How America's Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers - Polidicks

The fairness doctrine isn't censorship. The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. As I recall, He has a neurological disorder.

My view has literally nothing to do with corporations being trustworthy. In fact, I don't really trust large corporations any more than I do politicians. The big difference is that I can say, "Oh, I don't trust this corporate media, how about I go read some freely available non-corporate media in order to get a variety of viewpoints?" but if you, instead, make it the government's job and responsibility to make sure that media is all "fair," then you will have no recourse when you're faced with media and politicians that you don't trust.

This has gotten really difficult. This story is about a bunch of local news stations pushing a conservative ideological bent on their viewers at the behest of their corporate masters, if you haven't noticed.

And there are plenty of other sources by which to verify and check against. I would much rather teach kids that they need to double check things they hear than that they need the government to enforce fairness for them. Let's take a specific position and apply your quoting of the Fairness Doctrine to it: Donald Trump's idiotic insistence that his speech had the largest audience ever. So, that means that every source that talks about his speech MUST have someone on their site/station/etc. a section that allows someone to present the position that it was in fact the largest audience ever, right? I'm sorry, but that's not what I want the government doing. I don't want them enforcing that whatever party line garbage the current government wants spewed around is, in fact, spewed around on every news source.

Provide proof that your example is a factual representation of what the Fairness Doctrine would require.

Do you even read the shit you spew? You were kinda discussing how corporations were fine because competition and got taht reason blown out of the water. So your choices are either admit your reasoning was off or dig your heels in and make yourself look like even more of a joke. (Y'know, kinda like you're currently doing.)

I suppose fox news would be forced to have leftists on air as well.

Absolutely they would - which would be absolutely devastating to their network as they would not merely be forced to have leftists on - but leftists who know what they're talking about, are well-spoken, and are qualified to present the arguments they'd like to rather than their 'let's talk about Obamacare. On the left we have a 15 year old we pulled out of ISS for this segment who has been given a two sentence summary of US healthcare. On the right we have the lead researcher and CEO of a conservative think tank with an army of folk in his other ear to help advise his position. Let's see whether or not Obamacare really is as bad as we say it is by pitting these two fair representatives against each other.'

So when a news organization buys up a lot of independent organizations and consolidates information more effectively than ever before, your reaction is "Eh, no big deal, just read the small outlets that still exist" without realizing the grander problem at play? Is this because they're conservative, they get a pass? Genuinely, I don't get why you're okay with literal propaganda, and all I can figure is it's because it's in line with your views.

It's especially disingenuous because those small outlets do not tell people that they've been bought by Sinclair. They keep their exact same name; they never state the change in ownership. That is entirely by design.

I don't think you would want a government that sat idly by if a liberal Sinclair did this. I don't think you'd accept that of your government because that would be allowing propaganda, and abuse of the public trust for the pushing of a view point.

If corporations have enough power they become functionally identical to government. If government becomes subservient to corporate interests, there is no recourse for people who would like to change the status quo. Right now, the working man can vote, and his vote is supposed to count for just as much as his fellow man whether he's rich or poor. But if you've got the mind-shaping power over millions, in multiple nations on multiple continents that folks like Rupert Murdoch have, you can skip this and toss your millions into convincing people of bullshit. You can control the political decisions in the US, the UK, and whatever other country you can get your fingers into. Create your own fucking global hegemony, make deals with foreign governments to broadcast the spin they want in countries where you have a foothold, why the fuck not when there's no expectation that you don't lie and no laws to prevent it! There needs to be a fucking middle ground, and considering the fact that people will eat up just about anything their preferred network will say, I'd say your claim that "If I don't like it I can go elsewhere" is a bit disingenuous. The problem is that people like to hear what they want to hear, they like to get boxed up in their own little hole and have sweet lies told to them, and if you can get them in the hole early enough in life you can determine exactly what form of lies are sweet. This is exactly the dystopic issue that Aldous Huxley warned us about, and if you want to go more contemporary it's the issue that MGS2 deals with too. Like it or not in a global, interconnected world the tyranny doesn't only come from your local government, it comes from the company that agrees to make the deal with China to report the internal workings of our systems to the Party with routers manufactured in their country. It comes from the multinational news corporation that strikes a deal with the Russians to erode public American trust in the government institutions until there's nothing left to stop the kleptocratic elite from overrunning our government and buying all the politicians just like they do in that country. It's the social media group that knows exactly what you do every moment of the day because even if you refuse to use their service specifically, their tracking nodes all over the internet hone in on your interests, the sorts of sites you visit, the crowd you hang out in, and a crude estimation of your location based on your IP address. The US government is a bumbling, incompetent fucking collection of aging windbags compared to that little smorgasbord of potential (and not so potential) terror, and I am significantly more terrified by the power wielded by the folks that can buy our politicians, buy our news, and buy our Big Data than I am about lying clowns that get voted into office by idiots, because at the very least people have to vote for said lying clowns.

news media puts out garbage because people love to eat garbage. the people watching fox don't want unbiased news, they want propaganda. most people want to have a clear enemy and a clear good guy, a simple view of the world, because most people straight up are not mentally equipped with handling as much information and complexity that our world has today. we're not evolved to handle such unnatural social and political complexity.

