the media are a bunch of pussies hedging their bets with the audience, also willing to skew anything to cause controversy as long as it doesn’t come back to bite them. Sensationalism sells.

Likely liability… Saying “X” puts you in the way of more lawsuits than “so-and-so says ‘X’”

As described in The Newsroom, a great show I personally love, the media is “biased toward fairness.”

This is most likely due to the need to be as profitable as possible, although now that business model is changing in the Trump/Fox/MSNBC-Hyper-Partisan era and we are seeing more catered viewpoints. But the “bias toward fairness” is what has helped shift the Overton window so far to the right. They ignore basic factual truth to appear “fair,” taking this floating viewpoint that insists on looking at everything through the amorphous, yet binary, political lens.

The example used in the show was about flat earthers (this was, actually, a time when that was an absolutely absurd example): “if half of the Republican caucus walked onto the house floor tomorrow and said ‘the earth is flat,’ The Times would lead with ‘Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on shape of earth.’”

It’s one of the many, many, many, many issues with modern society that stack up to give us the overarching problem…of everything going on today. I dunno, maybe this is just me, but any time I think about any nuanced, hyper-specific issue like this, with such far-reaching consequences, our problems seem insurmountable. Because this issue is connected to larger issues and much smaller issues and THE largest issue and the consequences are devastating…it just seems like modern society has become so stacked and complicated that you can’t unravel one problem without digging up and figuring out a million others. And we’re running out of time. But even saying THAT is a multifaceted conversation…it’s all so exhausting.