for the Indians uprising and the Native Americans believed the only way to stop American expansionism into the frontier was to align with the British. Trade and Territory were the big issues. Ingterestingly, despite the impressment issue, New Englanders were against the delcaration of war in 1812.

I don't know how factual it is, because I have seen it on documentaries but not researched it - Britian had agrees to cease impressment prior to America delcaring war.

This was interesting - allegedly less than 10,000 Americans were impressed and we reciprocated in the process.
https://www.archives.gov/publications...

[Ian]

Fascinating link, Lizzie. Interesting that the US ships had up to 40% British - who were there for better pay and conditions. I can understand that.