[H99189]

I've read the "journalists lean left, owners lean right" mantra many, many of times over the last 10 years on various boards, yet the overwhelming majority of network news and shows, cable news and entertainment shows dump on Republicans/Conservatism and fawn over Democrats/Liberalism. IMO, it's a very misleading idea meant to deceive people into thinking their sources of news or entertainment are somehow more honest than they actually are.

[jancsika]

You're conflating two very different concepts. The mantra is not "journalists are Democrats, owners are Republicans."

Cable news and entertainment fawned over Hilary, not Bernie.

[Spooky23]

Cable news has an exaggerated influence. Nobody watches that crap. The real action happens in other mediums.

[Kalium]

So they fawned over a Democrat, then? I fear I don't understand your point. Can you help me?

[mistermann]

The error is in thinking Hillary is majorly opposed to the Republican agenda. A lot of Bernie supporters switched camps to Trump, as insane as that may sound. The rich would continue to accumulate more money either way, more war in the Middle East, etc. I viewed Trump as kind of a last ditch hail Mary, which seems to have been a bad guess in retrospect.

[JSONwebtoken]

Hillary is a democrat, Bernie Sanders is an extremist. So the mantra stands.

[sctb]

This kind of information-free comment is just trolling. You've been breaking the guidelines a lot, so we have to ask that you please go read them and stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[scrollaway]

As a european it's always funny hearing some americans call Bernie an extremist.

Here he's just an average left-leaning politician, we elect plenty of people like him all the time. US politics are so absurdly shifted right it's mind blowing.

Edit: Does anyone here actually disagree with this or am I just being downvoted because people are upset this is the case?

[lsh123]

European politics is so stupidly shifted left, it’s mind blowing.

[scrollaway]

No, actually, in this case the wording applies. It's one of the only countries in the world with such conservative stances on health care, guns, drugs and religion and really the only country with the aggregate of it all.

Comparatively, Europe is shifted left for sure, but you can't start doing something differently and then claim others are the ones doing it differently.

[abritinthebay]

You're mistaking "Republicans are right now a steaming heap of awful" with "News and shows are left-leaning".

I'm a huge fan of having a principled, Conservative, political group. They are there to help provide measured, sane, grounding and represent the status-quo in opposition to those who would change it.

That's actually a good thing for Progressives - it helps test the ideas, to forge them into concrete and reliable policy, as well as get rid of ideas that aren't fully formed or have terrible knock-on effects.

I'd love a Conservative group like that. But the Republicans are not it. Some channels are more left-leaning that others but - speaking as someone left wing - only barely.

It's like the show Newsroom - the lead character in that espoused traditional Republican ideals. He was very much a 60s-70s Republican. Yet he was often criticized for being "too liberal". Things that got Regan elected, but not proposed by Democrats, are "too liberal".

News will have bias, obviously. There is no such thing as news without bias, ever. However to someone from originally outside the US the US media is at best centrist. At worst it's absolutely maddeningly right-wing.

[simula67]

As far as I can understand, this is the wrong way to think about conservatism in the United States. Conservatives are not 'just interested in preserving the status quo'. They are interested in conserving liberty. This is because the nature of liberty is to yield, every time a law is passed it is a limitation on liberty. This is why Reagan said 'libertarianism is at the heart of conservatism' [1]

If conservatives can notice that the government has made massive incursions into liberty they have to challenge the status quo and try and roll back some of these restrictions

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYwQxvFAIJY

[abritinthebay]

The “conservatives” are the main ones eroding that liberty.

Trumps Administration right now, obviously, but the PATRIOT Act, the NSA wiretap program, the entire Regan administration... etc.

So yet, it IS the right way to think about conservatives in the US because that is what they do.

I submit that what you are talking about has zero to do with conservative vs progressive and a lot to do with authoritarianism. Unfortunately the worst offenders for that are US “conservatives” (but not the only offenders).

[rconti]

Quite honestly, in the past 10 or so years, the Republican party has made itself extremely easy to dump on.

More so than the media leaning "left", I think they lean populist. Human interest stories, people falling on hard luck, natural disasters, terrorism. Some of these things 'feel' left-leaning, some 'feel' right-leaning.

[Helmet]

>Quite honestly, in the past 10 or so years, the Republican party has made itself extremely easy to dump on.

