• The Liberal Media? A New Poll Suggests Otherwise
    14 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdLJX-zggDE
I'm sorry, but this is REALLY a stretch. First of all, this is a poll of people generally, not media watchers. Secondly, there haven't been any crimes of Russian collusion yet, which is what people think about when they talk about the Mueller investigation. He then focuses on fringe groups like BDS, which are not part of left wing politics generally. They also rarely talk about any specific policy. This guy is presenting half the story, and pretending it's the whole story. His whole challage about "5 progressives" is a joke. That's trivial.
Judging on most rated icon on your post, I really think this paragraph have something do this.
The idea of there being a liberal bias in mainstream media is just another conspiracy theory made up by the very real conservative media. While there are definitely left leaning media networks out there (Occupy Democrats and Jacobin spring to mind) they're nowhere near as mainstream as Fox or RT. Most of the larger media networks that aren't right wing propaganda try to give the image of being balanced, which often results in them avoiding discussing left wing issues like the aforementioned BDS or minimum wage matters, and also results in them supporting the right wing false dichotomies in matters of climate change and evolution.
If the liberal media had such a powerful role in how Americans think you'd imagine we would live in a Democrats socially-progressive paradise, instead of a world where Republicans control two of the three branches of government, are packing out the judiciary , and are busily writing their conservative social and economic policies into law.
In fact, were the media as liberal as people say, there wouldn't be so many right wing governments in power tbh
Another thing about conservative versus liberal media, and this is very strange given common public perception of conservatives: the conservative media has done a significantly better job of adapting to the new media of the internet than more liberal or centrist publications have. The alt right would not exist without facebook and youtube, Donald Trump would not have become president without twitter and reddit. I think it partially has to do with how we see conservatives as crotchety old men yelling at kids to get off their lawns, we don't expect them to be operating on the internet with anywhere near the degree of efficiency that they do.
Shoutout to Jacobin though, I think it's a very good hard left source that's very reasonable and fact based. Their articles tend to be very well cited and lack terrible loaded language of other stuff.
I think this problem comes down to the one that's old as time itself - the disunity of the left. The title of the left covers so many disparate viewpoints, from anarchist Jacobins to neo-stalinist communists and everything in between, including the moderate democrats. This has lead there to being a bunch of different mainstream media outlets dedicated to liberal politics, from relatively moderate CNN and MSNBC to extremists such as the upcoming Young Turks and the Jacobins and such. Meanwhile the Right continues to unite under one flag as they always do, with Fox news being the channel used for all the moderate to heavy conservative needs to Brietbart for the extremists, with a few alt-right speakers such as Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos defining that extremism. This large number of Leftwing stations allows the conservative media to paint the truth as though the media for the left is much larger than it actually is, where in truth Fox News holds barely less viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, two incredibly moderate TV channels that only really have a slight liberal bias, which are painted as so liberally extreme when they're not because of the extremist left wing media stations. The truth is simply that conservative media is more extreme and just as big if not bigger than most mainstream liberal media. Of course you'll never hear that because that doesn't make for a good victim complex.
Any grouping of 'the left' or 'the right' is going to be a massive generalization because neither group actually exists as a cohesive identifiable whole. Both labels are just vague approximations based on stereotypes and only defined as being opposite to each other. What one considers to be 'leftist' or 'rightist' is entirely fluid and changes on a weekly if not daily basis based on the movement of the Overton window. What one considers to be 'leftist' beliefs or 'rightist' beliefs will constantly change and even switch places as previously unacceptable beliefs become acceptable and vice versa. Culture is not something that can be put in a box, there is no unity of the left or unity of the right because whoever is considered 'rightist' or 'leftist' changes depending on who you ask. This isn't a no true scotsman fallacy so much as it is simply how things work. A person's beliefs are not based on some definable, objective natural axiom, but rather their socialization within a cultural tribe, and so their beliefs are fluid and somewhat arbitrary. What happens when all of the republicans in a state lose completely and they stop fielding candidates because they know it's a lost cause? Does 'the left' win? No, the Overton window just moves over and now 'the left' is progressive justice democrats and 'the right' are the centrist establishment democrats. What happens when all the democrats in a state lose completely and they stop fielding candidates because they know it's a lost cause? Does 'the right' win? No, the Overton window just moves over and now 'the right' are ethno-nationalist freedom caucus republicans and 'the left' are centre-right establishment republicans. The reality is that there are no 'sides', every person has their own individual belief system. Any unity is an alliance of convenience, not because they agree with others within their chosen affiliation but because they disagree with the other affiliation more.
It's just a simple truth that the left is not as unified as the right though, because the left covers far more differing opinions that can't as easily compromise and cooperate as the right can. Just look at any country that has more than 2 parties such as the UK and Canada. You have one huge conservative party such as the Tories or the Conservatives, and a bunch of disparate liberals parties such as Labour, Libdems, greens and so forth or the Liberals, the NDP, and the greens. You're absolutely right that on a whole, everyone has differing views and you can only lump so many on the left and right together, but the truth is simply that the right usually has a far easier time uniting under one or two banners compared to the left, and it makes sense as the left is more open to views and differences of opinion. This just needs to be accounted for in politics.
It's an unfortunate consequence of the way the political systems in the UK and the United States is structured, in that they aren't representative of the actual beliefs of the vast majority of constituents.
And the Conservative Party of Canada didn't exist 20 years ago, it was formed of the union of the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) and the Canadian Alliance which was itself the merger-successor of the Reform Party and several provincial conservative parties. The bastards consolidated their power in the early 2000s because all they want to do is win and then profit from it.
Yea, Alberta's two center-right parties (Wildrose and Progressive Conservative) merged into United Conservative Party not long ago after Province's New Democratic Party won first time in their history.
maybe one of my favorite things about canadian history is that for a very short period of time, The Canadian Alliance was called Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance. If you add Party to the end of that, you get Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party, or CCRAP. Calling them the crap party apparently stuck amongst their detractors even though they changed the name a day later.
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