[HN Gopher] The Meltdown at CNN
___________________________________________________________________
The Meltdown at CNN
Author : jgalt212
Score : 99 points
Date : 2023-06-05 01:49 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| incomingpain wrote:
| CNN was in my opinion a leading news agency at some point in the
| past. Must be true around 2000. What did CNN do to themselves?
|
| Has CNN been violating journalistic standards? Obviously yes, so
| which ones?
|
| >Accuracy and Factual reporting?
|
| Yikes no, CNN hasn't been doing anything like that recently.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anderson-cooper-hurricane/
|
| "Miscaptioned" is a nice way to call ACooper a liar.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/22/middleeast/tehran-respons...
|
| CNN is completely wrong and clearly pushing something.
|
| >Slander and libel
|
| How much did CNN give the MAGA hat kid? It was a lot wasn't it?
|
| >Harm limitation principle
|
| CNN is violating this rule by far more then the rule even
| intends.
|
| 6 people at CNN wrote this...
| https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/25/politics/missing-postmarks-bo...
|
| CNN is in gross violation of about all of the journalistic
| standards. The cost isn't immediate bankruptcy, you burn your
| reputation slowly as you violate journalistic standards. If you
| have a strong reputation, you can burn it for years upon years.
|
| Difficult job for Licht to fire all the political activists and
| keep the journalists.
| foul wrote:
| Why did the interviewer in the end ask questions (on behalf of
| CNN personnel) a union leader should ask? What a trainwreck of a
| longform, I love The Atlantic.
| sumo89 wrote:
| without paywall: https://www.scribd.com/article/650143150/Inside-
| The-Meltdown...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Lot of comparison to Fox and MSNBC. But what about Bloomberg or
| CNBC. Lot of times it seems like the financial news is resistant
| to BS, because people want to know what is really happening to
| invest real money. Why couldn't CNN follow that format, just lots
| of real, but more minor, news. Sure, not every interview with a
| CEO of a small company in Indonesia is super important, but it
| tends to be more realistic and can be interesting.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| mad money and the SPAC shills on these financial networks is as
| BS as anything else.
| epc wrote:
| Doesn't generate the ratings necessary to pay for a worldwide
| news team (which CNN hasn't had for years).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| How does Bloomberg pay for it? Is it as a loss-leader as some
| indicate, maybe to sell other Bloomberg products? Or is it
| difference in news, Bloomberg has lot more advertisers to
| financial markets interviewing CEO's, then a CNN would get
| interviewing Diplomats. Where Bloomberg interviews all levels
| of CEO's and analysis, why can't CNN interview Diplomats from
| around the world, or scientists, or there are tons of people
| that want to talk. And interviews don't take that much
| overhead. --- I think I agree with other sentiment here,
| there is a lot of news to report, it can be interesting.
| epc wrote:
| Absolutely a loss leader for Bloomberg. Whatever
| advertising they get is de minimis, I frequently see house
| ads for multiple hours when I have it on in the morning.
| It's subsidized by subscriptions to the terminal. I don't
| know CNBC financials but it has higher ratings than
| Bloomberg TV and has the heft and drag of NBC to pull it
| into cable lineups.
|
| As for CNN...its first twenty years or so were mostly great
| hard core news from around the world. A real shift happened
| post 2000, whether that was due to the cataclysmic AOL Time
| Warner merger/demerger or changing attitudes or just the
| rise of Fox News but CNN gradually then rapidly morphed
| away from hard news to fluffy content and politics 7x24. It
| used to be that you could watch Headline News to catch up
| on what's going on in 5-10 minutes and then CNN for more in
| depth coverage. HNN stopped being useful early in the
| 2000s. CNNfn was ok for the few years it existed but CNN
| didn't have the financial news depth that CNBC had.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| absolutely, I miss HNN, that used to be my morning
| routine. then at some point HNN turned into a dumping
| ground for re-runs and true-crime drama.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think it's largely about balancing the spend with the
| income. CNN simply spends more money on highly paid
| "talent" than the business model can support. They simply
| exist due to cable fees and probably given excess in terms
| of their actual contribution.
| Empact wrote:
| This article convinced me to give CNN another chance, after being
| disgusted with it under Zucker.
|
| IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization. If
| CNN can be it, then more power to them.
