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Old 11-07-2019, 11:17 AM   #5917
Sons to Glory!
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
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Default Re: Hiding History

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Originally Posted by OBW View Post
What we like to think about the near past ignores the more distant history. At the time of the founding of our nation, most newspapers were owned by the wealthy. Generally one wealthy person per paper. His thoughts drove how that paper wrote and reported. There was no such thing as an unbiased press.

To get the news, you had to understand the bias of the owner of each newspaper. Of course, there were many newspapers in those days. It has only been in the past 100 or s years that it began to consolidate into 1 or 2 broadly-published local papers. And even there it was often that one was more to one side of things than the other. That is the way it was in Dallas until the Times Herald folded into the Morning News (in the 90s?). Neither was strongly to either side, but now there is only one. (And depending on the side you are on, you swear it leans to the other.)

So what it really requires is an educated population that is not easily swayed by fake news. And despite my leaning to the right on things, I find much more truly fake news to come from the right (especailly FOX News) than from the others. I may not always like where the editorial content of the others goes, but I trust their basic reporting far above that of FOX. FOXy gets a failing grade from me.
We don't have cable, so I usually only see the cable news channels when I go to the gym. And like you, I lean right (somewhat libertarian), but I get tired of Fox News. They usually have Fox, CNN and MSNBC all playing side by side on screens at the gym, and it is amusing to see how biased they all are! It makes me wish for an outlet that you didn't have to filter constantly, but that's Adam for you - always expressing bias in some way . . .

And to your point about just taking the bias into consideration. I've subscribed to The Week magazine for years, because it gives both sides, quoting sources from left and right news outlets. I've turned various conservative people on to it, but they won't read it any more because it leans too far left. In actuality, though The Week does give both sides, it still skews to the left on many things. One way they do this is in an article, the last word quoted is almost always from a left-leaning source. But I'm aware of this and can filter accordingly.
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