I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them. But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as T…
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they don’t. The main problem is that progressives don’t communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people don’t automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual “fascists” end up looking reasonable, not just to “WWC” but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now aren’t “better luck next time” as it might have been in the 1980s. When you’re facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like “they meant well” don’t cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is “ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.”
The second is “people who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the left’s social and economic agenda) are ‘bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,’ and don’t deserve the right to free speech.”
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because it’s adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
“I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
They’re a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and Murdoch’s NY Post. I wouldn’t lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but they’re also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think it’s probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, I’d say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said Tucker’s point was that the “right” at the time (and even less now) doesn’t have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless it’s a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. “They worry about things like making sure they spell a person’s name right”. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didn’t then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede Tucker’s point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And that’s why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use “left leaning” msm as their main source for reliable information.
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they don’t. The main problem is that progressives don’t communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people don’t automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual “fascists” end up looking reasonable, not just to “WWC” but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now aren’t “better luck next time” as it might have been in the 1980s. When you’re facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like “they meant well” don’t cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is “ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.”
The second is “people who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the left’s social and economic agenda) are ‘bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,’ and don’t deserve the right to free speech.”
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because it’s adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
“I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Bouie is not merely "scrutinizing" it. This is part of a larger attempt at discrediting the Enlightenment through a left identitarian frame, as made clear by Liam Kofi Bright: https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2022/04/why-i-am-not-liberal.html
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
They’re a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and Murdoch’s NY Post. I wouldn’t lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but they’re also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think it’s probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, I’d say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said Tucker’s point was that the “right” at the time (and even less now) doesn’t have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless it’s a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. “They worry about things like making sure they spell a person’s name right”. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didn’t then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede Tucker’s point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And that’s why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use “left leaning” msm as their main source for reliable information.