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I just don't think this is fair representation of mainstream media. If we take the BBC, as just one example, surely the most mainstream of all mainstream media, and looks at the current headlines that just isn't true.
The current top stories on the UK home page are in order Sunak's fine, the nurse strikes, Zahawi's tax affairs, the new NZ PM, the compensation being set for a patient whose limbs were wrongly amputated, a feel-good puff piece about a man donating to his local pharmacy and Germany's tanks to Ukraine, or lack thereof. If you won't any article with a culture war article, there's only two out of the dozens on the front page, one of which is just a report about the Archbishop of Canterbury's commeaents on the recent gay marriage debate in the C of E, which is completely neutral and probably a worthy topic for coverage, and one about Andrew Tate. In the World section there are no pieces with a culture war angle, expect the Andrew Tate article which reappears here but not very prominently.
But fair enough, that's not American. NYT? The top article is about layoffs in tech, 2nd on military support to Ukraine (tanks), then others on Haiti, NZ, AI, David Crosby and George Santos. The only one of the main page that could be considered to have a culture war angle is the one on March for Life, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
The point of all this is if all you are hearing is about 'marginalised' groups that is probably what you're listening for.
I think this is useful. Just to contribute, I opened the website of German newspaper Die Zeit. Ten years ago, they were known as being slightly left-liberal but overall pretty boring.
Headlines on the front page:
Report about a reporter bringing 4 Afghan refugees to his home
Accusatory article about German companies exporting to Russia
Article about the Polish MP to bring together a coalition of countries to send tanks to Ukraine if Germany won't
Russian "occupiers" having to use their own cellphones to communicate with each other
A reporter naval-gazing about being addicted to nasal spray
Piece about a self-employed designer only earning 400€ per month
Banks pay too few dividends for personal accounts
The evolutionary explanation for the meaning of life
Sympathetic article about people gluing themselves to the streets to protest climate change
(Sober, non-editorialised) article about the rising number of asylum seekers from Syria
Accusatory article about companies not doing enough against climate change
(I stopped here)
I have to say, I am extremely surprised there is no fluff piece about feminism. Them being the reason I stopped reading them some years ago.
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There's always a comment like this whenever media bias is brought up, and I still don't really know how to bridge the gap between your viewpoint and the OPs. I feel like you could make the same argument about a hypothetical issue of Pravda in 1950.
"Comrade, you say that everything in the news is about Marxism, or praising the Supreme Leader, or rooting out counter-revolutionary forces, but it is not so! Look, here we have an article about a town collective that exceeded their monthly ditch digging quote by 225%, here there is an article about new libraries being built using funds seized from wreckers, and another about the Mayor of St. Petersburg providing commentary on the liquidation of kulaks which, as far as I can tell, is completely neutral. Then there's a simple factual article about a former KGB lieutenant getting appointed as governor of an oblast. Sure, there's an article about Pavlik Morozov and how we need more patriotic children like him, and there's an opinion column about how wreckers are undermining the socialist state and ought to summarily executed, but really, you're only going to be upset by that stuff if you go looking for it. Perhaps you have some sort of complex?"
That last line, the psychoanalysis angle, has always been unproductive, IMO and is more of a veiled sneer than anything. Anyway, my point is that if you're a liberal sea creature swimming in liberal water, you might only notice that there's water at all when there's a particularly strong current. But a conservative land creature under 20 feet of water will feel a.quite justifiable sense of weight and oppression even if the waters are perfectly still.
Yeah but looking at one random 1955 edition of the Current Digest of Soviet Press, which collated the top stories in newspapers such as Pravda the bias is way more obvious and prevalent than you suggest. The top story is on 'The profound treatment of Leninist philosophical heritage', then we have an article on Jazz, but this is used to attack Western racism, then one on 'gross provocation by French police authorities', another praising Soviet foreign policy, one criticising the reception of a Soviet delegation in the US, a discussion of Marx on religion and countless others. Almost the only one without an overt Marxist, anti-Western or pro-Soviet angle is one article on sheep farming. The bias is obvious and everywhere.
That's because you're looking at it from the outside. You weren't raised in an environment where articles on with those themes and topics were considered "normal" and "non-controversial." That's the whole point of my post. If you had been born in 1915 and grown up reading nothing but that stuff in newspapers it might not seem very ideological at all.
I will concede that Cathedral propaganda is much more subtle, but that doesn't make it any less effective. Quite the opposite, in fact -- the Soviet framework was less totalizing, less all encompassing than the liberal framework (see Legutko's Demon in Democracy).
I feel like we're running fairly close to an unfalsifiable argument, where if there doesn't appear to be any propaganda or bias in MSM that must simply be because the observer is inoculated to it or because it's so subtle.
The comment near the top of this chain said everything they heard would invariably have an angle about a marginalised group; while I can't speak for American radio, this just doesn't seem to be the case in prominent MSM outlets.
I think this is self-evident. The question is not whether there is bias, only how much, because there is no such thing as a neutral viewpoint. To get a bit pedantic, the most mundane dog-bites-man story will have some sort of philosophical framework baked in consisting of basic assumptions about reality, such as what a dog is ("a mammal often kept as a domestic housepet," "a ritually unclean animal," "a harbinger of evil," "a symbol of wiley cleverness," etc. etc.) and what a man is (well, in $CURRENT_YEAR maybe this is a bad example). Articles about mundane topics written by ancient Greeks are far enough removed from us culturally that they are laden with bizarre assumptions that make no sense to us unless we read up on ancient Greek culture and society beforehand to understand their framework.
We can easily see the unique assumptions (the bias) of the ancient Greeks because there is so much cultural distance between us and them. American leftists and rightists are not yet so far removed from each other, so we can find "unbiased" stories that both would probably agree are "neutral." But as we move to topics where the left and right have diverged more, the distance between the two frameworks reveals (usually leftist) assumptions which, yes, are often very subtle. As I have stated elsewhere, I am a "reactionary" Catholic so my framework is much more distant from the leftist framework than the average American conservative (who I believe is rightly described as "last decade's Democrat") and so I can see the left/liberal/Enlightenment fnords more clearly.
Edit: To get off my soapbox and back to the claim under discussion, I don't think that literally every article or radio segment has a claim about a minority group, but a whole lot of them certainly do, and even a mundane piece about an opera singer has a subtext that might be invisible if you're thoroughly immersed in a 21st century American context.
This sentiment is one of the biggest reasons we ended up in this mess in the first place. "The personal is political. There is no such thing as being apolitical" -> Therefore you better pick the correct politics or else you're complicit in moral wrong-doing, comrade.
Of course there is no such thing as complete political neutrality. Doesn't mean the concept can't still serve as an aspirational ideal.
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