ggw
Joined: December 16, 2001 at 06:01 AM UTC
Posts: 14237
Re: SPOILER WARNING: Prestige Television Discussion
November 21, 2018 at 09:02 PM UTC
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For the record, I am not a Republican. I'm not sure "conservative" fits either, although my core belief is that government has become too big (although for the best of intentions) and that is the root of many of today's problems. Many years ago we had all these colonies. Some dudes said, hey, let's have some central government to take care of things like national defense that don't make sense to do on the colonial level. Great idea! Later on, other dudes started saying, hey, since we have this central government thing, let's use it for all sorts of other things too! Not a bad idea on its face, except that it encourages the formation of interest groups to lobby the central government to enact policies which benefit the interest group. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that. Except we have gone way past interest groups now. Today, interest groups have morphed into "identity" politics. It may seem like a small distinction, but I don't believe it is. "Identity" implies something incredibly personal. So now politics imbues everything. Moreover, people of other "identities" are now viewed adversarially - If you are not an us, you are a them. When government is smaller, people are forced to work together to get things done and must find a way to get along. When government is big, people just join together and then compete with one another to get the government to favor their group over others competing for the same resources, which encourages animosity, not cooperation. Also, there is the whole principal-agent problem with government trying to have its hand in everything.
As far as the media question - I have a love-hate relationship with the media. I consume vast quantities of it, but much of it I find flawed and rapidly getting worse. I don't think I have ever seen Fox News. I like facts, stripped of biases. Fox News is obviously not that. But nobody else is anymore. I have read the New York Times daily since I was a kid. It used to be a great paper. They were always left-leaning, but they kept that part to the op-ed pages. They dealt with a lot of hard news and had great cultural coverage as well and largely succeeded in keeping the general news operation as bias-free as possible. Today, the entire paper is wildly left-leaning. Like the Washington Post, business concerns pushed them to make a conscious decision to abandon generalism and gear the paper toward its base - A very liberal and cosmopolitan readership. I've been thinking of canceling my subscription for years, but just can't do it after it being a daily touchstone for 40+ years. But the NY Times is regularly awful now. They just published their list of the 100 Notable Books of 2018. They try to force politics into all the reviews, even when the book doesn't say anything about politics (explicitly or implicitly). For example, one book [Cherry] they cite as a great statement on the "United States’ failure to provide adequate support to veterans." I read the book. Yes, the main character is a veteran. But it has absolutely zero to do with the subject of the treatment of veterans. A few months ago, the Sunday New York Times had at least one Trump-related story (all negative, of course) on the front page of every single section - all 10 of them. Sports? Arts & Leisure? The Travel section!?!? I mean, they really had to try hard to do that. Being political in every subject, every section, every day, is probably what their base wants. But I don't.
I can't answer the CNN vs. Fox question because I don't watch either. However, I do think of NBC (and its affiliates) as the Left's Fox. I'll give you some examples. Savannah Guthrie on the night of the election looked like she was going to vomit any second. Every time a state went for Trump you could feel her pain, anger, and hurt. She would say things like, "I can't believe this is happening?" and, "Oh, this is awful." Guthrie is certainly entitled to her opinion, but as the Co-Head Anchor (along with Lester Holt) of NBC News, I think she should at least feign being impartial. Then there is Andrea Mitchell. She is Hillary's BFF and has been for decades. And this is who NBC News has covering Trump during their Presidential election coverage? Another example - Shortly before the election NBC did a piece on Orange County, CA. They said they were going to this "republican bastion" to take the pulse before the election. But they cast the piece like a safari. The story started with the crew going to a train station (in LA) and boarding a train to travel to the OC (apparently they don't have roads in the OC?) and, in hushed voice, they spoke with such surprise that actual Republicans could be found so close to LA! The whole report was cast like an explorer heading deep into the Amazon to find a lost tribe that had never encountered civilization. I don't doubt that many at NBC News truly believe that Republicans are some strange alien tribe. Much like the NY Times, I still watch NBC even though I think its gone to shit.
Beyond that I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times every day. I skip the WSJ political coverage and just focus on business and markets. The FT is obviously primarily a financial paper, but their political coverage is very good and more international. I read the Economist weekly also. I read these three in hard format because I am old. Online I read Bloomberg and have started reading Axios periodically. I read tons of global macro research, which obviously touches on politics and economics. I watch NBC News and BBC World News occasionally. PBS NewsHour is still pretty good, but I got away from it when Gwen Ifill passed.
Obviously Hatch's question touched a nerve, as this may be the longest post I have ever written. Like I said, I have a love-hate relationship with the media. I still love it enough that I gorge on it, but I really hate it because I feel like there are no high quality generalist news sources left. 20 years ago (maybe even more recently) I felt like reading the New York Times gave me an excellent, largely bias-free handle on what's going on in the world. Back then, even the Washington Post was half decent (emphasis on "half"). Today, I don't feel like there are any truly non-biased sources left out there.
