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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
We didn't address that part of the text. The commentary there is unquestionably neutral, so I can't say it's biased.
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In your view, then: If the media reports on the President's mental state, which it (the media) can't know, and repeats what the President says as if it is fact, it is "neutral." If the media reports on the President's mental state, which it (the media) can't know, and suggests that the President intends to deceive, it is "biased." This is so even when the President has been telling the same untruth for months, and even when news outlets report that there was a concerted effort by senior officials to tell the untruth. You have found "bias" where the media correctly points out that the President has been lying as part of a concerted effort by the Administration to push lies.
It's just moronic to say that if a reporter suggest that a Republican President -- especially this President -- might not mean to tell the truth, that shows that they are biased and trying to help Democrats. You can't think that. Many people, not all of whom are Democrats, believe that the Presidents sometimes lies. With this President, that's not exactly going out on a limb.
The other even more moronic thing you say is that it's "unquestionably neutral" to accept the White House's self-serving descriptions of what it is thinking and report it as the truth. If you really think that suggesting an intent to deceive shows one kind of bias, then the opposite obviously shows a different kind of bias. I think your narrow focus on bias is myopic, and that the much bigger problem is that reporters tend to accept official sources at face value for a variety of reasons that don't have anything to do with partisan affiliations. But trading reporter for stenography is not "unquestionably neutral." If you really think that reporting carries a "higher duty" than opinion, why does that duty disappear when it comes to stenography?
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I don't want any type of media. I don't care what the media does. I was only noting that the media is biased against Trump. And that your argument that the effect of giving Trump so much attention, which works in Trump's favor, nullifies or undoes the media bias against Trump. (I don't really know your argument in total because you "flash around" quite a bit. One day, you assert the media is not biased against Trump. When that's contested, you shift to, "Well, the media may have some bias, but in terms of effect, it aids Trump.")
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I think most reporters probably vote for Democrats, and that this has very little effect on media coverage. I think most executives at media companies probably vote for Republicans, and this also has little effect on most media coverage, except that there are some important exceptions, like Sinclair stations. When you talk about bias in the context of the media, you seem to mean only the sort of bias that involves the particular political views of an individual journalist or pundit. When I talk about bias, I am talking about about broader set of biases, most of which have more to do with the business imperatives of the press.
Your view of bias gets you to the f*cked-up world of Sunday morning political talk shows (e.g., Meet the Press), which typically have panels where conservative politicians are balanced out by (presumably liberal) journalists. Someone like you can call them neutral, since you have some kind of balance. It's a balance that predictable and systematically neglects and downplays what the left thinks, and provides a forum for conservative talking points to be pumped into the mainstream. In other words, the shows are biased, but it's a form of bias you don't even seem to be able to perceive.
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I addressed this already, many post ago. It's nastier to brand a person as having bad intent than as merely hapless.
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That's your own bias. I personally think it's nastier to suggest that a person is too stupid to understand what he is doing than to suggest that he is smart and is trying to deceive for a purpose, as most politicians do. Moreover, I think most Trump voters would disagree with you. They think their guy is smart, and that if he says things that aren't true it's just a sign of his acumen and willingness to rock the boat. Fact-checking is for suckers, they would say.
And we both know that if a CNN reporter went on the air and said, the President said a lot of things that aren't true today, but we don't think he was lying because he's too dim to get stuff like that wrong, people would see that as biased too. And you wouldn't disagree. You would say, I bet, that the CNN reporter can't really know that the President is stupid, and is reflecting his Democratic leanings by calling the President dim. If it's biased to presume that the President is lying because you can't know what's in his head, it's also biased to presume that he is stupid, because you can't know that either.
Really, what you're saying is that the press is biased to report facts that contradict the White House line. Your "bias" is a dressed-up version of "Fake News."
