We can all collectively thank Reagan, among other terrible things we have to deal with today due to his administration, he is also responsible for the state of news media in the US in 2025. Previous to Reagan we had a policy called The Fairness Doctrine, it was a policy introduced in 1949, that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. Broadcasters could show opposing viewpoints via option pieces, news segments or talk shows, but if they reported on one side they were required to show the other.
In 1987 under Reagan the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Broadcasters were no longer required to air apposing viewpoints of controversial topics. This has directly lead to the echo chambers that you see in the news media today.
Just fyi it’s Reagan* not Regan.
obligatory: I’m glad Reagan dead.
oops fixed now tx
Money money money is all you need!
That’s frightening
News as a journalistic medium was killed by the continuous, incremental implementation of top-down imposed efficiency measures based on key performance indicators dictated by the market which changed basically overnight with the adoption of social media and fast paced consumer facing information flow. Investigative journalism became an artisinal craft.
This, against the backdrop of political disinterest of many people brought on by the illusion of the end of history and rapid growth of wealth and quality-of-life that resulted in treating politics as a sort of managerial problem in lieu of a continuous tug-of-war that requires “the masses” to educate themselves and organize in order to defend their rights and keep e.g. wealth inequality in check, created a status quo that was easily upset with events that are common historically but life changing generationally.
pfff, stop blaming one person for a facist nation. it is the people. twice! twice they voted him into office. and those voters are also the content creators in social media. ofcourse those dumbasses trust themselves more than anyone else. idiocracy.
And?
Like what can you do about it other than complain or kill all people that you think as lesser which is basically the whole fascist playbook.
We have to deal with reality as it is and it’s one where desperate people turn to others for help, even if they are turning to people that lie to them about helping for more power.
It’s frustrating but we can’t just stop at being angry.It’s inappropriate to blame the people when our current situation is eminently predictable. It is a law of human nature that when people get desperate enough, they will turn towards authoritarianism. When neither political party offers meaningful improvement in people’s lives, they turn to demagogues who promise to muscle change through and to punish the other. We are the same humanity that put the Caesars and Napoleon into power. Human nature hasn’t changed since ancient Rome. And desperation always brews dictatorship. Blaming the people for this is like blaming the people for the law of gravity.
Journalism in the US is dead. Being shocked or angry at anything the news does or doesn’t say at this point is in “fools me twice, shame on me” territory.
You’d be better off asking Days of Our Lives to weigh in.
Journalism is not dead. Cable news/massive mega outlets are not conducting journalism. Lots of amazing outlets doing great work. 404 Media, for instance, has been crushing it lately.
I really like ProPublica and More Perfect Union.
ProPublica rules. Not as familiar with MPU but seen some good work by them
The billionaires control the media, and they want that money/influence train to keep rolling and not derailed by the government. Doing the bare minimum of whatever pleases both sides.
And those who do then get branded with “TDS,” mocked, and ignored.
The last few days
I guess that technically correct, as long as you’re counting 4000 days as “the last few”
Fox News is the center piece of the crazy.
The reason? People are stupid. Too much lead paint.
Yeah, fr, Journalists are out there risking their lives and being factual and impartial, but people like OP are being handfed by algorithms so as to not trust anyone but the hand.
Corpo journos are very partial and are often unfactual. Corporate media could disappear entirely and nothing of value would be lost.
Working in a building doesn’t make you less credible. The buildings that are compromised are problematic, mainly the Murdoch empire, but are not all encompassing of an entire noble profession.
Social media ranking higher in trust isnt due to media accuracy. There are plenty of outlets that provide a consistent source of news. Its like the comments in here point to 5 bad news sites then smeer “news” as a whole. As if social media isnt 50x worse in every single metric.
Social Media ranks higher in trust because social media companies want users to trust the news they view on their platform. Social media “news” accounts constantly attack the reputation of traditional news outlets by pointing to bad news articles because they benefit directly from the audience losing trust.
Wild that Fox News can practically say the hard R on Biden but every god-damn news channel is tippy toeing on Trump and sane-washing his bullshit
Uh, Retard?
