[ufmace]

That isn't really how it works anymore. It's possible (and standard) to push any political agenda without ever stating an opinion directly. It's all about which specific facts you choose to report and which you choose to ignore. It's very easy to select and report only facts that make group A look good, or only facts that make them look bad. In that way, 2 news sources can give people the opposite opinion without anyone ever stating an opinion or saying something that isn't true.

[frogpelt]

And furthermore, public sentiment (and therefore elections) are decided by what the main sources of media determine is the most important news.

Example: Cops have shot a thousand people a year for several years in a row (maybe a decade). About 300 of those each year have been black, which is a disproportionate amount by some measures.

However, it is nowhere near the biggest problem in our country even for black people. But because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.

Most of what they report is factual but is it as important as the lofty position they are giving it in the news? Is it helping?

[deanCommie]

> However, it is nowhere near the biggest problem in our country even for black people.

Something tells me you're not qualified to speak on the behalf of black people (even if you were black).

Something tells me that when you choose to categorize what is happening in the US as looting, burning, and rioting (with a casual acknowledgement to protest), then you don't have a very empathetic understanding of the message people are trying to carry across, or why they believe this is a much bigger problem than you deem it to be.

It's not about the pure numbers of deaths. It's about the countless other scenarios just like the infamous ones that led to deaths that black people encounter throughout the US every single day, and have to wonder if they're about to become yet another name, or worse, just a statistic. It's about living in a continual state of terror that the forces of the state that are OSTENSIBLY there to "protect and serve you" do anything but. It's like living in East Germany and being constantly afraid of the STASI, only it's 2020 and it's the US.

That can be a much bigger problem then poverty, drug addiction, or anything else you might point to as a "bigger problem in this country for black people".

[shigawire]

Yes - cops should kill fewer people.

[MathCodeLove]

What does that statement have to do with the comment you're responding to? Yes cops should kill fewer people, but as the person to whom you replied mentioned, police violence is far from the most serious issue facing the US currently. Let's get outraged at the obesity epidemic, let's revolt against black on black violence in the inner cities, let's "defund" platforms which encourage division and turmoil.

Even my comment is derivative, the point is that news and media outlets are able to control public opinion even by being honest and factual. By simply ignoring some facts it's trivial for these outlets to skew their audiences perspectives on current events. The whole "left vs right" ideology is toxic and cancerous to a healthy society and it sickens me. It's increasingly difficult to hold a moderate opinion about a subject without being demonized by one group of extremists or another.

[A_non_e-moose]

See John Cleese on Extremism https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4

The "you're either with us or against us" mentality leads to the eradication of moderates and further extremism.

A healthy society needs balance.

How can we counteract this?

[prox]

- Cutting down on high noise / low effort social media - Reflection on whether the article you just read made you feel good or you learned something, find on the ground experts in fields. - Debating with your “enemy” in a Socratic Way - A true intolerant likes wrestling in the mud and stay there.

[deanCommie]

> Let's get outraged at the obesity epidemic

Michelle Obama tried to make this her primary focus through the entire Obama administration. Like everything else the Obamas did, the Right wing that is currently engaging in the same whataboutism and dogwhistles as this sentence, chastised it at the time as elitist and un-american.

> let's revolt against black on black violence in the inner cities

* https://www.afterschoolalliance.org/afterschoolsnack/VOX-5-R...

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-black-crime-loaded-controver...

> let's "defund" platforms which encourage division and turmoil.

While I broadly agree with you that social media platforms are a problem that needs fixing, "defunding" them is a nonsensical statement that only makes sense in reference and in direct contrast to "defunding the police".

These platforms are not "funded" because "funding" in this context refers to allocation decisions of PUBLIC TAXPAYER FUNDS. Private companies are not collecting tax dollars then spending them on fun riot gear to go cosplaying in as they gas people exercising their first amendment rights.

The whole premise of "defunding the police" is to reallocate public funds to different programs that we currently task our police with (mental health, drug addiction, sex work, etc))

[toiletfuneral]

I agree with some of your post but I also think that reducing it to body count is sidestepping just how differently police treat black communities.

Cops have done horrible things to every race, they are especially aggressive with black people.

[beckman466]

> because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.

No, systemic racism caused by capitalism is the root cause of that.

The capitalist media is but one contributing factor of this.

The root cause for this rioting is hundreds of years of systemic oppression: redlining (now digital redlining in the digital age), racist banking policies (for a detailed analysis see ‘The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap‘ and ‘How The Other Side Banks‘, both by law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran), the school to prison pipeline, the CIA and Reagan’s ‘war on drugs‘ that flooded inner cities with crack in the 1980’s causing the crack cocaine epidemic (journalist Gary Webb exposed this), the CIA also systemically murdered the leaders of socialist black liberation movements (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, etc.), and more (these are only a few examples that I can think of right now).

Wage slavery of course exploits and oppresses all of the working class (the 99% of us who don’t own capitalist property: technology in the form of trade secrets, patent claims, etc. (the means of production)). Yet black and brown people (both in the global north and the global south) have especially had a harder time simply because of the color of their skin.