Quite the opposite actually. As the contemporary left has taken over mainstream culture and turned into the de facto "establishment" that it originally railed against, it's grown intellectually soft and dishonest.

Both sides play to populist emotional appeals and sentiments, but the left-wing outrage industry and identity politics has left them intellectually vulnerable.

I mean, if you want a case study on this vulnerability just head on over to the major liberal think-piece sites and read some of the essays (Salon, Slate, The Atlantic).

Last night I read a piece in The Atlantic that bemoaned the fact that some people expect their neighborhoods to be orderly and not riddled with crime, drugs, and gangs, arguing that these attitudes unfairly discriminated against minorities. This, from a "respectable" magazine!

[hackbinary]

The left has not taken over anything. We have lived in a very conservative, anti public services regime since the early 1980s. Rollbacks and defunding public schools, health and infrastructure has been on the basis that media has systematically attacked taxation and public spending as wasteful while military spending never seems to be targeted like other social programmes.

We have stop perpetuating this narrative that the media is in anyway 'left' leaning because it is not. When was the last time you read an opinion piece that called for the nationalisation of some private industry?

[Helmet]

>The left has not taken over anything.

I specifically said that the dominant culture is left - and it most certainly is, not the economic order.

Virtually every major newspaper in every major city is left-leaning, almost every single cable news network, and all the major tech giants, who are a gateway to content, are undeniably liberal. And academia...well that goes without saying - half are card carrying communists, while the other half are in the ballpark.

In fact, it's heresy to even be conservative at most major tech companies.

[darpa_escapee]

> In fact, it's heresy to even be conservative at most major tech companies.

I've found more self-professed libertarians in this field than I've found of their left-leaning counterparts.

[gerbilly]

Instead of being conservative or liberal why don't we just try being nice to people?

All these hot button issues that divide conservatives/liberals would evaporate if each side just tried, in each interaction to treat the other with dignity and according to their needs.

You know, the golden rule: Treat others like you would like to be treated? That's a good start, but we really need the platinum rule: to treat people how they would like to be treated.

Attempting to walk this path is a much harder task than relying on a dusty old book or on an enumeration of freedoms. It requires one to try to develop humility and wisdom.

I believe there are no moral absolutes, and that only by paying attention the entire situation in the moment can you tell what you should do.

When you adopt this point of view, you see that labels like liberal/conservative are just a set of received ideas that people use to avoid the difficult work described above.

They are just an interrelated set of heuristics allowing you to take shortcuts in our day to day interactions with others.

[hackbinary]

Then how do you explain the successive insanely excessive right wing governments in the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia over the last 30-40 years?

Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

What do you even mean by conservative? Liberal?

You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives. The USA is a liberal nation by definition, for example 'The separation of church and state' and your 'right to bare arms, in a well regulated malitia'

[Helmet]

>Then how do you explain the successive insanely excessive right wing governments

I'm not familiar with Australian politics, but as for the others, what do you mean? We have had both liberal and conservative governments the last 30-40 years. This, again, has little to do with the mainstream culture, which was my original point.

As for explaining to you why neoliberalism has triumphed, well I recommend that you start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

>Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

Yes, and it had quite an effect on me when I was in college, and utterly ignorant of history. A lot has changed now, and while much of the book is still good, Chomsky has lost his credibility as a cultural critic following the embarrassment of his analyses about a few corners of the world...:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO1JkjbzvPw

Not to mention the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge situation, which should have tipped me off earlier. But I was naive then.

>You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives....

I understand well what the words mean, friend-o.

[mistermann]

> insanely excessive right wing governments in Canada

Calling anyone who disagrees with your political philosophy "insane" is....I don't even know what word to use.

EDIT: Perhaps instead of a downvote, you could give a few examples of the insanely excessive things right wing governments in Canada have done recently (extraordinary claims and all that....).

[kansface]

ISPs, in basically every conversation about net neutrality for the last two weeks.

[darpa_escapee]

The media is biased towards the left because they chose to promote the neoliberal who said she'd back a $12.50 minimum wage versus the one who said starve.

[whyaduck]

This article?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/the-cri...

In no way, shape or form does that "bemoan" efforts to fight _serious_ crime in changing neighborhoods. It DOES take into account the impact of gentrification on the less affluent residents. Is actually discussing that impact considered "liberal"?

