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I don't watch the news, but I recently found myself in a situation where I had to watch MS NOW (apparently what MSNBC became). My God, it was rough and bleak. It seems like it's trying to be the leftist answer to Fox News. Maybe it is. I'd always assumed leftist news carried a veil of credibility that conservative news didn't. Maybe it used to. But this particular network, at this particular moment, felt so pundit-driven that it was actively turning me against whatever they would say.
They'd mention something associated with Trump, like his family making money while he's president, then play a clip of him talking about it. And yeah, he sounds like Trump, a tactless braggart. But he also sounded reasonable, especially since I could tell the clip had been edited in the least charitable way possible. They'd have Chris Hayes, who's clearly trying to be the leftist version of Bill O'Reilly or Tucker Carlson, addressing the camera directly, smirking, telling the audience what to think about it.
Or in a roundtable discussion they'd mention the rising number of Democratic Socialist candidates in the party and, in a strikingly angry tone, insist it's naive and lazy to think this means the party is being "taken over."
It was just insinuation after insinuation, delivered with this anger and dismissiveness. It wasn't news reporting. It was punditry. They were never just reporting anything; they were stating opinions while implying no reasonable person could disagree. The goal, it seemed, was to deepen partisanship: build an echo chamber for the already-onboard, and shame anyone who isn't into submission.
Like I said, I've never been the biggest news person, so I don't know if this is a new thing for the left, or an old thing, or just this network, or every network.
Fun thought experiment: 24 hour news or 24 hour Italian brainrot? Which would be better for mental health? Which would lead to better life choices?
I propose calling this kind of news “American brainrot”. Including other countries’ channels, because they (at least BBC and Sky) still spend the majority of their time covering America.
Just out of curiosity, why 'Italian' brainrot?
Someone once told me I had to try Italian soda, so I did, and it was just soda. Then someone said I had to try '''gelato''' so I did and it was just mid ice cream. Neither point is probably relevant. Sometimes I think I just come here to get my rambling out before hitting real old age.
I can't speak to Italian brainrot, but Italian soda is just your basic syrups you might put in coffee, except put into seltzer. I don't know if it's really Italian, but it is good, and different from what I'd consider American soda to be, which is usually cola based and heavily sweetened and kinda proprietary.
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No it isn't. Italian Cola is more citrusy, less carbonated and slightly less sweet. I think they use more ppm from the flavor essence. It is also available in 500ml cans which is the right amount and packaging.
1.24L is the correct amount for us Americans.
You can always drink multiple cans and not lose carbonation.
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Americans buy 2 liter bottles or 12 oz cans, I don't know where that's coming from.
An example supermarket webpage lists 1.25-liter (
<del>12</del><ins>42.2</ins>-ounce) bottles of soda for sale.Yeah, those are bought sometimes, but not as commonly as 12 oz ≈ 355 ml cans. But the smaller bottles are common at businesses or vending machines, where it's tacky or unexpected to buy a can rather than a bottle. So for instance a pizza parlor might offer a choice between a 2-liter or a 1.25 liter. (Also, 12 fluid ounces is much less than 1.25 liters.)
I've never been a fan of the 2-liter bottles because you have to use them quickly or they go flat, but they're bought commonly for parties, cookouts, as a way to get a lot of soda for several people at once.
Interestingly enough cans closer to the 500 ml can size in the US are associated mostly with energy drinks, only rarely soda. And of course there's the Arizona tallboy with 23 oz ≈ 680 ml, but you wouldn't buy a soda in that size.
Yeah, I remember when they were 24.
Shrinkflation for 12 oz cans occasionally turns them into 330 mL cans (rather than the typical 355s), unless it's a drink made in Europe (like the old San Pelligrino citrus drinks that had the foil wrapper on the lid) in which case 330 mL is normal. Same thing with the 591 mL (20 oz) bottles shrinking to 500 mL.
They're 473 mL, or half a quart. If you want an even number of ounces you have to step up to the 20 oz/591 mL cans.
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There are also smaller 222mL soda cans, but they are less ubiquitous.
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20oz (~600ml) soda bottles are reasonably common.
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Buh? 12 oz is not 1.25L, it is 355 mL.
Sorry, I got confused betwen the nutrition label (12 ounces or 355 milliliters per serving) and the bottle label (1.25 liters or 42.2 ounces).
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Maybe it's just me, but I find the Italian sodas I've had to feel different carbonation-wise from American soda.
Similarly, yes, gelato is basically a type of ice cream, but that's like saying "someone told me I had to try Chicago deep dish, and I did, but it was just a mid thin-crust pizza."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_brainrot
It's a specific thing, not just brainrot that's Italian. It's these weird characters with Italian-sounding names and with Italian-language narration, which most of the audience doesn't understand but find funny. It's mostly to entertain kids. Same audience that Elsagate reached. Adults jumped on it ironically and it's just stupid all the way through. It's stupid to like it sincerely, stupid to like it ironically, stupid to get upset about it, stupid to even mention it. It just rots your brain upon contact in any way.