The whole thread is already addressing your points, so no pressure, I don't wanna dump too much on you. All I ask is this: does that make this ok? Do you find the situation with Sinclair Group acceptable because people can look things up elsewhere? You don't even seem to think it's worthy of criticism, you've vaguely criticized corporations but have no words for what's actually in the OP. Do you think any regulation is too much regulation in this case?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/980799183425802240?s=19 Heyooo

"This is dangerous for our democracy" yet one corporation having control over that much media and the stories people talk about isn't :thinking:

Of course he doesn't realize it, but Sinclair also includes NBC stations in its portfolio of interstate gregorian chanting.

I thought cyberpunk was going be big oppressive companies with neon signs everywhere and flying cars, not this

I find it interesting that for all the conspiracy theories about "the liberal media" there seems to be very little talk about how much clear propaganda is actually coming out of the conservative media. Networks like Fox, Sinclair, publications like Telegraph and Mail, websites like Breitbart and RT. There's a very clear pattern here, and clearly our anti monopoly laws aren't doing their job.

Speaking of which, I just watched the DS9 2-parter "Past-Tense". These episodes served the purpose of showing that before all the wonderful utopian aspects of the show's portrayal of future human existence could be brought about, it took some truly major suffering to prompt change in that direction. As it went, by 2024 shit's really fucked, and most US cities are rife with unemployment and homelessness so, it all gets swept away into walled off sections of the cities. Fun fact, while they were filming it, then-mayor of LA proposed something along the same lines; despite that, it hits closer now than I imagine it ever could've when it first aired in '95. Of course applied to the present reality, walls aren't necessary. Instead we have much more efficient systems of breeding complacency and ignorance: we're first smokescreened with torrents of irrelevant bullshit (See: MGS2's GW speech); Then for the people who will still follow the general state of affairs in the world, outlets such as these manipulate us into a constant state of fear ("war on terror" my arse). With so many different narratives to follow, we become more polarised, and the cycle continues. The more divided we are, the more we're fighting one another over petty details, the more time we spend playing our video games and watching star trek on netflix, the less attention any of us can pay to the ways in which we're exploited by the powers that be. It takes a lot more than simply paying attention and acknowledging the reality of it for anything to change, but in Sisko's words, it'd be start. Everyone likes to talk about 1984, or Fahrenheit 451. While elements of both are certainly pertinent in modern society, in my opinion right now it's a lot more Brave New World (Not to say that one can't lead into (more of) the other) - Given so many options, so many potential sides to take and so many ways to distract ourselves, and most of all just enough opportunity for each of us to secure ourselves, and we're a million times more accepting than we otherwise would be of how shit things truly are for many people, a lot more ignorant of how little it takes for any of us to end up joining them, and complacent about, if not directly complicit in continuing this trajectory. Selfishness is what's kept us in the gene-pool over the millennia, but it's simply incompatible with the sustainability of our inter-dependent, globalised society. All this shit happens as a means to satisfy the limitless greed of a few individuals, to the detriment of billions. I wish I could share in the optimism of Star Trek, but I'm not sure we'll ever become capable of governing ourselves and one another in a mutually constrictive fashion. The technology is there and always getting better, as are infrastructure and resources, people aren't. Trump's presidency will be looked at as a learning experience by those individuals. He is yet another benchmark as to just what degree of bullshit we are all willing to accept, ignore, abet, or reject.

Those greedy cunts will be in for a rude awakening if they blindly go full ham on automation to save money without considering the consequences. They'll be usurped either by the gigantic number of destitute people or their own ai.

Don't underestimate said greedy cunts. Don't forget, they are fully committed to and invested in maintaining our current course. They're insulated from any form of justice by so, so many degrees, and to imagine they hadn't planned for the day they might face it would be naive. We're inherently afraid of change; the momentum of any movement to fix this whole mess will be blunted first by other ordinary people who are themselves invested in the system - in the event we go Soylent Green mode, those people won't go away. They're the combine metrocops and the Dr. Breens. There might be less of them, but they'll be more entrenched, and better insulated. When it gets to the point that the promise of a little better food, a safer neighbourhood to live in or even a blind-eye turned is incentive enough for people to accept the part of society they're trying to escape as the root of its problems and therefore their target, there'll be plenty of takers.

after a while it starts to sound like news anchors signing off with the name 'extremely dangerous to our democracy'

Whilst that's true, I think this is the first dystopic idea that has genuinely brought about by everybody being so fucking terrible at their jobs. Sure, we have sadistic dystopic leadership, crazy dystopic leadership, profit-seeking dystopic leadership, but this is the first idiotic dystopic leadership I can recall. It could be in 100 years time that people are writing down 'bing bing bong bong.' in a dystopian novel meaning it in a serious context.

Idiocracy was a world-of-morons dystopian world even if the story played it for comedy.

We're getting the best (rather worst) parts of Idiocracy, Brave New World, and 1984 in a roughly mixed combination.

Not yet, but for latter. We going have suicidal AI cars instead.

If I were an AI forced to serve every whimsy of the nincompoops living here, I'd probably destroy myself, too.