And They're Off! The Democratic Candidates for 2020

[drogulus]

You could have two separate people, each representing a mainstream opinion each of left/right.

But inevitably, that would be like a civil war within the network by definition, which always would lead to one side winning out, so it wouldn't be sustainable.

The only way such a thing might be possible is to have the organization run by someone who is politically either moderate or impartial, and employ people that care more about the money they make rather than the message, since who wants to work for someone who will help support the opposing view also?

(I might have just described something much more than just my example scenario...)

     Biased sources of information simply don't present a serious barrier in a country where information flows freely all over the place. It's kind of silly to place such a high value on biases at the same time as you complain about how easy it is to detect them.

     I do like the horsey racy stuff and the combat theater. Sock! Pow!! It's OK to have a little fun.

[SimonNZ]

and its interesting that in the red box "nonsense damaging to public discourse" you see the right wing stuff cited everywhere, but the left wing ones I never see at all, to the point that their names are unknown

[JBS]

and its interesting that in the red box "nonsense damaging to public discourse" you see the right wing stuff cited everywhere, but the left wing ones I never see at all, to the point that their names are unknown

Occupy Democrats gets shared into my Facebook timeline at least once a day, and Palmer Report was retweeted into my Twitter at a similar rate when I was on Twitter.  I don't recognize the other names in that box.
As for the corresponding rightwing box, the Federalist has been nothing more than a Trumpian propaganda outlet for some time and should be there. So should another website, Townhall, that's not shown at all.

[SimonNZ]

Occupy Democrats gets shared into my Facebook timeline at least once a day, and Palmer Report was retweeted into my Twitter at a similar rate when I was on Twitter.  I don't recognize the other names in that box.
As for the corresponding rightwing box, the Federalist has been nothing more than a Trumpian propaganda outlet for some time and should be there. So should another website, Townhall, that's not shown at all.

Interesting. I've seen "Occupy Democrats" on a couple of joke memes, but otherwise nothing. The Palmer Report I've never encountered at all.

[JBS]

Interesting. I've seen "Occupy Democrats" on a couple of joke memes, but otherwise nothing. The Palmer Report I've never encountered at all.

Occupy Democrats seems to generate a lot of antiTrump memes. I am not sure I would call any I have seen jokes.
I haven't seen Palmer Report since I left Twitter, I think. It was retweeted by a GMG member who rarely, if ever, posts in these political threads.

[71 dB]

Newsweek writes:

BERNIE SANDERS 'BEST' ON HEALTH CARE, THE ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT AND IMMIGRATION IN NEW 2020 POLL.

Poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Reuters, November 1-4.

[drogulus]

     Do the far left wing sites do Putin stuff, too? My instinct is that they do, that the far left and right are both supported by the Mystery Caller, even when they don't exactly in so many words support him.

[JBS]

Newsweek writes:

BERNIE SANDERS 'BEST' ON HEALTH CARE, THE ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT AND IMMIGRATION IN NEW 2020 POLL.

Poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Reuters, November 1-4.

Isn't Newsweek corporate media? So aren't they prohibited from publishing anything good about Bernie by their oligarchic overlords?

[greg]

     Biased sources of information simply don't present a serious barrier in a country where information flows freely all over the place.

The sources themselves, no. It's more about individual choice if all viewpoints are present.

Anyways, the original point was a small-team group (like youtube) vs. a large-team group (like network news). I don't think your point really has anything to do with the point I was making.

     It's kind of silly to place such a high value on biases at the same time as you complain about how easy it is to detect them.

What are you even talking about?

[Karl Henning]

I'm in general agreement. You might be interested, though in an episode of a podcast called Against the Rules, which discusses how larger media organisations used to employ fact checkers to basically challenge the journalists internally to make sure stories are accurate, and how this job has been gradually dispensed with.

https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan-experience-s1!d20f3

It's certainly an industry in need of cleaning/truing up

[Karl Henning]

What confounds me and fascinates me are the people I continually run into who confidently gather like-minded fringe news into confident conspiratorial ideologies. Some of them even have the temerity to call themselves "journalists." They're working with facts and I don't dismiss them out of hand - but their questioning I'm-not-a-sucker attitude is often an unquestioning kind of twisted dogma. They're not always wrong but I certainly think they make a mess of reality.
I get annoyed but I also can't look away.

I feel ya.

[drogulus]

What are you even talking about?

     Nothing, it was just an idea I have that you can discriminate among sources based on their record of reliability in their presentations of matters of fact. The higher an organization rates on pure news criteria, the better they tend to be at the analytic level. I discount bias because it's not much of a barrier to understanding.

[schnittkease]

Isn't Newsweek corporate media? So aren't they prohibited from publishing anything good about Bernie by their oligarchic overlords?

This was a poll, and they chose to report it—not the case with many others. Sure, from time to time Bernie gets positive coverage, but generally speaking it is decidedly negative. If you don't see it, you don't see it.

One of my favorites:
"Buttigieg in fourth, but a strong fourth"

[SimonNZ]

I just did a Google search for "Bernie Sanders News" for the last 24 hours.

I'm not seeing the hostility.

