General Chit-Chat Thread: A New Beginning

[Barry Poppins]

Before the 1980s, mainstream media was required to be facts based and bipartisan in their presentation.

 

[Chris]

Before the 1980s, mainstream media was required to be facts based and bipartisan in their presentation.

for a small few decades, it was absolute shit before the 1930s or so, may have the timeline wrong there tho

 

[Barry Poppins]

You would never in a million years accuse someone like Walter Cronkite of being one way or the other

 

[Chris]

But my point is even when yellow journalism was at its worst on the 1800s, the general public wouldn't outright dismiss opposing views bc they were still all grounded in a reality where the facts they were given were true (even if they weren't) and you just have to have an opinion on them

 

[Chris]

You would never in a million years accuse someone like Walter Cronkite of being one way or the other

but they did and that was a miscalculation they made and is a big reason why the public turned against Vietnam. Not bc of his reporting fully, but he the government tried to say it wasn't good reporting and they loved Walter

 

[Chris]

This era of calling everything fake news and having to question the source every time you hear someone talk about news is very new. I don't even think that skepticism is the bad part, I think humans just can't handle having to question things and it makes them mad. We very much just want to be told "this is the good news, just listen to it"

 

[Chris]

And that has nothing to do with the news being good or bad. On both scenarios, it would probably be okay if we had good news and terrible with bad news

 

[Shane]

Fox News isn’t even real at this point. They blatantly will attack anything a democrat says or does while praising Trump to the gills, not holding him accountable for anything, AND making excuses when he does to bad shit. What happened to no bias in the media?

 

[Chris]

Well Reagan happened with that law that was overturned in 85 or so that Grim mentioned. Then they saw the vacuum and now they are the highest rated news station on the country

 

[Chris]

Having the most viewers means they do their job the best right?

 

[O-Blaze]

Some would say so

 

[Shane]

Yep that is how it works

 

[Hoss]

not really, for good or bad, people trusted mainstream news until the last 30 or so years, maybe around Vietnam. That provided everyone with a shared reality to debate points about, now we live in individual realities where we don't have to debate, we can just dismiss. Obviously the reason it changed is because the news was lying so it's a messy situation to begin with

And that's not even to delve into the rise in esoteric or really just magical thought, which could be okay, if it didn't just allow the most dangerously unhinged and stubborn people to construct a completely made up reality that can never even be debated because it all just exists in a foggy mishmash of religion/spiritualism and conspiratorial belief

 

[Chris]

Lol yeah a good point I've heard before but got reminded about yesterday was by their very nature, you usually can't "win" arguments against a lot of conspiracy theorists bc they are going to be so much more into the subject than you and twist everything around to what they need it to be

 

[Chris]

Or when Reddit atheism was at its peak annoyance, one of my Christian friends at the time said "you'll never find someone that knows more about the Bible than an internet atheist lmaoooo also very accurate