The real reason everybody is arguing each other today... by 6IXSTRINGJACK

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

The real reason everybody is arguing each other today...

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Sunday, January 19, 2020 10:42
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Saturday, January 18, 2020 10:10 AM

Here's to you, Legacy Media.

Do you see it? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, but I've trained myself to notice this at first glance because you'll see something similar every single day on RCP's homepage.

Take a minute or two before you scroll down for the SPOILER.

Pretty gross, huh?

I don't blame RCP at all for this. I actually hold that site in pretty high regard overall for their choice in stories to cover from the political spectrum, I have only a few gripes with the way they conduct their polling aggregates that are not complaints of partisan behavior and are rather things they could/should do to maintain more consistency with them, and when they publish articles of their own they seem to mostly come from a rather centered place and don't paint an overall picture of obvious bias to either side collectively.

But the media?

Seriously... WTF?

1. Trump/China Trade

If you read Bloomberg, this morning you were made aware that Round One Goes to Trump in the U.S./China Trade Battle. If Politico is more your style, the U.S./China Trade Deal was not even a modest win.

2. Impeachment

If you read the Spectator and/or American Greatness, you've learned this morning why Democrats are committing Constitutional suicide and everything you need to know about their final doomed effort to undo the 2016 election. If you read CNN, you've learned all about Trump's circus of defense lawyers.

SPOILER ALERT: Trump's hired Epstien's legal defense team. (I learned that from Tim Pool yesterday, but I can only imagine that CNN is roasting Trump over that one this morning.

3. Race and ism

And finally, the Federalist clues us all in on how Trump can triple his support among black voters, while NBC News informs us that racist Republican voters may be violating the constitution.

There are two entirely different Reality TV shows playing out here, that are superimposed over each other. No matter where you lie on the political spectrum, there is "news" that you want to hear and "news" that you want to condemn.

If you take a step back out of the bubbles though, you can see how we're all being manipulated into tearing each other down.

T doesn't understand why I put so much stock in what bookie websites say about the presidential election. THIS is why.

All of those Legacy Media sites are afraid of getting less money, leading to more layoffs and mergers and bankruptcies, and most of them have long since done away with a majority of their on the ground reporters and fact checking departments. It's all about being the first to drop a story, and "hey, if we're wrong we may or may not apologize for it in the future, but only if we're directly caught or sued over it, because most of the time we can just throw it down the memory hole and people won't even remember we said it".

The bookies aren't incentivized by advertisements and clicks. They aren't going to lie about the facts, because to do so would undermine their own ability to make money and conversely put them in the poor house.

Seriously.... Imagine that T's right and oddsshark is lying about Trump's insanely good odds for re-election now. What happens when a bunch of Democrats don't believe that and put a ton of money down on Biden or Warren or Sanders and hit the jackpot when one of them win since they're all big underdogs? They lose everything... that's what.

Now imagine a different scenario where the bookies say that Warren is a favorite to win because of feels and they make Trump the big underdog (like the cherry picked polls that the Legacy Media constantly gives you), even though their well researched numbers and statistics don't support that idea. Now when Trump wins, they've got to pay out tons of money that they never should have to people who bet on Trump when they knew he wasn't an underdog in the first place, all because they wanted to push a false agenda.

There's no such thing as a sure thing. In the end, the bookies might be wrong about this, just like they're wrong about sporting events from time to time too. But it's all about odds. They deal in numbers 24/7 and make a living doing it. They have no desire to fake numbers to push any particular agenda because to do so would end their lives as they know it.

But the media on the other hand, in the age of the internet, has all the ROI in the world to justify this behavior. Sensationalist headline rage bait is the name of the game. No matter how much they manipulate the facts and the numbers, they are rarely ever held accountable after the truth plays out in time, and letting facts get in the way of their bubble by posting stories that their particular readership won't want to hear will turn away their customers.

Though they shouldn't be given any pity since they put themselves there in the first place, they are in the unenviable position of not only "winning" by doing it, but also of "losing" by not doing it.... But this is only winning and losing in the short term, and the longer they all do it the bigger hole they're digging for themselves. One day the nation's fascination with rage bait online hatred will blow over and people will go back to a more sane mental place collectively. At that point, we will reflect back on the reasons why we were all so angry in the first place, and (though a close number two) the number one reason is not the politicians themselves, but it was the egregiously disingenuous the way in which the Legacy Media has reported on them for so long.

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 2:14 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Rage bait.