If you want to criticize liberalism honestly, then you probably shouldn't grossly mischaracterize your evidence.

[ameister14]

Interesting.

This is a tangent about that article, as I hadn't read it before, but I live in that part of Brooklyn, have for a few years.

Last year on J'ouvert, 2 people were shot about two and a half blocks from my apartment building. This happened every J'ouvert until this most recent one. I'm fine with the extra police presence for that one. When I moved in, there were drug dealers on every corner, including mine. Going to work, I had to go past their pitbulls in the morning or walk in the street as they all crowded the sidewalk. That ended a few months ago.

I've seen more police, and more police called for things like a drunk beating up and robbing another drunk where that used to just be let go - it's not all minor crimes, it's an attitude change as people move in that don't expect to have dangerous people and violence around them. Sure, they shouldn't necessarily call the cops on the guy barbecuing in the street at midnight, but honestly? I don't think it's a really bad thing.

[Helmet]

Yes, that one. I stand by my criticism, and I accuse you of the very thing that you are accusing me of. If you want me to go in depth, I will. If anything, I restrained myself in addressing that asinine article.

It opens with:

>"But having been marred by gang violence in recent years, this J’ouvert was markedly different, as The New York Times described. The event, which derives its name from a Creole term for “daybreak,” was heavily staffed by the New York City Police Department.....an overwhelming show of force in response to a comparatively small number of bad actors."

The author conveniently omitted the specifics of that "gang violance" - an aide to Gov. Cuomo was murdered at the event a couple years ago, there have been multiple stabbings, there have been homicides the past two years, and just few days before the festival this year, multiple people were shot and killed:

https://nypost.com/2017/09/04/gunfire-erupts-ahead-of-jouver...

Do tell me, how much violence and killing is acceptable for you before you call for, as the author put it, an "overwhelming show of force"?

And guess what, that police presence did nothing but make the event safer, as per the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/nyregion/jouvert-brooklyn...

I can go on if you want, but I don't see the point. The article is an absurd framing of the situation, and completely omits the perspective of all the minorities who APPRECIATE the police presence, and who work with the police on a day-to-day basis, serving in community watch groups, and coordinating with and calling the police whenever they see problems. But no, that doesn't fit the narrative, so it's not in there.

[objectivetruth]

So your first complaint is that the phrase "having been marred by gang violence in recent years" doesn't fully express that the violence included "multiple stabbings" and "homicides." Uh, that's what gang violence usually entails: stabbings, shootings, and murder.

You chalk that up to the writer intentionally ("conveniently") omitting that. Then you cite the NY Post, widely acknowledged as a sensational tabloid, presumably as an example of the coverage you prefer?

Then, you take fault with the author expressing their opinion that the festival had "an overwhelming show of force."

Is that all the author complained about in this respect? They didn't say "damn fascists!" or anything else? They didn't attach any value judgment -- YOU did. The author just pointed out that it was an "overwhelming show of force" which you admit did make the event safer.

If this is the awful, biased "liberal" media you're worried about, you should probably stick to the Post. That way all of your existing biases can be reinforced.

[Helmet]

A few things - the citation is quite irrelevant when the information is true, so it's not a point worth raising. In a way - and if the Post is the only place that reported on this, then your adding credence to my argument that the media is biased. Thanks.

>Then, you take fault with the author expressing their opinion that the festival had "an overwhelming show of force.

No, I take issue with the authors insinuation that it wasn't warranted, hence:

"overwhelming show of force in response to a comparatively small number of bad actors."

>Is that all the author complained about in this respect?

Have you actually read the article? It's probably one silliest pieces of journalism I've ever read. Just read something of quotes:

>“The gentrifiers are not wanting to share—they’re wanting to take over.” One of the tools they can use to take over public spaces, he argues, is law enforcement.

Yes, law enforcement is a tool of the "gentrifiers" to move poor people out. This is ridiculous.

It's not the crimes that are the problem (homicides, assaults, drug dealing, public intoxication), but rather the "criminalization" of the criminals.

I guess the solution is just stop calling the cops?

>If this is the awful, biased "liberal" media you're worried about, you should probably stick to the Post. That way all of your existing biases can be reinforced.

Okay.

