Unit2Sucks said:
Big C said:
tequila4kapp said:
OdontoBear66 said:
This is a most interesting question. Unlike the times of yore the readers are terribly biased for the most part and the journalists on both sides feed their audiences. I have almost given up at this late age. You either get vitriol or suppression of news. For the time being, the middle has disappeared in journalism as well as the population, As a much younger man I never knew Walter Cronkite's political persuasion until he was on his deathbed. Not any longer.
Amen. Worse still, we are being told we don't need a middle...the government will decide the truth and censor the rest.
Amen+ to lamenting the lack of a middle. Back in the day, there were the three networks and each competed to see how close to the middle they could be. Okay, the news was homogenized and a lot of voices weren't heard from, but at least they tried to balance the right and the left.
Dunno what network news is lately, because who the heck watches the networks! (I guess they are a lot of video, some mainstream stories and some fluff.)
I can't overemphasize how disappointed I am with PBS, being completely locked in to the politically-correct-left (but not too left) and basically never showing any other perspective, or even two competing perspectives in the same story.
Being able to choose the "news" that matches one's own (often ignorant) viewpoint is one of the things wrecking this country.
I understand this lament generally, but I don't find it super relevant to the discussion of the Ukraine war.
Are we trying to find the "middle" between reality and Putin's propaganda? I am not sure I see a need to give space for Putin's firehose of falsehoods, whether through broadcast media or anywhere else.
I don't think that the traditional right/left political spectrum is applicable here. There are a few extremists on the left and the right who amplify Putin's lies, but generally speaking I don't think it's the job of US media to allow extremists or obvious lies to present an anchor that may be balanced against.
If some nut job says that 500 million Ukrainians have been killed in this war does that mean the media should say that somewhere between 100k and 500 million have died? Or should they just split the difference?
We are still very deep in the fog of war across a number of large stories. For example - the NS pipeline bombing. We very much don't know what happened so it's largely speculation based on circumstantial evidence. Similar for the KHPP. I've found the reporting to be fairly reasonable on both of those matters with acknowledgment that there isn't much ground truth.
Contrast that with some of the early war crimes we saw in Mariupol and Bucha. US media didn't give much air time to Putin's propaganda (which his agents spent a lot of time amplifying in this thread - and will probably use this as an opportunity to re-trigger their firehose). Does anyone think there is a political reason why the media chose not to amplify Putin's lies? Is there anyone who believes that democrats or republicans are the reason that the media didn't do so?
I think the biggest problem with reporting in this war is that there is just an overwhelming amount of source material, much of which has either credibility issues or is unverifiable. I think in this respect, it's unlike any war the media has had to cover. We had direct feeds the US government from our smart bombs to share in the last few US-centric wars but here the fighting is dispersed across a huge front and much of the footage is coming from drones or cell phones. US networks simply aren't positioned to deal with that sort of footage.
Where I think US media is really letting us down is in more technical coverage of what weapons we are or aren't providing to Ukraine, what Ukraine has asked for, why they've asked for them and where the shortfalls can have an impact. They can easily parade their military experts to have a lively debate. We saw some of this with the will they / won't they on F-16s, but I don't feel like it was prevalent otherwise. All that said, I don't spend any time watching TV news so I could be off there.
Agree that US support for this war (or lack thereof) doesn't break in the traditional left-right split, like, say Vietnam.
Also agree about more coverage of the weapons systems.
However, there are a lot of questions not being addressed, national debates we should be having... and I am NOT talking about "Putin: Good guy or bad guy?" (because I think it's pretty obvious that he's the latter and the main cause of all this).
Here are some of
my questions:
Was it a mistake to talk about Ukraine joining NATO 30 years ago and is it a mistake to be talking about that today?
What does Putin really want? Is this a "dominoes theory" thing where, if he gets Ukraine, will he then go after Poland, then Germany, etc, etc and pretty soon he's at the top of the Campanile, gazing down at the new University of Putinfornia? Or does he pretty much just want Ukraine because, you know, USSR and close cultural ties and all that?
To what extent is the US actually kinda glad this war is happening, because it pumps up our defense economy, exhausts Russia and gives us an up-close-and-personal look at their military capabilities...
... and are we subtly (or not so subtly) egging Ukraine on for the above self-serving reasons?
Great that the media is reporting on Russian atrocities, but if Ukraine is also committing some themselves, are we instead portraying them as Little Mary Sunshine in order to clearly frame the war as good-guys-versus-bad-guys because that is as nuanced as we feel people in this country can understand?
Just about every war we've been involved in over the past 75 years was later believed to be a mistake, yet the media rarely even questions things until well after the fact, accepting false pretenses as if they are free pizza at a frat house. Why is that?
Why are we still spending more on defense than the SEC spends on football and yet we have to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions because -- after over a year to ramp up -- we are running out of ammo? Moreover, why do we spend so much on defense anyway and should we at least be getting more bang for our buck?
What is wrong with the human species to where we have to have all these fooking wars and atrocities and shouldn't we maybe let women be in charge of all the wars and lock the men in rubber rooms with unlimited beer? And shouldn't we put said species on a three-century glide path towards a more manageable population of, say, five billion?
The above are some of my questions. Also, can Cal win at least six goddam games this fall?
Go Bears!
