Originally Posted by Disco King
(Post 4494099)
I don't think anybody in this thread made a distinction between mainstream news and "real" news.
"Independent" = not owned by one of a few giant media corporations.
Discussion about bias in mainstream news can be found in Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Essentially, mainstream media tends to be biased toward elites, because (1) the news is owned by giant corporations, so it's in their interest to spin the news in ways favourable to their rich shareholders and owners; (2) the news relies on access to elites for content, and that access could be curtailed if it is too critical of elites; (3) the news relies on revenue from advertisers, and advertising could be pulled if the news is too critical of the large firms that buy ad space; and (4) media outlets will receive lots of flak for reporting in ways inconvenient to power structures.
Of course, conflicting opinions can still be found within the mainstream media. But this is usually only on topics that powerful elites disagree amongst themselves on, and the range of opinion won't be much larger than that. Issues on which elites are in consensus will not be contested very often in the mainstream media (for example, try to find mainstream American news critical of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict; or, back in 2003, papers that weren't cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion).
Being "independent" isn't a sufficient condition for being reliable, of course. You can still have total nutcases spouting nonsense to their audience of like-minded followers. It's just that, indepedent media don't necessarily have the same biasing incentives that the mainstream media do.
But, like I said, having a spin or a bias is quite different from being "fake." The mainstream media, most of the time, doesn't just make shit up, like conspiracy theorists claim they do. It's not "lies made up by the lizard people to control us" or whatever. They report on things that actually happened, just with a filter that colours how they report it, what issues they give time to, how much time, and what sides of the story get to be heard. And because only the mainstream media are large enough to foot the costs of some very important aspects of reporting, one must still rely on them to get a fuller perspective on the news, and I don't think it makes sense to eliminate sources like the Washington Post or the New York Times from one's consumption. If you do that, you're missing an important component of the news. Read it, but take a look at what's not being said, too.
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