[mistermann]

It seems like a simplistic explanation, but I wonder if some people simply forget or overlook how multidimensional and complicated life is when discussing such matters. It is extremely common when reading political discussions, even among intelligent people, to see opinions with absolute certainty on matters they know very little about. It's easy for "smart" people to see this in (let's be honest) dumb people, but very few can see it in themselves, or others sharing their political stripes.

EDIT: Wow, I didn't even criticize one side or the other, but simply pointed out a fact of human nature, and here we go with the downvotes as usual. Another excellent illustration of the "either you're with us or against us" philosophy. At least people can agree with ole George on one thing.

[rconti]

Disagree. The extent to which "the left" is the establishment in the media today, was also true 10 and 20 years ago. Again, the appeals to populism, human interest stories, and so on, have been staples of popular media for ages.

The attitudes you speak of in some opinion pieces may be laughable in some ways but thought-provoking in others. Is it not true that some crime-fighting techniques disproportionately affect minority communities? Eg, not in proportion to the rate at which those communities commit crimes? You can't tell me that considering these factors is without merit, even if you disagree wholeheartedly with the conclusions.

It's difficult to honestly compare a perhaps laughable premise or conclusion from one end of the political spectrum, with outright disregard for basic facts, truths, and reason-based discourse on the other. I will not participate in calling these things equivalent, however many points it may score with folks who are too afraid to offend. (We won't go into the irony of the great offense felt by folks who are hostile to truth itself, who expect their hurt feelings to entitle them to being treated as if their (lack of) ideas have merit).

[MaysonL]

If you want a case study of how the Republican party has sunk to extreme dunk-on-ability, read the Twitter feeds of David Frum, Bill Kristol, and Rick Wilson: three stalwart Republicans.

[MaysonL]

Curious about the reasons for downvotes. In case I wasn't clear, those three are very critical of the current Republican party, especially the current administration

[thebokehwokeh2]

Hate to break it to you, but reality tends to have a liberal bias.

[Helmet]

I disagree. I think the "natural" state of things is definitely more conservative, and it's reflected in people's attitudes, traditions, and behaviors as they age, and their general resistance to change.

Progressivism works as a sort of pushing against the order of things, for better or worse. Its development being the result of our ability to manipulate and change our environment to an extraordinary degree, much more so than any other animal.

[Miner49er]

Maybe that's human nature, but I wouldn't call that reality. Humans have to adapt or progress to survive. I think OP here was referring to things like global warming, it's a reality, but many (most?) conservatives in the United States believe it isn't happening. Another example is creationism. 60% of Republicans believe we were created by God 10,000 years ago, and evolution played no role. Yet, we know this isn't true, it's not reality.

[malandrew]

I would consider myself centrist (which is conservative by Silicon Valley standards). Personally, I believe global warming to be real, but I find the alarmism to be an exercise in popular histrionics.

I remember being a kid in 1992 and being told that by this point in my life I would have to wear a special suit because the hole in the ozone layer would get so bad the suns rays would start frying us. The same is happening today. People are crying wolf about everything to the point where it's become impossible to take the alarmism seriously anymore.

Ivar Giaever and Freemason Dyson have done a great job illustrating the problems with the current dialogue around climate change.

[darpa_escapee]

There was a global effort to eliminate causes of ozone layer depletion. It took a significant amount of political will and resources to ensure that we'd get to the point we are at today[1].

The people crying wolf back then prevented us from depleting the ozone layer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Public_policy

[lern_too_spel]

We addressed the ozone depletion problem by banning CFCs. It didn't magically go away. The issue of global warming has yet to be addressed.

You probably recall being told about endangered species when you were a kid too. The fact that they still exist does not indicate that you experienced alarmism but that people actively protected those species.

[yesenadam]

Interesting. Ok, maybe liberal is young peoples' philosophy, conservative is old peoples'. As reflected in the many sayings about how you should be the former before 30 or 40, the latter afterwards. It's not more natural to be young or old - both are natural. From Robert Louis Stevenson:

"...the opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head and says: “Ah, so I thought when I was your age.” It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: “My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.”

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men’s opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better — I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. ...

When the old man waggles his head and says, “Ah, so I thought when I was your age,” he has proved the youth’s case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous generations and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives."

http://essays.quotidiana.org/stevenson/crabbed_age_and_youth...