[jessaustin]

Re-read your Chomsky, and pay attention. You've fallen far behind. You're talking about authoritarians and the "trial-by-drone" guy left office years ago. I haven't mentioned CCTV. It is a pale imitation of the much more distracting Western news business. We are endlessly terrorized about bullshit, yet somehow nothing I mentioned above was even covered. They don't focus on the vast areas of agreement between the two faces of the status quo political party.

For all that they caterwaul about surface controversies like is it worse to arrange corrupt positions at foreign firms for one's children or is it worse to investigate such positioning, Fox and MSNBC agree about everything important to the rich bastards who own both the media and the government. For instance, China: we're told constantly by both (all) news firms to fear China. In this very thread there is evidence of a widespread derangement stemming from that constant gaslighting. ("What if the masks are pre-impregnated with virus?!%?") After all, China is an independent nation with a military! USA military-industrial complex might make a lot of money losing a war with China! They must all be evil bastards bent on destroying us! Oh but they're not as bad as Russia! Or Iran! Or Venezuela! Or some random goat enthusiasts in some desert somewhere! When the topic is a war into which we haven't yet blundered, there is unanimity in the war media. (Since you're language policing, tell me: is "war media" better or worse than "MSM" that you derided upthread? On the one hand, it's evocative and focused on the bottom line. On the other, it is one more syllable... I can't decide!)

[seanmcdirmid]

The media tends to align on certain topics because their audience does: make no mistake, media doesn’t bias their audience, it is most definitely the other way around! Where they differ is almost universally where their audiences differ.

China is played in western media because that is the perception that their audiences want to see. It isn’t universally negative either, it just is what it is. Media reports negative stories about everyone (not just China), because negative news sells more than positive news and unlike CCTV, they have to pay the bills.

[jessaustin]

No, influence does not go in only one direction. If it did, it wouldn't go upstream! The TV news broadcasts to us, not the other way around.

In the short term, though, you're mostly right. News media firms program to increase audience engagement. Rachel Maddow didn't particularly enjoy turning her program into all-Trump-all-the-time in mid-2015, but she couldn't really help it. There was a large portion of the cable news audience that couldn't resist the frisson that came from seeing that one guy who had said mean things to people on that one TV show now saying other mean things to other people on the news. These morons would tune into to anything Trump (to some extent, they will still), and as Les Moonves observed it was "damn good" for the bottom line.

It's tempting to assume that the modern news media firm doesn't really care about which direction their product points. The particular cars that crashed don't really matter when the morons just want to see car crashes. We could hypothesize an efficient market and be smug in the sure knowledge that there are no long-term trends. Or, we could pull our heads out of our asses and actually observe the trends.

Maybe USA is so irredeemably racist that China is an easy mark for this sort of media malpractice. Somehow our racism has ignored all of sub-Saharan Africa? And somehow Israel is not only not despised, but is actually celebrated, despite the fact they are every bit as awful to Palestinians as China is to Uighurs? This is a strange reflection of common USA prejudice!

In fact, Israel purchases (often with USA tax money) large quantities of armaments from USA armaments manufacturers. The moment they stopped doing that, or alternatively the moment their rivals seemed likely to purchase even more armaments in hopes of finally destroying them, would be the moment they were seen in a very different light in USA news media. In the long run, every stupid misguided war USA or its proxies fight is preceded by a long run of news media demonization. Maybe that's just a natural thing, but I'm suspicious.