I mainly want to point people to Daily Kos’ “The media has failed this nation“. Frank Vyan Walton covers most of what I’d say. He likely has a broader perspective because the majority of the news I watch is hyper-partisan Fox News which is nothing more than a news format for right-wing blog and radio content their executive suite view as marketable to a broader, more mainstream conservative audience.
As Fox News has grown into an unwatchable Donald Trump infomercial when it isn’t trying to destroy Hillary Clinton, I switched over the CNN. CNN is bending over backwards to look fair. Okay, that sounds terrific. Who wants biased coverage? However, at some point the purpose of a news network is to report the news and any analysis must be based on expert research, not partisan opinion.
…Fox News which is nothing more than a news format for right-wing blog and radio content their executive suite view as marketable to a broader, more mainstream conservative audience.
What CNN defines as fairness typically is gathering pundits, politicians, and campaign surrogates onto panels where important topics rarely are discussed long enough to get beyond shallow talking points which viewers hear repeated over and over again. Nothing is learn. Mud and dubious factoids are tossed back and forth. Infotainment.
Can we please depend more on in-depth expert, non-partisan analysis? What do we really understand of the candidate’s policies on health care, the economy, climate change, national defense, etc.? I’m not saying these topics are never discussed on CNN but the overwhelming emphasis I’ve picked up watching many hours of their Election 2016 coverage is the sizzle of the horse race, not the steak of actual policies.
Worse, CNN doesn’t seem to me to be just reporting on the horse race. It’s pretty clear CNN wants the horse race to be as close as possible. So we are bombarded with endless false equivalencies and imbalance in critical analysis to make it look like there’s no difference, say, in the honesty of Hillary versus Donald. Yet, a fact check comparison by PolitiFact proves Trump is by far the worse liar.
Is it any surprise in the absence of quality Election 2016 information and an avalanche of poorly fact checked partisan claims, conspiracy theories, speculation, and over-hyped scandal voters are frustrated and angry to the point most have a very poor opinion of both major party candidates and have an even lower opinion or our media?
