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Reading too much negative anything is bad for the psyche. It just so happens that the MSM is full-on TDS and they can't seem to let go. Trump is the blackhole for MSM, everything is somehow connected to "Orange Man Bad".

Moreover, the Washington Post reported that 90% of Trump's coverage is negative [1].

Do you know anyone that is 90% terrible? I doubt it. Taking a step back from one's political views, which is hard for a lot of people, it becomes obvious that there's little honest and unbiased reporting going on within MSM.

Sure it's fine to read information with a particular viewpoint (be it conservative or liberal), as long as the reader is made aware that the "facts" are framed from a particular viewpoint. Otherwise it's just brainwashing and intellectually dishonest. I think any rational person can get behind this sort of "zero-trust framework".

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/15/a-broadcast...



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Reading too much negative anything is bad for the psyche. It just so happens that the MSM is full-on TDS and they can't seem to let go. Trump is the blackhole for MSM, everything is somehow connected to "Orange Man Bad". Moreover, the Washington Post reported that 90% of Trump's coverage is negative [1].

Do you know anyone that is 90% terrible? I doubt it. Taking a step back from one's political views, which is hard for a lot of people, it becomes obvious that there's little honest and unbiased reporting going on within MSM.

Sure it's fine to read information with a particular viewpoint (be it conservative or liberal), as long as the reader is made aware that the "facts" are framed from a particular viewpoint. Otherwise it's just brainwashing and intellectually dishonest. I think any rational person can get behind this sort of "zero-trust framework".

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/15/a-broadcast...


Very strange that an unusually terrible politician would have an unusual number of negative articles written about him, isn't it? Clearly this is bias in action. Many people don't realize that everyone has exactly the same moral standing, and that any indication to the contrary is not to be trusted.

Thank goodness we have the catchphrases "Orange Man Bad" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to safely allow us to ignore any and all criticism of the president. This certainly helps assuage any cognitive dissonance, which as we all know is a leftist plot.

Do make sure to read this extremely informative article from the eminently neutral Washington Times (here misidentified as the Washington Post, in what was surely an honest mistake) and while doing so keep in mind, that all politicians have a god-given right to exactly 50% positive coverage. This is as true for Trump as it is for Maduro, who as you know we laud precisely as much as we denigrate.

Just remember, anyone telling you that Donald Trump is going to reject any non-landslide loss and claim tens of millions of fraudulent votes without a shred of evidence, merely because he's told us this with his mouth, is clearly suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, their brain fried by a surfeit of orangeness.


"The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious."

After Trump won, story after story, show after show in the MSM and beyond was about reaching out and talking to the Trump voters. Famously left-wing people went out to speak with Trump voters to get to know them, to understand why they voted, and made sure to humanize them. They went out of their way to not be negative. This went on for a long time.

This was on CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, and other MSM outlets.

The flaw in this article is reading only the negative headlines, and ignoring all the reporting that is done.


My grandmother is currently watching MSNBC, which is constant Trump bashing, and she quite enjoys it. The New York Times most read almost always includes negative stories about Trump.

I suspect the "problem" is just that people enjoy reading these negative articles. Google is trying to point people to what they're likely to click on.


Is there a reason most of the MSM attacks Trump's credibility on a daily basis?

The reasons are ratings and political ideology. They know that a lot of people hate Trump so they attack him. Any evidence of wrongdoing on Trump's part is merely a happy extra for the MSM.

If Obama did the same things that Trump does, do you think the MSM would behave the same way?

The MSM have cried wolf so many times that now half the country will not listen if they actually find something solid against Trump.

Whatever your position on Trump, it's hard to think of the MSM as being driven by actual journalism. And that's a real shame for the small number of journalists in the MSM who actually have integrity.


The conversation wasn't about the MSM, but still...

> Nearly 100% of the mainstream media was against the person who ended up being elected.

Including Fox News and other right-leaning news outlets? I would suspect that for people who voted for Trump their news content was close to 100% in support of him, with negative news and polling basically either ignored, minimised or re-framed as being another sign of "the elites" being contemptuous and/or scared of Trump and by extension his supporters.

Why would you assume that people are consuming political news they don't like when every indication is that they don't? You even say this yourself later on in the post:

> Instead people who are partisan focus exclusively on one side and simply pretend the other does not exist.

When you consume content that is unabashedly partisan in nature you are far less likely to subject it to any kind of critical analysis, and even small amounts of reinforcement from other sources you align with can give enough credibility to establish a particular "fact". See pizzagate or the Q-anon conspiracy theories for instance.


