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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.
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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