[antux]

Not a surprise that political climate is getting more liberal since mainstream media is largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.

[wbsss4412]

Mainstream media is run and controlled by advertisers.

As education increasingly becomes the political dividing line in America, liberal politics are where the valuable ad dollars are.

Edit: upon reflection, I would be remiss to not also advance the fact that the mainstream media is inescapably caught up within Twitter and it’s discourse. As much as Twitter “is not real life” and it is not representative of Americans views as a whole, it is representative of an outsized fraction of elite media attention.

[amalcon]

This is exactly it. "Vote with your wallet" sounds like a pretty good idea until you notice that your wallet doesn't actually contain that many votes.

[josephh]

But don't ratings matter most to advertisers? Who's going to run ads on a station that nobody watches?

[wbsss4412]

Are liberal politics bad for ratings?

[mgh2]

So can we extrapolate that liberal media, and to some extent HN content and what this community believes, is driven by monetary incentives?

Curious to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250026

[wbsss4412]

I made no statements about what the HN community believes. Only that mainstream media is driven by monetary incentives, which I don’t believe is a very controversial statement.

As for my opinions on what the hacker news community believes. We know that certain demographics skew certain ways politically, empirically. It’s not surprising given the demographics of HN that certain beliefs are predominant here. That has little to do with money, at least not in the way it does for media products.

[ipaddr]

Mainstream media is controlled by a select few. Powerful men/women from powerful families shape the stories.

Advertisers are picked and closely vetted.

[wbsss4412]

After I turning on Fox News any time during the 2010s and running into the plethora of “cash 4 gold ads”, it’s hard to see how that argument can hold water.

[zozbot234]

inb4 privileged limousine-liberals and gauche-caviars literally advocating for classism and elitism. What happened to checking your privilege?

[wbsss4412]

What I wrote was a descriptive, not a normative statement.

Tbh I don’t really know what your point is.

[mywittyname]

I don't think this is the case. Sinclair Media, NewsCorp, and iHeartMedia (formally ClearChannel) are heavily conservative, very open about it, and dominate their respective fields: broadcast local television, cable television, and local radio. They are the largest, and most mainstream of all media companies. And there's plenty of crossover. Plenty of Fox News personalities have syndicated radio programs aired on iHeartMedia stations.

Yeah, NPR and CNN exist, but none of them draw near the audience of their conservative counterparts do.

It would be more accurate to say that conservative media is highly concentrated while liberal media tends to be much more diverse, but draws far fewer people.

[munk-a]

America has several prominent news organizations including one extremely well funded and staunchly conservative one, one pretty darn liberal one, and another one I'd argue is more pro-establishment than either liberal or conservative. So I don't think it's fair to argue there is overt government favoritism that is blocking out voices on either side - it seems to me that each time the majority control switches hands one side or the other of the media will greatly benefit from the preferential treatment given to it by the majority.

If that doesn't sound incorrect to you then I think it's down to the market. If the market willed the conservative voices to have a larger audience the market would so deliver. And if everyone dislikes market driven news sources then how the heck did we ever manage to defund NPR and similar programs?

[mgh2]

I think you are missing the point. We know that internet content and advertisement has largely replaced print and that most large tech corporations that profit from this business model lean liberal (Google, Facebook, etc.).

Wouldn't there be a bias on what ads get accepted in general? Especially when Facebook is largely human monitored and Google caters marketing to populous beliefs, with AI augmenting this effect?

[mywittyname]

Who can, with a straight face, call Facebook left leaning? At this point, the platform exists solely to spread conservative talking points.

[mcguire]

"...most large tech corporations that profit from this business model lean liberal (Google, Facebook, etc.)."

I find this to be a rather bizarre statement. While internally, both companies (as well as the other tech companies) are populated with highly educated employees, who tend to lean liberal, their public corporate behavior is neither particularly liberal or conservative until they are publicly embarrassed.

(Facebook and Twitter were an important component of Trump's election campaign in both runs, and at least the former is a big part of the COVID-denialism movement, right?)

[dfxm12]

Their anti-union behavior [1], [2] is certainly conservative. :)

1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...

2 - https://www.wired.com/story/document-reveals-more-google-ant...

