If you never watch any of this news garbage you will see an immediate improvement in your life. Try it for 30 days and you will see how useless it is and never go back. Use that time for self improvement, 30 minute work out and you will be sooo happy. It’s poison.
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I can attest to something similar to this honestly. Used to spend so much time on Twitter. I was pretty big on there actually but the topics on there were so distracting and toxic. Took that time I used to spend there on blogs like this and constructive things. Huge difference in my mental health.
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We’re getting off topic but I’ve never thought of the Goodmons and Capitol Broadcasting as right-leaning.
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I didn’t mean politically I meant one sided media coverage.
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Much less so today, but long ago they arguably launched Jesse Helms’ career: Viewpoint | NCpedia
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ncpedia.org is another “fact checking” site, but take it with a grain of salt like snopes, which used to be pretty neutral but is no more, even “fact checking” satire sites. so sad. I do think ncpedia ATTEMPTS to be neutral unlike snopes, so i will give you that
I think our local media is WAYYYY less biased than national media. When local reporters get it wrong, I think it’s more a case of laziness on the part of the reporter (or just not knowing how to get the right facts) than it is having some agenda pro- or anti-business for Raleigh.
Just glad we’re growing here, regardless of how it’s reported.
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NCPedia is in no way comparable to Snopes, it’s an encyclopedia published by the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, not a fact-checking site; and anyways Snopes is only biased if you’ve succumbed to the poisonous alternative reality currently gripping about 40% of the country.
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Of course everyone knows what you mean, but your post implies that you believe all lines of thought that are right of center are poisonous alternate reality. Media bias, like many things, is much more nuanced than the common narrative, and hot takes that easily dismiss millions of fellow Americans are not helpful to the situation.
Anyways, I believe online fact checking is useless in a world run by the tech giants that literally listen and respond to our daily conversations with served digital content. The real world is a much more credible source of info for me in this wild epoch.
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I feel really conflicted about this… On one hand, I did this, too, with the (inter)national news by skimming no more than two news sources every morning (as opposed to like 15) and I also feel like it’s helped me feel less anxious or hopeless about the world.
But at the same time, isn’t it the responsible thing to do to be on top of what goes on around the place you live in? Or did you mean more like @atl_transplant where you’re not actually cutting out every shred of news from your life?
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Most everything except the local weather and I am not looking back. I find that it allowed me just take everyone I am meeting at face value and not what some idiots on TV direct me to do.
I could read the news for you everyday, it won’t change, it’s the same BS over and over.
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You’re right, I was slightly overzealous, the real percentage I should’ve used is around 29%, that being the percent of Americans who at least “mostly agree” to the Big Lie.
The discussion was about Snopes, and Snopes specifically focuses not so much on nuanced political disagreements, but on outright lies and conspiracies, from both the left and right, and verifying attribution of quotes by public figures. You could try to argue that they’re biased because they seem to end up covering covering false claims from right-wing sources more often, but the reality of things is such that there have been academic studies which empirically show that right-wingers and conservatives are more likely to believe and disseminate blatantly false information.
This is all nice to say, and overall eliminating social media as a source of news would be a good thing, but where in the real world are you going to be able to reliably find out whether or not Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green really said that she does not believe in evolution? (The kind of claim that Snopes regularly checks.)
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Yes, and guess how most Academics lean? Playing devil’s advocate here… The majority of publicly sanctioned disseminators of information tend to lean left including scientists and academics, which poses a threat to democracy. Not because one may disagree with the content but because the content itself is consolidating into a more centralized ideology.
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Personally, and this may be very different in your case, but knowing whether or not a politician believes or doesn’t believe in a scientific theory that is still being debated by brilliant minds is not relevant to experiential life.
I may seem like a conservative, but I promise I’m just a contrarian.
I do think local news is increasingly grasping for click bait, biased stories to prolong the seemingly inevitable collapse of profitable journalism. Hence, a story covering a new Raleigh development will likely be shared more if the spin is negative… those dirty, profiteering developers! As it is empirically observed that negative information carries more emotional saliency than positive info.
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Click here to expand my thoughts on the whole Snopes and media partisanship thing, since it's off topic for this thread.
From a global perspective, American society leans more to the right. Whether you’re looking at the average American voter’s ideologies pre-covid, the BBC’s comparison of 2020 Democratic candidates to major UK politicians, or even at survey responses all the way back in Obama’s first term, you’ll see that even a “centrist” American isn’t really what you think they are.
With that said, I agree that there’s more cultural leaders in America (not just newsrooms, but pop culture) that lean one way politically than another. But correlation is not causation; what you wrote implies that a lot of opinion leaders leaning to the left is what threatens democracy -but is that true? Or is there a common denominator that could be lurking deeper, at another possible root of the problem?
Y’know… such as how most news and media companies are owned by a very small handful of mega-corporations? Or how they’re driven to fill up air time with 24/7 coverage of news issues that don’t need that level of coverage just so they can appease advertisers and stockholders?
I agree it’s not directly relevant in that you can’t draw a straight line from event A to B. But what about indirect effects?
Click here to see what I mean.
For example, let’s look at a North Carolinian leader like Madison Cawthorn. What if he used evolution denial to grab headlines and then ramp up his support for the Big Lie just like that Georgian did? Can you deny that his stoking of the flames would’ve scared away Apple, Google, and the other corporate headquarter move announcements (read: new jobs) we got in the past few months? Is that still irrelevant?
And if you didn’t like my example, remember we’ve actually been through this before. Remember the bathroom bill? I don’t know about you, but I remember quite a few out-of-state friends and work contacts glaring at me (the one North Carolinian in the room) when that was on the headlines. Now imagine if you didn’t know about that law and had more on the line.