Regarding soda, I guess it's to distinguish it from "regular" soda, like Coke, Fanta, Sprite, which Americans call soda.
I thought by Italian brainrot he was referring to Italian TV which would run those maddeningly stupid variety shows that seem like something that the guy's wife in Fahrenheit 451 would be addicted to.
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I’m a little confused by this post. MSNBC has “always” been like this and never really maintained the veil of credibility that ABC, NBC, even CNN to some extent attempted to maintain. It has been brazen Democrat punditry as far as I can remember (I’m not that old but still).
This has been their core brand and strategy for a long time. In fact part of the reason for their rebrand is explicitly to disassociate from the more “neutral” NBC news brand (neutral in their own eyes, anyway).
I don’t think this is even disputed by Democrats. Some may argue that Democratic punditry is more objective and correct than faux neutrality because they believe Democrats are the best, or whatever. Or they may argue that they’re not far enough left so they are pro uni-party, or whatever. But they’re not going to deny that MSNBC’s brand is targeted at Democrats.
And so that dissenters can no longer call it MSNPC.
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MSNBC has been like this for a long time (at least since the first Trump administration) but it used to be much better and balanced. I would date the change to around the time they fired Pat Buchanan (2012).
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What is confusing you exactly?
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MS NOW is pandering to the Democrat base. CNN panders to the Democrat establishment. The veil of credibility was always a sham. People used to care a lot about the aesthetic of 'journalistic integrity' and being rational, responsible and credible. But that's less of a concern for people nowadays. It has often been said that the entire 'don't be a crazy person' thing died the same day Christopher Hitchens did. Not to speak too highly of his flawed character.
My conspiracy brain believes that it's a controlled setup. There is a conception of the left media ecosystem as an emergent reality. All the actors play their role to keep it alive by providing as broad a tent as possible to keep as many people captive inside as they can. You need to make everyone comfortable. You can't do that by broadcasting division within the tent or having too small a tent. So everyone gets their corner of affirmations. But why?
When push comes to shove, you have everyone politically active there. You can make broad appeals to a shared crisis or enemy. Which is what happened with Trump, as an example. There is no 'news' there per se. That's just not what these media outlets are supposed to do. They're there to keep you captive until you are needed. The conspiracy part of my belief is that these media outlets have their chain yanked by the same hand.
This is a necessary context to understand media. It also helps explain why Musk buying X was so important. It gave the base on the right a place to organize. A place to make calls to action. A tent. Without that there was just 4chan, Talk Radio and Fox News. And out of the three 4chan was the only platform that wasn't explicitly in the pocket of zionists and the Heritage Foundation, though I repeat myself. The larger and more unanswered question on the right is who is yanking the chain over there. Which would help us understand the shifting media landscape on the right in recent years and why it's suddenly not banned everywhere like it used to be.
It’s also worth remembering that smugly smirking pricks are actually great when they agree with you. So the goal here is not to pretend to be some logic lord that can not be captured by any smile or contained within any tent. Just to remember that when you are hunkered down under the canvas, the constant pitter-patter above can make it incredibly easy for people to believe that it’s raining, especially when everyone inside agrees that it must be. When, in reality, it’s just the overlords of the media ecosystem sprinkling our tent with water.
What a polite way to put that.
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I'm sure this is a well-slogged swamp but fortunately I've not waded into it. If the Zionists are the chain yankers, how do you explain the mainstream/left now wailing for their blood?
I'm not going to pretend I know or understand every link in the chain. But there is an undeniable pull from that direction and it's coming at a genuine cost to the establishment dems. So what gives?
The left is in the middle of a small civil war right now because of Israel. If the zionists weren't doing some yanking, why doesn't the establishment on the left dump the Israelis? Why do democrats keep voting in favor arms deals with Israel or clap for Netanyahu when their base hates him? It doesn't make much sense when you look at the electoral state of things. With 30 year incumbents like Diane DeGette suddenly losing to folks like Melat Kiros who was campaigning on being pro-Palestine you need an explanation.
Avila Chevalier is another example.
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NBC was always "bad", but I feel like it has gotten a lot worse in the last few years.
When Rupert Murdoch was initially trying to get Fox News off the ground his sales pitch was essentially "NBC but for Republicans". That said, NBC used to at least TRY to maintain some pretense of being a news source rather than an editorial outlet. That pretense seems to have been discarded somewhere in all the drama surrounding Covid, the George Floyd riots, January 6th, etc... and it has since become little more than a venue for affluent white liberals to vent their spleens.
Not American, but it seems to me that the older market when it was ABC, CBS and NBC as the three national stations, was where you needed to try and be neutral or at least not lean too obviously towards one side or the other. You were competing for a share of the national audience and that meant voters of both parties and all stripes. News and current affairs programmes were meant to be factual and even-handed.
Then came cable, and now our modern media landscape where there is no longer a national audience that can be assumed to watch the same programmes and news output, and where it is economically viable to be "the channel for left-handed contact lens wearing model train enthusiasts in the south-west", and that combined with the greater partisanship does lead to what we have now.
