US Politics

Actually I said

Mainstream media has told some whoppers over the years but it's hardly Pravda

To which you replied,

I disagree with that, I think mainstream media owned by oligarchs like murdoch is horrifically propagandised and new media actually opens things up a bit. Sure there are risks, but I think that, rather from coming to a bad place from a good one, we are coming to a bad place from a horrendous one.

As far as voting in the US goes, most Trump voters get their news from Cable and Social Media, most young men in particular from a combination of X, Youtube and Reddit. How would you rate that content for balanced reporting, fact checking etc vs traditional media?

My point was, while you can find flaws in western mainstream media, they tend to be self correcting, albeit sometimes over a longer time line than is ideal. At the other end of the spectrum, is Pravda (or any autocratically controlled state media,) where ALL reporting is spun in service of the government and glaring events are airbrushed from history, without recourse.

I tend to think that a media environment with people like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg as effective Nomenklaturas, is inherently corrupted. That Michael Tomasky article is really worth a read, as he says:

"It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.... right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win."