[techdragon]

This is actually a wider issue with political discussion in countries with two dominant parties. There are parties who frequently use “political description words” such as (regex notation to save on duplicates) “democra.?”, “republic.?”, “liberal”, “labour”, “social.?”, “conservative”, and many more. As a consequence of this people begin to develop associations with certain kinds of political views with the full or shorthand names of the political parties that promote them so we get discussions about “Republican/Labour/Liberal/Democrat/Conservative policies” that grow increasingly divorced (from the terms that are needed to discuss them like “liberal” and “conservative” … which generates confusion.

There are fundamentally, multiple axises upon which you can measure political policy, views, goals, parties, etc. A few examples of widely understood ones being “progressive/conservative”, “authoritarian/libertarian”, “collectivist/anarchist”, and some even cover similar things such as “socialist/capitalist” which has philosophical overlap “collectivist/individualist” but is not the same, being obviously more focused on the economic structures than basic political philosophies of collectivism vs individualism.

All of this is to say that boiling politics down to a simplistic “left/right” spectrum does nothing but confuse the issues.

[DiggyJohnson]

I actually very much agree with your characterization of the challenge.

That said, and I'm curious if you'd agree, I don't think that means that we cannot observe that MSNBC is left-biased. Both in a relative (definitely) and absolute sense. That said, if we are going to use such a reductive spectrum, we do lose a huge amount of important details that may keep individuals from agreeing with my perspective.

[techdragon]

I wrote that up because of how hard it is to even agree on what “left” means. I could agree with a characterisation of MSNBC as socially “progressive” but they’re fiscally “conservative” just like the majority of business focused news outlets. They push “individualist” views quite broadly along with the majority of business news by being (in general) anti-union, and they don’t really seem to have a fixed position on the authoritarian/libertarian axis (as in they don’t make the decision if it’s good or bad based on this axis)

Effectively I could agree with a characterisation of MSNBC as “left” if you want to define “left” as just “progressive”. Which feels like an oversimplification that hides the fact that when you look critically at the situation that broadly speaking news in the USA is tailored to instil fear as a mechanism to keep people watching because seeking information (to ensure our safety) on things our brain finds threatening is a basic human instinct that happens at a subconscious level. Effectively the only difference between the 24/7 news channels is what they think you’re afraid of.