| yesco wrote:
| Honestly this article convinced me there _is_ no chance for
| CNN. To fix it you would need to rebuild the entire
| organization from scratch, it seems increasingly clear to me
| that the tabloid elitism they call "journalism" at CNN, was
| just as much a bottom up issue as it was top down under Zucker.
|
| > Licht argued that the media's blind spots owe to a lack of
| diversity--and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms
| obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply
| religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and
| reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his
| own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some
| spicy remarks at a conference. "I said, 'A Black person, a
| brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same
| year from Harvard is not diversity,'" he told me.
|
| I feel this really gets to the heart of the problem at CNN.
| Sadly, I have doubts over whether Licht actually has the skill
| to pull it off.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| They can't.
| [deleted]
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization.
| If CNN can be it
|
| They've been the exact opposite for so long, that I don't see
| how any sensible person could ever trust them to be "it" in the
| future. the brand is tarnished beyond repair.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > IMO the USA does need an honest, unbiased news organization.
|
| No organization made up of humans can be unbiased.
|
| You can have honesty, you can have forms of transparency, you
| can have adherence to various journalistic procedural norms,
| but you cannot have "unbiased".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I find it interesting that we haven't seen rise of a
| bipartisan fact-based news media that presents both sides in
| a deliberate Maner.
|
| I could follow a simple format of topic, position one,
| position two. And obviously could be a debate platform but it
| could also just be a simple summary of facts
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I heard that. And you don't need to overpay all the talking in
| heads.
|
| In England, they are called newsreaders because that's what
| they do. And if you pay them as such, you'll get a lot closer
| to break-even.
| dogleash wrote:
| > what began as a journalistic forum devolved into a WWE match
| before the first voter asked a question.
|
| _Insert astronaut "always was" meme here_
|
| Politics isn't _like_ wrestling, it _is_ wrestling.
|
| The defining property of wrestling isn't that the outcomes are
| predetermined, the defining property is a stage show to get
| viewers emotionally invested in a fight.
|
| Most people are too busy feeling superior for not believing in
| fake fighting so they fail to understand it's appeal, and wind up
| falling for the same exact tricks. "But the outcome is actually
| important in politics" one might say. Yeah, and those dummies are
| letting themselves get conned on the surface level so the
| politicians don't even have to try and con them on the policy
| level.
|
| The reason the news is fucked is they steadfastly refuse to
| acknowledge to themselves that always choose spectacle over civic
| education.
| lapcat wrote:
| "a mission to restore the network's reputation for serious
| journalism"
|
| LOL. CNN needs tragedies: the Challenger disaster, the Gulf War,
| baby falling down a well. Those are the kind of things that made
| CNN popular.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is basically true. CNN invested to build a reputation for
| being always on, so when something newsworthy happened, people
| would flip to them right away. To be fair, the reporters
| usually tried to report soberly and factually when that
| happened.
|
| Today no TV channel can beat the Internet for being always on.
| No one runs to their TV and flips it on to see what's going on;
| they pick up their phone... a place where CNN does not stand
| out at all.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| "one of the world's preeminent news organizations"
|
| Did I miss something?
|
| Nobody watches CNN.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Wow, huge piece. I don't know how magazine writers can do that
| much writing in a few weeks.
|
| Anyway, CNN is in terminal decline and there is no person or
| strategy that can save it. Nobody with even moderate brain
| activity watches cable news these days. The only success you can
| find in that medium is to pander to self-selected stupid people,
| outflanking Fox and Newsmax somehow. It seems that Licht has done
| a lot of damage to the organization, but it was flying into a
| mountainside regardless.
| HybridCurve wrote:
| The Atlantic is well known for lengthy articles. Every issue is
| a non-stop literary marathon of information.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I once attempted to read The Atlantic's contemporary review
| of "On the Origin of Species" by Asa Gray, and I didn't stand
| a chance. I agree with you that the modern version is known
| for lengthy articles, but it's got nothing on its older
| incarnation.
| berkeleyjunk wrote:
| from the _July 1860_ issue. Wow, started reading it and I
| was hooked. Thank you for pointing out this gem.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Looking at it again, it's not _that_ long, but yes, it 's
| a cool look into highbrow journalism from a time long
| gone by, and nice of The Atlantic to expose a bit of
| their archives online.
| Balgair wrote:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darw
| in-...
| tptacek wrote:
| This piece took months. Staff writers at The Atlantic might
| write shorter pieces on a monthly cadence, or they might take
| half a year to write something really big. As my sibling
| comment notes, The Atlantic is a bastion of literary/narrative
| journalism.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230603191055/https://www.theat...