Yep.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 3:18 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Many decades ago I read part of a speech given by a TV channel owner during a journalism awards ceremony. And basically what he said was: your job isn't to do a good job reporting important news, it's to bring mass audiences to the show so we call sell expensive ad time.

At some point 'the media' decided that they no longer wanted to support reporting real news as a civic duty and business loss, they wanted their news to be a profit center instead. And so they got into infotainment instead of news. (Infotainment - a word that came pre-loaded into my editor the concept has been around for so long.)

DESPITE that fact being widely acknowledged, DESPITE being massively lied to about Iraq WMDs and RUSSIA!!COLLUSION!!! - and everything in between, DESPITE the lack of evidence that gets pointed out over and over ...

... what I don't get is the childish belief by - just about everyone here - that they're getting the news.

When does reality start to kick in?

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 3:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I'll admit I wasn't old enough to see it, or if I was I just didn't care back then. But all signs point to Fox News really kicking this practice into overdrive, and all the other media outlets followed suit when they saw how profitable it was.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

But let's face it... The fact that only a handful of entities own all the news in the entire country now plays the biggest role in this.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 4:08 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Well ... TV news reporting was traditionally a loss-center, and it was accepted as that as part of the civic duty. And maybe (for all I know) there were some even more stringent FCC requirements that were being enforced. The media in general has always had a heavy CIA influence. And newspapers and TV have always scrambled to get the favor of 'sources', so they could get their 'stories' first. (The one exception was IF Stone, who believed 'sources' were just another name for propaganda.)

So since at least the 70's that I remember there's been this tension between easy and cheap (parroting 'sources', printing CIA scripts) and accurate and newsworthy but expensive (for example, independent reporting from Vietnam).

At the time there were the few big papers and the few big TV stations, and they were behemoths vying for dollars.

At some point in the 70's, the tide shifted and turning TV news from a loss center into a profit center became the thing to do. That meant yanno - coming up with the infotainment formula you see today - BREAKING !! TRAGEDY !! ... moderately important stuff ... and the heartwarming coda, all presented as a series of carefully sifted random facts, completely void of context or history - or follow-up, and swaddled in a well-considered narrative of US exceptionalism and righteousness. This was WAY before FOX News was even a gleam in Murdoch's eye (in 1999). As for print news, I haven't followed it closely, but it's obvious by the time of bush the deux and Iraq War the deux the NYTimes and the WaPo were obviously doing the war-hawks bidding. So that doesn't seem to have been triggered by FOX either.

Yeah, having just a few really wealthy owners who have agendas in terms of how they want this country to run, on top of how they want their bottom line to prosper, is obviously not going to get us a good account of reality in the news.

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 6:01 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

So I just wanted to add that cycling out even important, ongoing news and pretending it no longer exists is another reason why people have such a distorted view of reality. And fostering the enteral sunshine of the spotless mind is another way people are being manipulated.

Back in the day, Vietnam was in every single evening newscast. It was ongoing, and it was important. Somewhere along the line it became both propagandically convenient, as well as cheap, to simply stop reporting on things.

I'm sure it was going on long before I noticed it but it really struck me during Katrina. Well before the crisis was over, it stopped being 'font-page' leading news ... and then stopped being news altogether.

Anyway, when I get my act together, I'll get back to my thread about things / not being / no longer being / reported.

It's amazing what massively important stuff is being simply swept under the rug of silence.

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 10:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Well... I surely wasn't paying any attention to news in the 70's, so I'll have to take your word for that.

What I meant, with Fox News, was the flashy graphics, the loud "important" music, and the ticker at the bottom of the screen always telling you things while you're listening to whatever they think is important on any given day. I don't believe that any of the other news outlets did any of that until Fox did it to great financial success.

The FCC probably did have a lot more control over it when it was all on network TV as well. I don't think they have much pull over cable TV.

Wanna see something scary?

It's like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

THIS is extremely dangerous to our Democracy.

Fucking pod people.

Speaking of the memory hole, what's funny is that people are pretending that this is a Trump thing and it just started happening. I can't even find the ones from years ago in a youtube search anymore. This has been happening at least 5 or 10 years now... maybe more. I don't think people knew about it before YouTube made it easy to compare.

EDIT TO ADD:

Ah... here we go. Conan to the rescue.

Posted to YouTube 6 years ago, so this was at least 2014, well before Trump was even a political figure.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 19, 2020 10:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

1/19/2020:

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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