Koyaanisqatsi
Veteran Member
my point is wtih Obama, coverage of drone strikes was an ongoing thing. Now strikes are accelerated, but it's not even on the mainstream radar. An example supporting Chomsky's argument.
Except that it is most definitely on the mainstream's radar. I just took this screenshot:
Note the different dates and publications as well as the 665,000 number of hits my search generated.
Like I said, it's low hanging fruit, the intellectual equivalent of whataboutism. All anyone has to do is say something along the lines of what you just said, "The mainstream media isn't covering it!" And yet...they are, you're just not paying attention because it's basically impossible to constantly read ten different news sources simultaneously at all times.
Does that mean that the msm is perfect? Far from it. Does it mean that the msm is not essentially/effectively controlled by its conservative ownership? Absolutely not. Any objective check on msm bias will definitely yield an emphasis on right wing/conservative issues, but is that necessarily a result of ownership bias or the fact that the right wing knows better how to manipulate the press? If it bleeds, it ledes. Republicans bleed all over the fucking place constantly.
Plus, it's not binary; it's not either/or. Sometimes there's political bias/influence from the ownership on down; sometimes there's pushback and journalists and editors standing their ground; sometimes there are fuck ups; sometimes there are pulitzer prize winning pieces that turn out to be plagiarized or straight up fiction. As with ALL human institutions, it's a clusterfuck, which simply means that it's every citizen's duty to act as the superior judge and do their homework (find primary sources, always; never re-quoting a reporter's hearsay or interpretation), that kind of thing.
Chomsky used to say something that I found primarily true and insightful, which was that to get the most accurate news in a capitalist/corporatist society like ours, you had to read the papers that the money managers read (i.e., the Wall Street Journal). Well, now the WSJ is owned by Murdoch. So that means, you have to dig deeper (or boot up McLuhan).
The "tl;dr" lulz culture birthed by the interwebz is really what's fucked us all over. It's Syme's dream (Orwell's nightmare) coming true. In the age of information, more forces people to use less and less forces people to abandon depth.
But there is hope. Twitter expanded to 280 characters. So, you know...there's that....
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