| TrueGeek wrote:
| That one didn't work for me, here is another:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...
| tptacek wrote:
| There is no way for CNN to win. Unless it's somehow a loss leader
| for its parent company, there's really no reason for it to exist.
| You can't make the news a compelling 24/7 product without turning
| into toxic partisan entertainment, a lesson Fox News learned
| early and MSNBC has successfully followed on with. There just
| isn't enough interesting news! There's no opportunity for a
| "centrist" cable news network, because what drives the constant
| attention is appeals to partisan agitation.
|
| Fox News has about 1.5MM viewers, MSNBC close behind with ~1.2MM.
| CNN has 500k. Two things to note about those numbers: even for
| Fox, they're infinitesimal (Game of Thrones, which is premium
| cable content, averaged almost 30x more; the NYT has almost 10x
| more subscribers, there are more subscribers to The Atlantic
| Monthly, where this article ran, than reliable CNN watchers, &c).
| And, if you scope it down to the demographic ("under 54"), it's
| even bleaker: all the cable networks have a little over 100k
| viewers.
|
| This is not a good product. Steven Colbert was right to warn
| Chris Licht off of taking this position.
|
| Tim Alberta is an excellent writer, by the way; it's worth
| seeking out things he's written.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| TV is a losing value proposition in general. It's a race to the
| bottom. Top programs from each of these are getting less
| viewers than online content from e.g. Youtube or other places.
| Lots of youtube channels reaching millions of people with each
| video.
|
| The thing is that most things worth reporting are distributed
| widely via internet based sources. The half life of any
| exclusive news is basically minutes. After that, world + dog is
| reporting it. So, none of these channels ever have much in
| terms of exclusivity and in fact they rely heavily on online as
| well for getting their news in the first place. Anyone who
| cares already knows long before CNN bother to report inbetween
| commercials, the weather, more commercials, and some fake
| toothpaste smile nobody yapping on for ten minutes about god
| knows what interrupted by some reporter reporting absolutely
| nothing whatsoever happened since the last time they reported
| the same 40 minutes ago. If you strip away all the filler
| content on CNN, you have about 2 minutes worth of content per
| hour. The signal to noise ratio is terrible. Unacceptably low
| for anyone actually interested in news.
| brandon272 wrote:
| > There just isn't enough interesting news!
|
| There are interesting things happening in the world every day.
| Back in the days when I liked and watched CNN (i.e. 25 years
| ago) they would actually report on things happening in local
| communities around the country and would have stories and
| footage from local news organizations and affiliates. The
| "Breaking News" banner was actually (for the most part)
| reserved for things of importance.
|
| One of the biggest problems with CNN in its current form is
| that it's simply boring. You can tune in for 5 minutes and
| learn pretty quickly what they are going to be talking about
| all day. What's amazing is their ability to take a single
| headline and milk it on repeat for 72 hours.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Sure, but all those local, interesting stories are far better
| told on the web than on TV, which is the real problem -
| people under 50 think of TV as a place for entertainment, not
| information.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Yeah but investigative journalism is expensive. A few talking
| heads and glorified zoom calls to comment on news someone
| else investigated is much cheaper.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| There is plenty of news, if you consider positive or mundane
| happenings in the world. I remember our old local TV station
| would report things like park openings, local fairs, the high
| school football game etc. Surprisingly, they occasionally
| also managed to do longer segments on things completely
| unrelated to the local news. For example they'd get a local
| university professor to come on and explain the ozone hole
| for 60 mins or do a segment on pan handling scams that were
| supposedly taking over. There was always content, and there
| were always viewers.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| The only hope for "boring news" is a sort of whispering ASMR
| rendition of C-SPAN.
| briffle wrote:
| > because what drives the constant attention is appeals to
| partisan agitation
|
| What drives attention is fear.
|
| The people I care about that watch right wing news are
| terrified that socialism is going to take all their things, and
| force them into a life of poverty.
|
| The people I care about that watch left wing news are terrified
| the facists are going to come and force them to have babies go
| to church, and work for peasant wages.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "You can't make the news a compelling 24/7 product without
| turning into toxic partisan entertainment, "
|
| True. There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill
| 24/7.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.
