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by cirath 3430 days ago
>CNN for sure did not cover these issues proportionately to their gravity.

This is a very reasonable statement, but ultimately does not encapsulate the rhetoric that has been levied against the media by Trump specifically, nor his more ardent supporters.

Not covering proportional to gravity is not:

Anything similar to lies, fabrications, false news, misconstruing the news, or presenting the topic with a completely false narrative.

While it does certainly affect the narrative, and while CNN gives far more weight to articles favoring the left, this does not hurt Trump in any way as far as his getting elected was concerned. At the very least, the song played by the left leaning MSM (and that is a VERY IMPORTANT distinction, as Fox News represents the right leaning MSM; their viewer numbers have them as a larger body than CNN--how would they not be the true MSM?) lulled many Clinton supporters into a false sense of security. The post-election meltdowns by people who claimed they did not vote directly as a result of this false security, while anecdotal, points directly at that narrative.

And even if you allow that CNN reports on left leaning issues in a positive light while decrying conservative viewpoints, and Fox reports on right leaning issues positively while pointing out the issues in progressive topics, one cannot use them as direct opposition to each other, as neither tends to focus both on the positives and negatives in an issue in a way that could be considered equal. Equal airtime doctrines have also caused a negative skew, but that is another topic altogether.

2 comments

The amount of attention given to an issue is just as relevant as lying, because it's even more responsible for which candidate someone will vote for. People are more persuaded by what they see and what their attention is drawn to than the cold facts.

Humans are not "rational" and pretending they are doesn't give you a moral high-ground.

Thank you. Misjudging the proportional "gravity" of an issue is not equivalent to lying. But when affect has replaced logic as the value system you use in evaluating media, then I guess it is.