As someone who vehemently opposes Trump, I feel that allegations of anti-Trump bias in the mainstream media were entirely correct and somewhat to be expected. Although Trump is certainly a name that sells papers, Trump's repeated threats to open up news media to broader libel laws were not well received. The news organizations' endorsements were pretty one-sided[0]. I don't want to take you too literally, but it seems to me pretty obvious that a model ignoring the MSM entirely would not be preferable to one that took into account the MSM opinions and then applied a correctional factor. I'm sure we agree that truth is a function of our means for determining truth, but I suspect we disagree strongly on the reliability of Internet news sources.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...


Exactly who else is going to cover the % of negative media coverage on Trump, in your mind, other than a "right wing" source?

"Funnily enough, the over-coverage of Trump by the media actually gave him an edge when it came to the election. Despite the fact that negative news on Trump were the norm, they only gave Trump more publicity. A prime example that, the lower the media sinks, the more it backfires on them."

THAT is the only part of the article that rings true. Trump deserves all the negative media coverage in the world, but the media's lack of tact and professionalism ends up helping him and reinforcing his narrative.


Even NPR admits the coverage was more negative. And no, not more negative because he was worse, more negative in an unfair way: https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage...

To be clear, you're saying you're unaware of any news media which says only positive things about Trump?

That seems implausible.


NYT can't go a single, off-topic article without crap-smearing Trump. When a media outlet covers a person 100% negatively, at what point does its readership begin to realize there may be a conflict of interest? Or does the collective cognitive dissonance take care of that all by itself?

They don’t seem to apply this rigor to stories that are engineered to make the orange one look bad... the NYT “anonymous” piece, the hit job re: Trumps taxes, dishonest articles about border separations (who built the cages?), etc., etc. it’s become clear that the media is absolutely biased to the core. This coming from a 2x Obama voter.

The problem I see is that unless these organisations are beyond criticism they can always be accused of bias and all their work dismissed, and then consider the context:

'It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon the president in the media. Comics and actors use their non-political programs to attack him, often to the implicit applause of the press. Virtually all coverage outside the conservative Fox News and isolated conservative outlets is negative, often couched in highly hostile terms. Virtually all of the columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, America’s two most respected dailies, despise Trump – and that includes nearly all of the conservative, libertarian and Republican columnists too. Trump supporters who follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity. This has, predictably, hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters.'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/libera...


Your evidence doesn't address the statement you are apparently refuting. It only shows that, A. There are a lot of negative Trump stories, which would make sense for a neutral platform, and B. They use unprofessional tone in their headlines, which is certainly a reasonable thing to criticize.

Are you talking about this[1] study? Because it doesn't say that the media is "left-leaning". Rather, it says that their coverage of Trump has been more negative than positive (in the first 100 days, the period the study examines). Rather than the result of bias, it could simply be that he's done a bunch of obviously-bad things. Which one can certainly argue.

Another point: the article points out that, despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage, most of the time, they're using his own voice:

What’s truly atypical about Trump’s coverage is that it’s sharply negative despite the fact that he’s the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because they’re not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam.[31] So why is Trump’s coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, he’s been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad.

[1] https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...


Ahh yes, every bit of news reporting that doesn't show the Democrats in the worst possible light, and Trump in the best possible light, is the result of "media bias", facts be damned.

The constant whining by Trump and his supporters over "the media is so mean to me" has long since passed Chicken Little proportions.


Well, check out basically any news source besides Fox, which I don't care for either, and tell me how I'm wrong. I'm not a Trump supporter, but MSM has become identical to Facebook news feed. It's popular opinions dressed up as news. I don't feel like it's informing me of much.

They're not going to get much traction with the Fake News narrative if they don't enact some real change on their part. If I'm wrong and there's a news source out there that isn't comprised of this, I'd appreciate you guys pointing me to it.


That's based on a flawed notion of balance, the idea that news media should publish equal amounts of "negative and scandalizing news".

It's flawed in that it assumes that equal amounts of such information exist. When Trump shoots some grandmother in the face, people expect equal prominence for "Hillary came to my house and left the bathroom light on".

Parts of the news media have been bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of partisanship, which gave us the endless faux-scandal regarding her mailserver.

The same principle leads to news media sometimes creating the impression that global warming is some sort of scientific debate, because they feel the need to give equal billing to the doubters while reality is 99-1 lopsided.

Trump may actually have a positive impact in the end, in that he may stretch the concept until it breaks. Indeed we can see it breaking down in the last few weeks with, for example, newspapers publishing harsh editorials and endorsements against him whereas they remained quite in previous elections.

If the current trend could continue for another six months, we'd see every article in every newspaper end with "cetero censeo Trump delende est"

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