|
| Sure there is. There is so much news for one day that it's
| impossible to get it all. If 8 billion people are awake for
| 10 hours each day. You have 80 billion hours of people's
| experiences to compresses into only 24 hours.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're getting hung up on semantics. The parent comment said
| "real stuff". I said "interesting news". People took issue
| with both terms. But that's fine: substitute whichever term
| you'd like for content sufficiently attractive to make CNN
| competitive. The strategy Fox and MSNBC use to accomplish
| this --- and, again, bear in mind that their audiences are
| relatively pathetic, even when they're successful! --- is
| obvious: turning the news into a sporting event. The NYT
| uses another strategy: they're a broader entertainment
| platform, not solely reliant on the news, and have a
| significant cohort of subscribers who don't even care about
| the news. But CNN can't really do that, either.
| Solvency wrote:
| There is an ungodly amount of editorial content that
| could be done on every single corporate/government
| scandal, collusion, bribery, corruption, you name it --
| which happens on a 24/7 basis. You could fill a month
| with the food industry alone. Let alone chemical
| companies.
|
| There is a mindboggling amount of shit that is completely
| and utterly ignored, or suppressed, or normalized as
| "business as usual".
|
| But it's not profitable for a CNN to report on this, not
| because they wouldn't get eyeballs and viewers, but
| because the tightly enmeshed corporate stakeholders of
| the world in and around the infotainment sector wouldn't
| want it to happen.
| tptacek wrote:
| I do a lot of local political stuff, and am acquainted
| with people doing serious local political corruption and
| mismanagement and scandal journalism, and I think you'd
| be surprised how small the audience is for that stuff.
| CNN isn't avoiding this stuff because they're part of a
| conspiracy to suppress the truth; they're avoiding it
| because it's ratings death. Which is what you're saying!
| But they're a business, not a public service, so that's
| the end of the story.
| kcplate wrote:
| How about "real, interesting stuff that appeals to more
| than 2 people".
| charcircuit wrote:
| With skilled enough story telling a writer can make
| almost anything appeal to a mass audience.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Funny. There used to be, back when CNN was a news network...
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| To be fair, CNN's heyday was mostly centered around the
| major international crises between the end of the Cold War
| ("the end of history") and major uptake of the internet.
| Similar events would be treated as a "slow news day" today,
| because the audience only cares about international news
| when it suits them. Their major domestic coverage of the LA
| riots would set better precedent for a US audience, except
| everyone is either inured to the exaggeration of non-news
| to that proportion or acutely aware that news of that
| proportion like mass violence is barely reported at all.
| blihp wrote:
| Even then, not really. Most of the time they had 4-6 hours
| of actual programming that they just repeated.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is what I remember. They had basically an hourly
| rotation of segments, and every once in a while they
| would update them. But if you had watched for 2 hours,
| there was a pretty good chance that a lot of the second
| hour was completely repeated.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm skeptical. The "C" in CNN is sort of the giveaway that
| there was never really any legitimacy there.
|
| Am I picking on cable as a whole, suggesting it was always
| a profit-driven entity that runs counter to level-headed
| news reporting? I guess I am.
|
| And I'll defend the "big three" networks that existed
| before cable because news was only a small portion of their
| broadcast schedule. I don't think the networks objected to
| Walter Cronkite (etc.) being the loss-leading face to
| represent their corporate integrity.
| tptacek wrote:
| Did there used to be? Or did CNN function more like a
| utility, something between what it is now and the Weather
| Channel, which is how I remember it? Because it's not that
| you can't stand up The Weather Channel But For News; it's
| that you can't compete with Fox and MSNBC doing that.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Nah, same amount of news, way less competition for eyeballs
| back then. CNN had its best commercial times when the
| Internet was still very small.
|
| For years, if something important happened in the middle of
| the day, CNN was kind of it, in terms of finding out what
| was going on quickly. If it was REALLY big, the networks
| might break into their daytime programming, but that was a
| very high bar.
| bsder wrote:
| > There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill
| 24/7.
|
| There isn't enough _CHEAP_ stuff to report to fill 24 /7 that
| isn't toxic partisan garbage.
|
| There is _plenty_ of "real" news. But it takes _real_ money
| to go dig it up and put it together.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >There just isn't enough interesting news!
|
| There isn't enough _sensationlist_ news, you mean. There are
| plenty of, arguably bordering on the infinite, _interesting_
| goings-on in the world around us.
|
| The problem for journalism and why it was replaced with
| "journalism" has always been that journalism costs money, you
| need customers to make money (or else rely on the state, a la
| BBC, NHK, etc.), and the most effective way to get customers
| has always been to sensationalize.
