Goddamn centrist media!

I don't have any answers. I tend to use the BBC news site in general though.

Ew, actually I wouldn't. Ew.

The BBC

NOT CNN jesus people!! this is the network that says things like "keep it right here for updates on the holiday terror situation... 24 hours a day"

NOT NPR .. "fuzzy-sweater liberal" just means they drive a Volvo instead of a Jeep but it's the same fucking diff, people

NPR, NYT and WaPo all have both left and right tendencies. CNN is basically the neo-con network with a few snarky blue-state-isms thrown in.

and wrt BBC, I'm referring to the website and World Service

kingfish otm

http://www.havoca.org/images/News.h1.jpg
"News just in"

http://www.havoca.org/images/News.h1.jpg
"News just in"

say, who remembers:

http://www.lanesarasohn.com/tvwriter/images/nntn1.jpg

The NY Times, yeah ... harps on Whitewater for a couple years, then lets Judith Miller play Chicken Little for W's pre-war rationale? Very balanced.

after a while, it begins to all meld together. new info needs to fit into pre-existing narratives/storylines, or by god we'll make it so. Music journos are like this, too. That's why every band from Seattle was a grunge band!

(...towards the Pittsburgh Steelers)

Balance is a whole other issue that has to do with how many of what kind of stories get reported, and its meaning varies depending on the publication or broadcast, its intended audience, etc. etc. Some striving for "balance" is worthwhile, as is some striving for "objectivity," but ultimately the people running the show need to decide for themselves -- hopefully using reasonable criteria -- what they think is important, and cover it -- fairly.

So, I think NPR, the NYT, the Wall St. Journal, the WaPo, the BBC, the Guardian, and the major weeklies (not just Time and Newsweek but the New Yorker and the Economist too) all do a decent job of fair coverage. You can find glaring exceptions in all of them, in every issue. They all have blind spots that become obvious to regular readers and that need to be kept in mind. But if I want to get some general idea of what's going on in, say, Sudan, I would trust all of those outlets to provide at least an overview. CNN and the rest of the broadcast spectrum, much less so, for the simple reason that they generally don't devote the time necessary to get even an overview.

Classic tweet yesterday.

Hey @mrjamesob, why is the @caitlinmoran podcast episode just 43mins long and not 3hrs?!

— FarFarAwayFromHere (@Colognetastic) June 22, 2020

thread has a real quaint post-90s end of history vibe to it

I agree -- it's surprising to see people talk about Centrism in 2005, when it seems to mean something a bit different now.

Great column by Perry Bacon Jr. on "an anti-woke centrism that is increasingly prominent in American media and politics today, particularly among powerful White men who live on the coasts and don’t identify as Republicans or conservatives."

It really matters that these anti-woke centrists often live in deeply Democratic areas. If you are in a red state, like me, you are constantly in fear of your state government adopting conservative policies — such as new limitations on reproductive freedom, transgender rights and honest education about race. But if you live in D.C. New York City or San Francisco, a much more realistic concern is that a “woke” liberal with whom you don’t agree gains political power — or sharply criticizes you in public.

“Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” the New York Times declared in the first sentence of a March 2022 editorial.

In reality, there has never been a right to voice your opinion without the possibility of being shamed or shunned (terms without precise meanings) — and there shouldn’t be. Shaming and shunning people are free expression, too. What I suspect this editorial was actually calling for is for self-described Democrats and liberals to be able to express more conservative views (such as skepticism about transgender rights) but without being attacked in the way that conservatives often are for such views (being called bigots).