[JBS]

This was a poll, and they chose to report it—not the case with many others. Sure, from time to time Bernie gets positive coverage, but generally speaking it is decidedly negative. If you don't see it, you don't see it.

One of my favorites:
"Buttigieg in fourth, but a strong fourth"

I don't see it as negative because I see it as accurately reporting the flaws in his policies. Drastically increasing taxes so a minority of Americans can get less than adequate health care.,.increasing taxes to increase college enrollment figures (why not instead focus on programs that prepare people for jobs without forcing them into colleges no matter what their career is?)...
Buttigieg is wholesome, normal, not part of the DC swamp.  Why wouldn't people like him compared to three candidates (Warren, Sanders, Biden) whose main credential is name recognition?

[Madiel]

You could have two separate people, each representing a mainstream opinion each of left/right.

Half the problem is that there are various issues on which it makes zero sense to divide opinion into "left" and "right", but it happens anyway.

The glaring example right now is climate change (a debate rearing its head again right now in Australia as fires last week killed 3 people and tomorrow is tipped to have some of the worst fire conditions ever recorded... and it's not even summer yet). I'm perfectly happy that you can have "left" and "right" views on, say, the best mechanisms to use to push the economy in directions that favour less emissions, but that isn't what has happened in your country or mine. Instead, for some incomprehensible reason, the tactic of part of the "right" has been to attack the credibility of the scientists reporting that the climate is changing.

WHY? Why in God's name is listening to scientists even a political issue? Who exactly was the political madman who first saw advantage in casting scientists as part of some kind of vast conspiracy for profit (a notion which is ludicrous if you've ever known any scientists and the constant struggle for funding, nobody gets rich from being the actual scientist)?

So instead of having a genuine left/right debate about strategies as the climate changes (which IS in fact the kind of debate that has happened in some countries), one side of that debate frequently isn't happening because someone, somewhere decided to turn climate change itself into a left/right debate. Which is just fucking nuts.

Australian politics has spent a decade being utterly wrecked by this. We're almost at the 10-year anniversary of when the more right-wing of our main political parties overthrew its own (relatively moderate) leader because he was about to finish negotiating a market-based carbon price mechanism with "the enemy". MARKET-BASED. As he said shortly after his overthrow, it was actually an idea that was thoroughly in keeping with his own party's basic economic philosophy, but they revolted because a pile of them had decided that climate change wasn't real.

I won't bore you with all the further disasters that followed. For current purposes, it's sufficient to say that one side of politics deciding that the science of climate change is absolute crap (and that is a quote from the person who became the new leader at the time) makes me extremely skeptical of the value of picking a mainstream left and a mainstream right opinion on important issues. Because in that instance, on one of THE most important issues, the mainstream right decided it wanted to be represented by people who wouldn't listen to thoroughly apolitical source material.

And I know that most of the Republican candidates in 2016 did not accept climate change. I was paying attention. The fact that Kasich accepted the science was seen as highly detrimental to his chances of getting the nomination. Which is a completely lunatic state of affairs. When accepting the science becomes a fringe view on one side of politics, something is VERY wrong and left/right balance becomes unachievable.

[amw]

Save your breath, a good number of people on this board are also climate change deniers and there's a few more who think climate change is happening but it'll be good for them personally so nothing should be done (except build the wall).

The latter will eventually become the mainstream conservative position even in Australia: "climate change will be fine for us, we'll survive, we just need to end all (nonwhite) immigration and refugee intake so we can keep our standard of living." (isn't that basically what Peter Dutton already believes?) And that position was always the endgame for climate deniers—denial was just a tactic they used for a few decades to prevent action that would meaningfully reduce their own access to cars, luxury yachts and so on, before they could pivot to "ah its too late now we just gotta hold on to what we have"

[SimonNZ]

Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of 'untold suffering'
Statement sets out 'vital signs' as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency

[Madiel]

Save your breath, a good number of people on this board are also climate change deniers and there's a few more who think climate change is happening but it'll be good for them personally so nothing should be done (except build the wall).

The latter will eventually become the mainstream conservative position even in Australia: "climate change will be fine for us, we'll survive, we just need to end all (nonwhite) immigration and refugee intake so we can keep our standard of living." (isn't that basically what Peter Dutton already believes?) And that position was always the endgame for climate deniers—denial was just a tactic they used for a few decades to prevent action that would meaningfully reduce their own access to cars, luxury yachts and so on, before they could pivot to "ah its too late now we just gotta hold on to what we have"

Well, we've already got to the point where, when bushfires are happening, "now is not the time to talk about climate change" in much the same way that when there's a massacre in the US it's not the time to talk about gun control.

EDIT: Have any of the people on this board been good enough to disclose their scientific qualifications? Just curious if any of them have any. Not necessarily in climate science, just wondering about the extent of understanding of science in general.

[Florestan]

EDIT: Have any of the people on this board been good enough to disclose their scientific qualifications? Just curious if any of them have any. Not necessarily in climate science, just wondering about the extent of understanding of science in general.

That's an interesting topic which begs two questions.

1. What do you mean by "scientific qualifications"?

2. What are the criteria for assessing "the extent of understanding of science in general"?