[mgh2]

Sure, when it is convenient for their pocket lines.

[ipaddr]

Companies hold different core values. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc all share(d) west coast left leaning values that shaped the internet so it was more open than society. The do not evil motto fit the times. Today these companies are much bigger and global but part of their culture is still intact.

Liberals in 2022 are more like conservatives in 1970/1980 when it comes to nudity, community and free speech.

[munk-a]

A large number of companies, whether this seems ethical to you or not, still mostly follow the Friedman Doctrine[1] any political leanings they appear to have are adopted solely to increase their expected revenue. Some companies do violate this by altruistically acting to improve the world, but, honestly, these companies get a lot of crap from a lot of free-marketers for going against the natural market and "wasting resources on inefficiencies". A lot of companies may choose to support charities or offer employees volunteering hours, but these can also be viewed cynically as maneuvers to maximize PR and goodwill and avoid taxation.

At a really basic level I think it's important to remember that corporations are not people (not just in the citizens united manner) - anthropomorphizing them is dangerous since (except when wholly controlled by a single unimpeachable entity like a founder or single person business) their actions are dictated by consensus and consensus decision making is incompatible with human morality.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

[mcguire]

That's an effect, not a cause.

After the American Civil War, slavery became illegal. After WWII, antisemitism became verboten. After the Civil Rights movement, open racism had to be suppressed. After the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality entered the public sphere. Each of those steps represented a loss to conservatism. But they were not caused by some liberal conspiracy, rather the "better natures" of people (most people really do believe in things like fairness and justice, at least in the abstract) were forced to confront behaviors that were just conservatively accepted.

Showing law enforcement using firehoses, batons, and dogs on people seeking to register to vote is not inherently liberal or conservative. The response, however, was liberal.

[sam0x17]

One thing I find irksome is all these ideas are put under the general category of "liberal" when really it's a bunch of leftist ideas with a few neo-liberal/centrist concepts thrown in for good measure. Credit where credit is due.

[xxpor]

Liberals will always control culture absent government censorship. The strong correlation between openness to new experience and liberal political views is all that's needed to figure that out.

(Using liberal in the American sense here)

The forefront of culture is what's new and exciting. You have to actually be willing to try it out though. It's inherently not conservative.

Edit: the sibling's post about ad dollars is a fantastic point as well.

[munk-a]

I think a point you missed here though is that in a lot of countries "culture" doesn't control media - industry and commerce do. America has an extremely strong media tradition that isn't based in economic news - but in other parts of the world (and you can observe it in America by looking at WSJ for instance) a fair number of media sources will emerge from the fact that business folks need to know a wide breadth of business news - the political and opinion branches these news sources tend to grow into will almost without fail lean toward preserving the businesses status quo which generally aligns with the conservative side of the political compass. An interesting counter example toward that general lean is Victorian England where the conservative business community was traditionally oriented towards land exploitation and the industrial business concerns ended up joining with the more liberal block in opposition.

[zozbot234]

There are plenty of close-minded liberals. And, for that matter, plenty of open-minded centrists/libertarians/neotraditionalists.

[dfxm12]

Not a surprise that political climate is getting more liberal since mainstream media is largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists

Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!

The "liberal" party voted for the most centrist choice in their primary, and America picked him as their president. Americans today see Biden as more moderate than Obama, not more liberal [0]. I don't see how one can make the case America is getting more liberal when even the liberal party isn't.

The media is also absolutely not largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. Nationally, Fox News dominates the ratings and had the top 3 rated cable news shows last year [1]. That doesn't even touch on SBG's well documented reach in key markets or conservative talk radio (which you can also find all over the top of the ratings lists [4]).

As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.

It's hard to take such a claim at face value. On the one hand, conservatives like to play the victim against an undefined boogeyman, like we see here. On the other, conservatives are the ones wielding actual political power to enforce ideology through censoring educators and banning books [2], [3].

0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/100-days-american...

1 - https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/top-cable-news-shows-of-2021...

2 - https://www.businessinsider.com/virginia-school-board-member...

3 - https://www.wfft.com/news/education/indiana-teachers-push-ba...

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...

[unethical_ban]

You say this as if it is a bad thing.

[spaniard89277]

It is.