|
| Merely being interesting doesn't make enough money for
| journalism to pay for itself, let alone return a profit, thus
| we have "journalism" and its endless spewing of sensationalism.
| tptacek wrote:
| Select whichever words best describe the challenge of getting
| a million people to watch cable news --- or, really, any news
| show for more than 30 minutes. That's how much time Walter
| Cronkite had, and he had roughly 30 million viewers.
| pdonis wrote:
| Walter Cronkite only had to keep viewers interested for a 1
| hour news show each day, not 24/7. The network his show ran
| on spent most of its time airing things that were _not_
| news. CNN is trying to run news 24 /7, and of course it's
| failing to keep people interested given that.
|
| Also, Walter Cronkite had only two other major networks to
| compete with. CNN has to compete with however many cable
| channels there are _plus_ the entire Internet. I 'm not
| sure even Cronkite could have kept 30 million viewers in
| today's environment.
| tptacek wrote:
| The CBS Evening News was only 30 minutes long when
| Cronkite anchored it. :) We basically agree, though.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The CBS Evening News was only 30 minutes long when
| Cronkite anchored it._
|
| Hm, yes, I'd forgotten that.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > The problem for journalism and why it was replaced with
| "journalism" has always been that journalism costs money, you
| need customers to make money
|
| That's part of it certainly, but it's also driven by the need
| for neverending growth. It's not enough to just be making
| enough to be solidly in the black, the networks are pressured
| to always being pulling record profits.
|
| It's completely unrealistic, but that's the expectation
| regardless.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That seems a secondary or tertiary issue. If they can't
| even break even then there's no point blaming profit
| targets.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn 't enough sensationlist news, you mean. There are
| plenty of, arguably bordering on the infinite, interesting
| goings-on in the world around us_
|
| I don't think unsensational is a fit for TV news. Maybe I'm
| wrong. But as someone who likes that stuff, I tend to get my
| news through text.
| ajross wrote:
| > There's no opportunity for a "centrist" cable news network
|
| Worth pointing out that the actual scoop in this article is
| that Licht deliberately put his hands on the scales to tilt
| coverage toward Trump, even to the extent of personally
| suppressing coverage of the one-day-old sexual abuse verdict.
|
| Whether or not there's a market for "centrist" news or not,
| that's not centrist news.
| albertopv wrote:
| 500k viewers is a low number even for a smaller country like
| Italy, let alone USA, if it wasn't for cable fees, how could
| they survive?
| tracker1 wrote:
| In the US, news and reporting was largely a loss leader for
| TV stations. It was done because they were required to do so.
| The likes of 60-minutes long format content changed that when
| it was successful for advertising. This shaped news for the
| worse imo. I think CNN largely started in a similar way,
| meant to simply be constant reporting and re-reporting of
| news, and think the constant display of the Gulf War is
| likely what changed that for them.
| tchaffee wrote:
| There is plenty of news to report 24/7. There are actual wars
| taking place that the average person is totally unaware of. As
| far as whether or not it's interesting, you need to make it
| seem relevant to the life of the average person. That's a
| challenge but not an insurmountable one.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Am I misreading that they reported hundreds of millions of
| dollars of profit in 2022?
|
| Like I agree that cable news seems to be a declining business
| with bad programming incentives, but if I had to choose between
| something like the profits from a nice restaurant that people
| widely appreciated and hundreds of millions of dollars from
| CNN, I'd have an easy time of it.
| tptacek wrote:
| They make money a bunch of different ways, and one big one is
| advertising, but don't forget that a pretty significant chunk
| of their revenue (and Fox's) is carriage fees: money they get
| mechanically from cable providers, just for existing.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _There just isn 't enough interesting news! There's no
| opportunity for a "centrist" cable news network, because what
| drives the constant attention is appeals to partisan
| agitation._
|
| Isn't there some sort of contradiction here? There is WAY more
| that needs to be discussed than is being discussed.
| [deleted]
| pc86 wrote:
| You're conflating "needs to be discussed" with "interesting."
|
| C-SPAN has tons of content around things that need to be
| discussed. Few outside policy wonks, poli sci students, and
| those in recovery from one of the former would consider it
| "interesting."
| thevagrant wrote:
| I always thought netflix would have best fit owning a news
| channel that just focused on reporting facts, events, without
| spin, as they happen. Due to sheer subscriber numbers, if the
| news channel had advertisements, it'd have a good chance at
| large viewership to bring in profit.