There isn’t just a “politics world” and a “media world” and an “internet world” etc. We all live in some bubble in one hyperconnected world; even the things that seem pointless and boring have a chance of blowing up in your face.
I have a strange idea about this: is it really inevitable? Or could this be a sign that it’s time for journalism to evolve to work differently than how it does today?
After all, just like people and companies, important parts of society can change, too. Banks in the US went through this, for example, where state and federal governments kept fighting for power until just over 100 years ago. In the past, banks were much less reliably run and not trusted to begin with, and it made it for financial crises to happen like every other decade. People eventually got tired of bank-induced recessions, though, and came up with better solutions like the Federal Reserve that helped to stabilize the economy and actually put their savings in banks.
I’m not saying the government should get involved in journalism (though I think we should bring back the federal rule that required news coverage to be “honest, equitable, and balanced”). Rather, I’m just saying it’s possible for institutions in our society to change how they work and still do its job.
For example, if you’re sick and tired of journalists and news companies feeding you the news while they decide how news gets covered (for better or for worse), why don’t we push for a system where readers are actively involved in shaping how news comes about?
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Keita, as always, good points. I will look into community involved journalism.
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To add to @keita’s fantastic thoughts… think there might be a reason for this? Perhaps “reason” itself?
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Getting way off topic, so quickly…I’d separate the issue into strands of issues. One issue is rising partisanship among institutions, like universities, which are increasingly adopting cultural/social policies that attract left leaning academics, students, and researchers, thus narrowing the diversity of thought within the institution. Another issue; Regardless of politics, humans are biased, and subconsciously use “reason” and “logic” and “objective observable facts” to justify their emotional limbic system urges. Science says nothing; Scientists do
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Again I pose the (rhetorical) question: Do you think there might be a reason that many of the most intelligent and well educated in the sciences among us lean in a particular direction that happens to fit in line with a particular school of political thought?
Because it’s a massive worldwide conspiracy by millions of underpaid people who don’t know each other. As a scientist, I can tell you from experience it’s taught in one of the 200 level college classes: Liberal scientists and how they run the world. 
Political scientists, sociologists, and people studying higher education spend their whole careers arguing about that question, soo… maybe this site isn’t the best place to ask this 
If I had to guess, though, I think it's because of how the US historically treated liberalism, crossed with weirdness in how America has evolved. (click to read)
Notice that I’m talking about the classic political theory of liberalism. This is different from “liberal” as a synonym to left-wing politics (though the academic rivalry between John Locke’s liberalism and Edmund Burke’s conservatism did evolve into what we know as “left-vs-right” politics we know and hate today) as well as “neoliberalism” (which is more of an economic school of thought that modern libertarians worship).
American elites, including the Founding Fathers’ ideas, came about during the Age of Enlightenment when the rich and powerful held up certain ideas on a pedestal like:
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people have (and should follow their) free will
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liberty is a thing; people deserve to be free to do things
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progress is good; why stick to “how we’ve always done things” when you could have it better?
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it’s in everyone’s interests to tolerate people with opposing ideas, such as Quakers (i.e. why Massachusetts was made) and Catholics (ditto, but Maryland).
These ideas are grouped together into “liberalism”, the OG “liberal ideology”.
The nerdy, scholarly politicians of the time like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton baked those ideas into our Constitution, and hyped that up among anyone who would listen (usually other intellectual elites and people who liked getting free alcohol).
That explains why “American ideals” include liberal ideals, but not so much why it seem like it’s concentrated in academia.
Emphasis on “seem”, because as much as places like the conservative American Enterprise Institute point out how right-leaning people are a minority and feel uncomfortable in academia, it doesn’t seem as clear-cut if you try to take a broader view.
It doesn’t seem like liberal biases in academia were much of an issue until communist scares in the early-mid 1900s. Remember, that’s the same time as when college degrees changed from a rare status symbol to a nice-to-have (and, now, a requirement for most jobs), and when Americans started to have a single, dominant culture after WWII thanks to the radio and TV. This means:
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The GI Bill and LBJ’s Great Society program started bringing more people into the college education system, slowly turning it from a niche world into everybody’s problem.
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Republicans led by Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy leads a communist witch hunt on academia. In response, the Supreme Court ends up strengthening freedom-of-speech protections in tenured professors, among other protections for academics pissing off people in power (though the Nikole Hannah-Jones controversy at UNC could now put this to a test)
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Boomer students who are fed up with segregation and Vietnam consolidated their power on college campuses. Segregationists and other conservatives get flashbacks from McCarthyism and start to see colleges, themselves, as a threat to their ideals.
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Reagan gets elected in a rejection of progressivism, and his appointees take down the FCC Fairness Doctrine (see my previous post). This, combined with cable news (which aren’t using limited public resources like “regular” TV) enables the rise of ideological media like conservative talk shows and Fox News to build an ecosystem of conservative ideologies for parents and future adults alike.
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Further globalization and urbanization brings more people, money, and power to cities. Meanwhile, rural areas get left behind with less economic opportunities, more closing businesses, and a lack of good education or other kinds of economic mobility; it gets harder for people in rural places to “get out”, and the jobs and culture available in cities look more and more different (if not hostile) to people from rural backgrounds. Liberals and conservatives continue to self-select as the urban-rural gap gets wider and wider.
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etc. etc.
At that point, I think it just became a cycle where the right became terrified of the sociopolitical motivations of everyone else, and fed into a cycle of forming their own bubble.
TL/DR: it’s complicated. I don’t think a single reason caused this imbalance in what kinds of people work where, but there are several patterns in history that could give us clues.
Glad I could point you to something interesting 
I wonder if the Triangle could be a good market for a startup that does just that? I don’t know of any local outlets that explicitly work like that, but I feel like how @dtraleigh works with this community meets half of that idea.
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