I’m not that familiar with the usa blacklist of words.
Yeah we don’t call it that here in the states. I’ve heard ‘the r word’ but never ‘hard r’. We reserve that terminology for the OTHER hard R.
Republican?
That was my first guess. Its amazing how people think referencing the first letter a word starts with is somehow different from just saying or typing it.
It’s the main offensive word for black people. In general use it ends in an “a” sound, and can be positive neutral, or negative. In racist use it ends in the “hard R” and is always negative. Since you are not from the US, I would say you probably shouldn’t say it at all, just like I did not in this post.
Aah ok. That was a lot of walking around hot porridge as they say here, so:
Nigga: can be friendly
removed: the real racist bad word.
You americans are bizarre (or should I say “the B word” 😁).
Edit: lool my post got sencored! Now nobody will ever know…
Did you just write r*moved?! With a hard R?!
Though frankly, I used to think the whole moral panic around the word was just more of the typical American puritanical bullshit, until I watched Django Unchained - that movie made me realise it’s not just an insult but its use was intimately linked with rampant dehumanising (successful, I should add) and that part is still alive and kicking. In my part of the world the equivalent would be something like calling a holocaust survivor oven fuel. You just… don’t. Don’t say it.
Fuck all forms of censorship otherwise though, definitely.
It’s definitely a wild etymology ride, and linguistics is one of my favorite subjects as a layman.
Congrats on your evolution!
I have a friend and his friends who call me by the word, in a friendly way. I don’t say it even though I have slave heritage (black grandmother).
And yes fuck censorship.
Message recieved loud and clear. 👍
Yeah, the short of it is that it used to be used clinically to describe developmental disorders but fell out of use around the mid-90s because, like so many other words, it was used maliciously to the point where it lost its original meaning and context.
If you were a 90s kid, retard and gay were as close as you could get to actually swearing without getting in trouble and basically carried the same cultural weight as outright slurs. The stigma around being gay was so bad that in the 2000s they made up a sexuality to describe men who were straight but liked to shower and dress in nice clothing so that they wouldn’t lose their jobs. And the stigma around mental needs little explanation, I think. It wasn’t that long ago that they were electrocuting people and cutting out parts of their brains for being sad or having a stutter.
i remember going on a school trip to san francisco in the 90s. one of my classmates kept saying “that’s so gay” about everything she didn’t like. we only let her go two shops (while gently pointing out the SF-specific merchandise) before i had to ask her “you know where we are, right?” in her credit, i never heard her speak that way after that incident so
Fun fact, electroconvulsive therapy is still available for depression! It’s one of the things I tried.
And it’s not mumbo jumbo but something that actually works!
I hope it did for you ❤️ !
I suspect OP is using it wrong. Usually “the hard R” refers to a really bad “no-no” word.
Though the phrase has probably become a slight meme due to Linus from LTT getting the phrase’s meaning wrong in the same way you guys have, but on a live broadcast.
Any “no-no” word?
You can actually write one down, we’re not in kindergarten 🤷🏼♀️.
I can, but I don’t want to because it’s disrespectful.
Also, I think you’d even get thrown out of middle school for saying this one.
It’s a Biiig difference saying a word and using it for treatibg someone with it.
Or so I think.
I do understand you want to curb usage of some words, but outright forbid them is not what I am used to where I live.
They are referring to Negro, but having the R like the river in Africa.
I will now explain this in the only way acceptable in society today,
THROUGH SONG! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSrTnWDTdwI
A big part of it is he’s doing what Israel wants…
Israel kept bombing past the ceasefire start, but look at MSM and everyone is saying Iran violated the ceasefire when they retaliated for Israel not even stopping for it.
It’s decades past time to recognize that Israel’s government has bought off the majority of both of our parties along with our media.
We can’t just keep ignoring it or screaming “both sides” when people point it out
It’s not gonna fix itself, and we can’t fix it till we admit it’s a problem
I have a slightly different take.
He is doing what Russia wants which actually means get Israel to stop bombing Iran because Iran is an important asset to Putin. In the mean time he can look good for ending the conflict. At least thats what daddy Putin told him.