| [deleted]
| scarface_74 wrote:
| When half the country believes the "election was stolen",
| there is no agreement in facts.
|
| Even on HN, there was an argument about something as sensible
| as "kids in preschool were a major cause of the spread of
| Covid", while parents have known from time immemorial that
| kids in preschool were walking Petri dishes for every
| communicable disease imaginable.
|
| The above statement is very much common sense. Now the
| opinion should come in about what should have been done about
| that fact.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| [flagged]
| scarface_74 wrote:
| From your link
|
| Clinton: "I take responsible for the parts that I
| should".
|
| Has Trump ever taken any responsibility for his loss?
| ssharp wrote:
| I doubt the real number believing that is half the public,
| or even half the voting public. Certainly a fair number,
| maybe not the majority, but at least a sizable chunk, of
| Republicans don't believe the stolen election theories.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/repu
| bli...
| spacemadness wrote:
| All I have is gut feel, but I agree. If half the public
| truly believed the election was rigged, then we're a
| pathetic lot for not being out in the streets daily
| raising hell in protest. People just say it without
| believing it. The Jan 6th folks believed it, but there
| has been nothing since.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Isn't that more or less what happened in 2000, with
| little to show for it? It all coming down to a confusing
| ballot in a state run by one of the candidate's
| brother's, the recounts were ordered stopped, and later
| analysis showed full recounts would actually have given
| Gore the state & presidency.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There is no equivalence. They had recounts in multiple
| states before the election was decided and each case,
| Biden won by more votes - including my former home state
| GA where there was a Republican governor and a Republican
| Secretary of State that stood up to the foolishness.
| There were no mass protest and certainly no invasion of
| the Capital.
|
| Gore didn't spend years complaining. He ceded the
| election and moved on.
| krapp wrote:
| "Half the country" is what Trump supporters claim the
| size of their membership is. It's propaganda based on a
| purposeful misrepresentation of the fact that about about
| half of the public who voted in 2016 voted for Trump.
| They like to use it when making veiled neo-revolutionary
| threats against "the left" or "city dwellers" or whatever
| group they feel doesn't show them enough respect at that
| moment, or to overstate the legitimacy and influence of
| their movement within the public at large.
|
| At some point, "half the country" simply evolved within
| common parlance into shorthand for Trumpists and
| Republicans in general. An unfortunate side effect of
| this is that it's also useful among the left, who should
| know better, when used unironically to make Trumpism into
| a bigger monster than it is.
|
| Of course, nowhere near half the country even voted at
| all, and of those who voted, a slightly _bigger_ half
| voted for Hillary Clinton. But Trumpism demonstrates that
| minority movements can still have influence when they
| grab power, even if they can 't really claim a mandate.
| That a significant fraction of Republicans either believe
| the election was stolen or believe _claiming such_ is
| necessary to maintain power is still troubling.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This is what the polls say about who believed the
| "election was stolen".
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/repu
| bli...
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| What social media has painfully exposed is the level of
| gullibility within all societies globally. And political
| opportunism has been utilizing this to bad ends.
|
| "Classic Media" today, is busy pushing the narratives of
| whacky billionaires/corporations as a general
| undercurrent.
|
| 1) Work in the office is better than remote.
|
| 2) National healthcare can't work in the US, only in
| every other industrialized nation.
|
| 3) wealthy people are geniuses & you should read the
| books they read and listen to them about everything.
|
| 4) progressives are evil, conservatives are evil.
|
| 5) Ignore the military industrial complex, keep feeding
| the military budget.
|
| 6) homelessness can't be solved.
|
| 7) Support the Troops! But once they are veterans ignore
| them to the bureaucracy of the hellhole of veterans
| affairs.
|
| 8) Authoritarianism in government is alarming but there
| is nothing to be done.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even then, it's also down to the interpretation of
| "stolen" ... does a "cabal" of journalists and
| technologists working to "defend the election" by shaping
| the news and opinion stories that get spread vs stopped
| count? Does changing election practice in violation of a
| state's constitution count?
|
| It's also worth considering it isn't even just one side,
| in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was
| stolen from her.
|
| Note: I was working for an election services company over
| the 2020 election cycle and saw coworkers and even myself
| seeing death threats. I still think there were a lot of
| at least suspicious things across the country. In the
| end, the lack of trust in media/news and the government
| is pretty well deserved all around.