In fact, the three networks all leaned left (if not as obviously as CNN and MSNBC do today). They were all basically in tune with the urban Democratic mainstream. Then came Fox, which captured an enormous untapped market consisting basically of the right half of the country.
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I think modern media has exposed that you can have multiple narratives on the news and the prior big 3 period was just the ability to maintain 1 narrative. Americans were all “ the channel for left-handed contact lens wearing model train enthusiasts in the south-west", but because the media was an oligopoly you could create Americans who were all the same thing.
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Tbf you could also have turned on fox news and see Karoline Leavitt, who married a sugar daddy twice her age, proclaim that zoomers and millennials need to be shipped to Cuba and Iran for being lazy bums. The median age of viewers of these channels is like 70. Thank Reed Hastings and streaming tech for sending cable to hell.
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They all do this. ABC and NBC news are just the same. You, the viewer, are a dull child, prone to evil thoughts, and you must be brow-beaten and relentlessly propagandized so you know which is the Good Guy Anti-Bad Guy Club and which is the Bad Guy Club.
Caught my mother watching ABC earlier today. They were interviewing some black descendant who was saying that Thomas Jefferson was a monster. The level of isolated demand for morality is just utterly disqualifying.
However much you hate journalists, it isn't as much as they hate America.
I know you mean the American ABC, but I would like to submit this from the Australian ABC as some of the most naked and patronising propaganda I've ever seen.
I think Trump is disastrous, but on the fourth of July you should probably not publish the Declaration of Independence annotated with "by the way, Republicans are evil" after every paragraph.
That's fine to do as a foreigner, as long as you understand you're declaring yourself an enemy. That one seems extremely bad; they start by bitching about separation of church and state which simply isn't in the Declaration. They go on to bitch about slavery vs consent of the governed (a point, and one that Jefferson would agree with), but then add irrelevancies about ballot access, wealth gaps, and sentencing disparities. It doesn't get better from there; using the veto is not the same as the king refusing assent, as refusing assent was an absolute power whereas vetos can be overridden. And to hostilely annotate the Declaration but fail to do anything with this grievance:
is to expose yourself as a totalitarian. Hello, regulatory state!
I think I'm mostly just annoyed by this sort of thing because the ABC is publicly funded - it's a federal agency and is in theory supposed to be politically neutral. Now, it isn't, and everybody knows it isn't, but even so I think it is unusually brazen of them to publish a piece, not marked as opinion or analysis, that firmly takes the view that the Trump administration is the enemy and opposed to the founding principles of the United States.
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The white guilt and black worship will continue until morale improves.
If Jefferson's black descendants feel that way, they should take a page from Hitler's relatives and stop having children—to end an evil bloodline and stop Jefferson's monstrous legacy through the non-consensually formed Hemings branch.
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To play Devil's advocate a bit... isn't there a place for this in any realistic democracy? The average voter isn't an expert in economics, or international relations, or constitutional law. Yet we're still expected to vote on all of these things. The only way this system works is if someone else interprets and simplifies the key issues for us, and maybe that requires a funny pundit more than a technical expert.
In any realistic democracy the average voter is one of the best educated in his nation on these matters and this isn't a problem.
Universal suffrage can only lead to subversion precisely because the average man has neither the time nor the inclination necessary and has to seek the mediation of demagogues.
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Yes, the problem is that this is a sacred duty in support of democracy, that has to be held by a solemn and sworn priesthood. And its orders have been thoroughly infiltrated and its mission twisted, not that they were ever too resistant to influence. We are after all asking people to hold massive influence, by delegating them as our eyes, ears and voice, and expecting them to never ever use that power to further their own goals. And then we pay them poorly, fail to punish them when they fail their duty and even reward them when they do fail in a way that flatters us. It's no wonder that with human nature being what it is and incentives being this grossly misaligned, journalism ends up being what Hunter S. Thompson described as "not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
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Do you ever watch any network TV news? The levels of condescension and contempt they sometimes reach is astounding. I've gotten mad at my own mother for talking like that to an eight year old.
To the greater point, sure. This is why progressives used to love Jon Stewart, so much that he eventually cooked their brains. Even most experts in those things low-key kinda suck, and that's the real problem. TV news goes so horrendously bad about it because their remaining audience can barely imagine turning to someone else. They're boomers who've spent 60 years thinking the TV was a respectable source of information.
For all the flaws of influencers and twitter pundits, they produce a more chaotic "laboratory of democracy" effect. They can't go full ABC News without getting pushback, or turning into lolcows.
The funny part is that he more or less got one of the biggest political shows of all time cancelled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Stewart%27s_2004_appearance_on_Crossfire
It is true, and I used to think of that a lot. He was the youngish upstart who disrupted the big name, and then he became that. I don't think that "my show was led into by puppets making prank phone calls" was as good as a defense at the end of his career as it was at the start.
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