Submitted by Missing_Trillions t3_11cflhy in Documentaries
Reply to comment by byOlaf in Shadows of Liberty (2012) - How media manipulation and censorship work. 90% plus of the media in the USA are controlled by five big for-profit-conglomerats, creating a media monopoly that manipulates our political, economical, and social world. [01:28:52] by Missing_Trillions
MSNBC is the worst offender IMHO, but there are many others. CNN was atrocious when Trump was president, but they seem to be working on being a bit better.
MSNBC is owned by Comcast. CNN is owned by Time Warner.
Both of those are corporations placing them at the right end of American politics. If either of them ever come across as left-leaning, it is simply a disguise of their true corporate nature.
You have been told by the right wing media that another part of the right wing media is the left.
The corporate owners are irrelevant. They just want profits rolling in and do not care which side sends them money.
What makes them left-leaning is their content and editorial decisions. MSNBC is clearly far to the left of center in American politics.
Oh, and BTW... the U.S. is further left than 90% of the world's nations. (There is more to the political scale than health care, getting that out of the way since that is the only comeback people have when I make that statement.)
That is the formulation they would like you to believe yes. But MSNBC is not in the far left of American politics, or at least were not whenever I’ve seen them. They have a center-right bias just like the Democrats. I’m not sure you know what the left actually wants, but it’s not the stuff advocated by msnbc.
Oh and by the way, the US is in no way left of 90% of nations, that is an absurd and completely made up statement. And nationalized healthcare should be a right-wing agenda item, as it would save untold billions of dollars and produce better outcomes.
The U.S. is further left than... nearly the entirety of South American, Central America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Again, the political spectrum has more to do than one subject. For example, Venezuela is far left economically (how's that working out?) but try to have an abortion there (punished by mandatory prison sentence)... or a gay marriage (which is constitutionally banned.)
So, besides Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (I'm ignoring the state sanctioned religions and monarchies that still exist there) what country is further left than the U.S.?
Well none, if you get to define what left is.
I think you’re confusing agenda items of the American left with left-wing politics. Abortion, for example, is not a left-right issue. Or more accurately, the parties in the United States are misaligned on the abortion issue. Conservatives should be opposed to government interference in medical decisions.
So really the issue is one of perspective. What you really mean is that you perceive the US to be left-leaning based on the policies you prioritize. That’s simply not the same thing as statistics. If you have any data you’d like to present, I’m glad to read it, but these are just feelings you have.
It's ridiculous to think that politics can be defined by statistics or data. What the fuck are you even talking about? What stats are you looking at? What "data" have you presented? Just emotional opinions like "that is an absurd and completely made up statement."
And yes, many within the U.S. political split takes on stances that don't align with their claimed ideology. The left should be pro-freedom and anti-influence of pharmaceutical companies. Yet what side did they take on "vaccination" mandates? The left should be anti-war, yet they are cheering on sending billions of dollars to weapons manufactures under cover of the Ukraine proxy-war.
I was responding to your made-up statistic. 90%? There are 195 countries in the world, what even is 10% of that? There are 19.5 countries more lefty than the US?
My point was that you are biased. You are drawing conclusions based on your opinion and then presenting it in numerical form. That's the data I'm talking about.
The Left should be anti-war? Why? Why should the right be pro-war? Who told you that these political opinions are aligned this way? There's no historical basis for that. The left and right were both mixed in favor of WW1 and 2, Korea, Vietnam, and MiddleEastHappyFunTime 1 and 2. The notion that Left means anti-war is your own color because of the eventual political alignment at the end of the Vietnam conflict. That's exactly one instance where being left meant anti-war and being right meant pro-whateverthefuckvietnamwas.
Realistically, the Right should be anti-war. It's a wasteful expenditure and an overreach of government. You seem to have conflated the individual politics of the GOP with "Right" and politics of some of the Donkeys with "Left". That's unmoored in global politics, historical politics, or really anything else. It is literally the narrative you have been programmed from the corporate media you consume.
The GOP are a center-right party with nationalist tendencies, globally speaking. The Dems are also a center-right party, this time with some historical flag-burning tendencies. But those times are decades ago, you don't see Nancy Pelosi out there without a bra on. There is no left-wing party in the US, just as there is no left-wing media. Maybe Democracy Now! or other crap like that, but neither you nor I consider that to be mainstream, and with up to 200k viewers an ep, it really isn't.
And Ukraine is not a proxy war. Principals aren't participants in a proxy war. I suppose you could claim that it is half-proxy, but that's a pretty novel formulation and inaccurate. The US is doing literally the barest minimum to aid that country. I am not pro-war myself, but I am confident that the US military could completely flatten the Russian army in a heads-up conflict. If the US were directly involved in Ukraine, it would already be over.
So, name 19 countries further left than the U.S.
>the US military could completely flatten the Russian army
Huh? The U.S. couldn't even defeat primativists fighting with Mosin-Nagants in Afghanistan after two decades.
You're confusing ability with intent. The US didn't intend to flatten Afghanistan. Let's be honest, no one really knows what they intended, but leveling the country was not in the remit. The US military was not built to fight insurgents in their own mountains.
What the US military is good for is fighting another large military in open warfare. And in that capacity, The only force on the planet that could contend with any one branch of the US military is another branch of the US military. The Navy has 11 aircraft carriers with 60 planes each. China has one. Russia had one.
The Russians are struggling to defeat Ukraine. A country with a third the population and a hundredth the landmass. If the US decided to act militarily in Russia (and nukes didn't exist), the war would be over in a month. We have a standing peacetime military that is larger than their wartime active military.
Also the US lost about 2,400 people in Afghanistan. The Afghanis lost at least 240,000. That may not be winning, but it doesn't look like losing.
For us, Europe is what we compare ourselves to, culturally and economically. Compared to them, we're definitely to the right.
But, compared to the whole world, I think you're right on.
I see your point on the corporate nature and maybe there's a better way for me to have worded my comment. My main point was just that MSNBC spends its time talking about how bad the Republicans are in bashing Republican positions, while Fox News spends all of its time bashing the Democrats and democratic positions.
That may be true, but not all of them, right? They only bash certain politicians and policies. Fox's 180 on Trump should tell you how much they actually care about the things they say. One day he was a serious danger to America and the next he was our only hope. The media we have are controlled by the wealthy and report things in ways that are favorable to their worldview - or to their ratings. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's literally our system.
It's the same way the Republicans can call themselves the party of small government while every Republican administration balloons the deficit. They just literally do not give a shit if the reality lines up with what they are saying, and apparently neither do their voters.
MSNBC may spend their days bashing certain policies or politicians of the GOP. But they simply don't have to platform ideas that are to the left or to the right of the ideas they wish to discuss. If you say inconvenient things, they simply don't have to ever mention you or your ideas.
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True leftism isn't even on the table in the US. THAT'S the function of the 'leftist' MSM.
Meanwhile, we're maybe THE most right-leaning 'developed' country, all the while the right tells us we'll be communist - I.E., like the social democracies, which are simply more regulated capitalist countries, in Europe, any day now. It's how all those Koch-funded organizations and "non-partisan" foundations work to keep things like national healthcare out of serious consideration, even though a majority of Americans favor it.
Well said. That was exactly the point I was trying to get across. The sad reality is that leftist media wouldn't be popular because it wouldn't be all doom and gloom. Have you watched the news lately? Turns out everything is bad everywhere, except for here, where it's getting worse. The very nature of for-profit "news" is anathema to a leftist world view.
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