| hinkley wrote:
| If the election really was stolen they seem pretty docile
| about it. It was posturing. That's more consistent with the
| evidence.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Aside from storming the Capital, intending to beat &
| murder politicians they don't like, smearing feces on the
| walls and parading confederate flags through it, and
| general white rage, you mean?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >If the election really was stolen they seem pretty
| docile about it.
|
| Has January 6th already slipped from your mind? Aside
| from that it's strange to suggest we should ignore what
| people said, consistently, for years.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know how they saw themselves on Jan 5, but
| afterward they've acted like a bunch of teenagers who
| threw a tantrum and now want to be indulged for a
| misunderstanding (leniency).
|
| As serious as the charges are, I think we should honor
| their desires because it belittles the entire pack of
| idiots.
|
| People doing serious jail time for something that was so
| stupid, it deflated them.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Do you mean they acted like a BLM mostly-peaceful
| conflagration "protest" except they didn't pick a
| designer sunglass store clean, torch 50,000 to 70,000
| private and public vehicles, loot and burn 100,000+
| businesses, murder 25 people, throw nailbombs at federal
| court houses, claim a 2x1 block as a "autonomous zone,"
| beat up kids for wearing red hats, and ultimately doing
| $2,000,000,000 in damage over a 7 months long campaign of
| domestic terrorism?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So how do you think the response would have been if a
| bunch of black folks invaded the capital or an armed
| group of Black men were in the state capital in Michigan
| causing them to postpone their session?
| [deleted]
| HaroldBolt78 wrote:
| [flagged]
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Calls to hang the vice president of the united states are
| docile? People trying to hunt down specific members of
| congress docile? Breaking down doors docile? You're
| gaslighting hard here. Clearly people believed the false
| claims about the election and were taking action about
| it.
|
| This isn't docile:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| news/jan-6-ri...
| HaroldBolt78 wrote:
| [flagged]
| operatingthetan wrote:
| [flagged]
| HaroldBolt78 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Has January 6th already slipped from your mind
|
| Is there a fairly neutral source on January 6? I can only
| find partisan ones, and the photos and video I saw seem
| very benign. Is there a decent writeup that draws it all
| together?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What's "benign" about trespassing in a government
| building causing lawmakers and the VP to go into hiding?
| krapp wrote:
| Assuming you don't intend to dismiss any source that
| doesn't paint an entirely benign image as being partisan,
| there is the Wikipedia page[0]. Of course, it's easy to
| find plenty of non-benign images and video from the
| event, it's odd that you've apparently never encountered
| them.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_
| Capito...
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > When half the country believes the "election was stolen",
| there is no agreement in facts.
|
| At one time or another, it's been far more than half. Trump
| "losing the popular vote" was daily news on left-leaning
| sites. From Hillary Clinton:
|
| > Trump "knows he's an illegitimate president," Clinton
| said. "I believe he understands that the many varying
| tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging
| to hacking to the false stories -- he knows that -- there
| were just a bunch of different reasons why the election
| turned out like it did ... I know he knows this wasn't on
| the level."
|
| And Russian interference comments, e.g. these from Jimmy
| Carter:
|
| > In June 2019, Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic
| president, said, "There's no doubt that the Russians did
| interfere in the election, and I think the interference,
| although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would
| show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016.
| He lost the election, and he was put into office because
| the Russians interfered on his behalf."
|
| In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats thought
| Russians got Donald Trump elected, which is about the same
| as the number of Republicans[1] who think that the Twitter
| files etc contributed to Joe Biden winning.
|
| All in all, most of the US can be convinced that a fraud
| happened, split equally along party lines.
|
| [0] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politic
| s/gen... [2] https://www.poynter.org/fact-
| checking/2022/70-percent-republ...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > At one time or another, it's been far more than half.
| Trump "losing the popular vote" was daily news on left-
| leaning sites. From Hillary Clinton:
|
| This was a fact. No one claimed that he lost the
| electoral vote and no one claimed that he didn't win
| based on the rules.
|
| > In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats
| thought Russians got Donald Trump elected
|
| It is a fact that Russia interfered in the election and
| that they were responsible for hacking and leaking the
| Democrats private messages. It is also a fact that people
| close to Trump were convicted about lying about their
| communication with Russia. The opinion part comes in
| about whether it resulted in Trumps winning.