Iran was informed about the US attack. They made sure there were no casualties and the US promptly proclaimed the nuclear treat was now gone. Then Iran did a symbolic counter attack because all people (including Iran citizens) expected a counter attack.
The message seems to be directed at Israel “we solved the problem, now you can stop bombing”
Except Trump is learning the hard way that Israel is just using him for the fool he is and is in no way going to stop their purge. Basically calling the bluff because Netanyahu stopped caring about how they are perceived a while ago.
Israel played there cards very well realising that Russia is in to much of a difficult position with Ukraine to start a war with them to defend Iran.
I have zero proof of above hypothesis but its what emerges in my autistic head if i do go over all the details and in context it just makes a lot of sense to me.
There is a word for this framing of reality and its hypernormalization.
Netanyahu stopped caring about how they are perceived a while ago.
I don’t think he ever did. This guy was burning effigies of Rabin in 1995 because he didn’t want Palestinians to have rights.
I appreciate both your take and the inclusion of “zero proof” and “hypothesis”. It tastes better with those grains of salt.
If you call that out, you’ll be shouted down for being antisemitic.
Because Trump is the abusive ex that you don’t want to piss off because he has thousands of guns and has a hair-trigger temper.
Because they are morons getting stuck in the personality cults on demand that social networks are? There’s plenty of news critical of Trump, but true news sources don’t try to radicalize their viewers either. They all have their biases, bus social networks are the epitome of bias and social engineering.
It’s access journalism. Trump is just more overt about it, but each admin does it. Biden staffers refused to field questions around his acuity, Trump tried to kick out the AP from the White House Press Pool for running actual news instead of fellating him, Obama’s admin refused to honestly talk about the growing drone war, the Bush jr team chided any ‘where WMD’ reporters, Clinton…
If you say mean things or are critical of your subject, they tend to remember that and don’t volunteer information to your outlet - costing your boss exclusives and headlines, and thus ad revenue. I’m pretty sure
TedRafael Cruz is never going to sit down for a 1:1 with Tucker Carlson again after he got the steel chair. White supremacist shitbag as Carlson may be, he actually did a journalism, didn’t let Cruz lie, and challenged him on the topic, and Cruz was shown to be lacking.There is no actual journalism to be found among the main headlines, just repackaged press releases and barebones reporting devoid of context that might actually inform readers. Find an investigative reporter that deals with a topic/region you care about and follow their SubStack, or wade into Telegram and filter out the propaganda as you are able.
I remember watching a 60 Minutes episode from the mid-2000s about government corruption and embezzlement of oil wealth by the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea, and how American oil companies facilitated this corruption. They interviewed a representative of an American oil industry group and confronted him about whether it was ethical to keep doing business with a dictator knowing that the billions in oil money was going straight into the pocket of a corrupt autocrat and his family to fund lavish spending sprees in Paris and mansions in America while the people of Equatorial Guinea starved in some of the poorest and worst living standards in the world. Of course, the industry rep claimed that it was ethical, and the reporters got kicked out of Equatorial Guinea and harassed by local security forces.
But that’s the kind of fearless reporting that just doesn’t get done any more. It’s cheaper to just have people in the newsroom write clickbait articles about what local political figures are yapping about on Bluesky than to send people to create that sort of high-quality journalism. And there’s no chance that any oil industry representative would ever agree to that sort of interview now. At most, they would just have their PR division write a two-paragraph statement.
Agree wholeheartedly. It’s why I hold the term ‘journalist’ as an honorific, and don’t apply that to easily 95% of the people who work in news media. Reporter, sure. But a journalist speaks truth to power, knowing that that power figure may retaliate. A real journalist risks being assassinated with a car bomb for investigating a global money laundering ring, not invitations to state banquets, or ‘embedded live’ with government troops whilst accepting the censor.
Like I said, find a journalist with a good SubStack and support the news and analysis you find valuable. Find somewhere that tells you the what and the why, instead of a story.
It goes back even further. Look at how much the media worked to cover up FDR’s polio.
