[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.