|
| I'm also not clutching my pearls. I know that the US has
| a history of interfering with (small d) democratic
| elections across the world.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous non-
| partisan news. Yes, I understand every news publisher has their
| editorial discretion. The problem with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox is
| that they are American news. There is only so much American
| news at the national level to report. France 24 supplements its
| news content with a tremendous amount of content from Africa
| and other sources internationally. Al Jazeera is more focused
| on the Middle East than France 24 but is otherwise a more bit
| balanced with its content as far as geographic source but is
| also extremely international.
|
| In other words the way out of partisan stupidity is to increase
| the diversity of material published. There is plenty of news to
| report on.
| micwag wrote:
| > France 24 and Al Jazeera manage to do well with continuous
| non-partisan news.
|
| Al Jazeera English might be somewhat non-partisan, but Al
| Jazeera Arabic is stupendously partisan.
| tyingq wrote:
| I like Al Jazeera a lot, but it pretty clearly has it's own
| slant for many topics. I even like Sky News, despite the
| obvious right leaning which doesn't match my personal
| politics...because for example, their military analysts that
| report on Ukraine seem knowledgeable and insightful.
|
| Basically saying I'm fine with the non-neutral reporting,
| provided it's obvious enough for me to compensate mentally
| with. And more importantly, that there's high quality content
| despite any slant.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Have to agree to that second point... I'm perfectly fine
| with bias, as long as it's obvious, clear and the reporting
| is relatively complete and accurate, even if I don't agree
| with the conclusions or opinion in the end.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| What blows my mind as a Kiwi is how news channels in the US are
| 2 minutes of a news item, 15 minutes of talking heads
| discussing how you should feel about that news.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| So much this: _There just isn 't enough interesting news!_
|
| 24 hour news was "born" in the Gulf War I and the need to fill
| every minute with something compelling so that people won't
| turn it off is just to strong.
|
| I really do think that a streaming news channel/app where
| current stories are just updated when they have new information
| could be a win here.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| There just isn't enough interesting news _once you have ruled
| out reporting on stories that threaten advertisers_.
| akomtu wrote:
| Indeed, CNN could talk non-stop about icebergs of plastic
| trash everywhere in the world and Coca-Cola factories that
| produce this plastic 24/7, but guess who buys ads banners on
| CNN.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The closest you can get, I think, is to position yourself as
| what works as an inoffensive, neutral, background option for
| always-on TVs (the cable news version of USA Today, basically).
| You can probably be (barely) profitable with such a model, but
| you're really going to have settle yourself with having no
| growth potential.
|
| > Game of Thrones, which is premium cable content, averaged
| almost 30x more
|
| To be fair, I'm pretty sure that Game of Thrones is the most-
| viewed premium cable content in history.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| The neutral background offerings I've encountered in the last
| few years are: HGTV, food channel, CNBC/fox business, and,
| strangely often: the Conan interview where Rob McIlhenny
| talks about getting buff.
|
| In a dentist, car showroom, or airport, it's a real risk to
| show the news. House hunters or guy fieri are way more
| neutral
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think a News App like CNN+ could have worked if it were ad
| supported, and otherwise "free" ... let people catch the
| stories they want, when they want... get 3-4 hours of good
| content a day and let that carry things.
|
| I happen to like Breaking Points a lot in this regard. You are
| absolutely right in that 24/7 news really doesn't work and in
| general causes more harm than good imo.
|
| In the end, it just gets to a point where it's a toxic bubble
| that too many are willing to parrot. That doesn't even get into
| the distorted ad spend that does happen, and what it does to
| reporting. Not to mention the revolving doors between state
| propagandists and news commentators.
| ruralthinker wrote:
| I was wondering how Chris Licht was hired to be a CEO without
| any CEO experience. He was running Colbert Show, yes, it is a
| successful show, but being a CEO of an organization is a
| different ball game.
|
| A team lead can't get a Software Engineering Manager interview
| at Amazon because of the lack of people management experience,
| here we have a guy with no experience running a company as a
| CEO, it is not a surprise he flopped.
| smegsicle wrote:
| funny they mention wwe- i don't think cnn (or the atlantic) even
| exists in the wwe universe
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I do use CNN.com as my go-to to get the angle from the
| intelligence community.
| infamouscow wrote:
| CNN is the CIA News Network.
|
| CBS is the CIA Broadcasting System.
|
| Edit: apparently, people lack counters to the obvious snub at
| Operation Mockingbird and the repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act.
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