Media Bias

[macdoc]

Brian seems to have a taste for Koolaid and decoder key access to sources of knowledge mere mortals are not allowed to access without Raider of the Lost Ark efforts.

Staying in the science forums is one method, my method of staying sane and most are reporting on peer reviewed material.

[Sean Hayden]

Where is our magnificent Peacock anyway? Did someone leave the gate open again?

[JimC]

Computer issues, I gather. He will return, trailing clouds of glory!

[Brian Peacock]

Brian seems to have a taste for Koolaid and decoder key access to sources of knowledge mere mortals are not allowed to access without Raider of the Lost Ark efforts.

Staying in the science forums is one method, my method of staying sane and most are reporting on peer reviewed material.

Judging by the straw man I doubt you could represent my views honestly. So that's a miss for the koolaid jibe.

You could also try reading research on perception and attention, game theory, &/or the attention economy.

[Brian Peacock]

Where is our magnificent Peacock anyway? Did someone leave the gate open again?

Yeah. Big PC gone rogue, and getting in on the phone has been rather frustrating - and still is!

[pErvinalia]

[L'Emmerdeur]

CBS, one of the original big three American television networks, was acquired by right wing billionaires. They hired one Bari Weiss to run CBS News. She was cited fairly regularly by Cnut, which may give some idea of who she is. She's been busy remaking CBS News into a more MAGA-friendly source, firing staff and replacing them with more ideologically compliant people. Strangely that might not always go well.

'CBS News Star Hire Busted Sucking Up to "Outrageous" Epstein'

One of CBS News’ newest “star” contributors appears in the latest tranche of Epstein Files over 1,700 times.

The 52-year-old anti-aging influencer Peter Attia, hired by CBS News‘ MAGA-curious editor-in-chief Bari Weiss earlier this week, was in regular communication with the disgraced financier until Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges and later killed himself in 2019.

Dozens of emails between Attia and Epstein outline the pair’s seemingly playful friendship. Attia joked with the pedophile and even voiced concern for his legal well-being after serious allegations against Epstein came out.

In June of 2015, Attia gushed in an email to Epstein that the “worst” part about being his friend is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

The message was written on June 24, 2015, seven years after Epstein was arrested on procuring a child for prostitution and four years before he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

In 2016, Attia grotesquely wrote to Epstein, “P***y is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”

In December 2018, Attia asked Epstein if there was any legal “fallout” from a recent story, an apparent reference to the bombshell November 2018 Miami Herald story by Julie K. Brown that identified 80 of Epstein’s victims.

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

In reality Trump is the little guy on Bezos' knee.

[Brian Peacock]

Happy International Press Freedom Day.

[Svartalf]

In reality Trump is the little guy on Bezos' knee.

shhh, the image shows the things how he believes them to be, and you might bruise his delicate ego by revealing the truth.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Free speech for some, some of the time.

'Trump angers right-wing fans with censorship campaign'

When Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, he leaned hard into the right-wing narrative that free speech was under siege from liberal elites, Big Tech platforms and an overreaching Biden administration. He promised in his inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” Now the conservative architects of the anti-cancel-culture movement are discovering that their hero has become the most aggressive censor in modern American presidential history.

In January, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a Pentagon contractor who had allegedly leaked classified information, an action legal scholars called “intensely concerning” for its chilling effect on journalism. (On May 4, Natanson was part of a team at the Post that was awarded a Pulitzer for Public Service reporting.) Two months later, Trump posted that media outlets covering a national security story involving war rescue operations in Iran should be “brought up on Charges for TREASON.” In April, he threatened to force CNN to hand over its sources “or go to jail.”

For years, the MAGA faithful raged against the left’s supposed creeping culture of cancellation. Now, the machinery of the federal government — using agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — is being loosed on the president’s enemies with a thoroughness and a vindictiveness that has begun to unsettle even his most loyal media allies.

You know the project is going sideways when Megyn Kelly starts defending Jimmy Kimmel.

After Trump spent days rage-posting on Truth Social, demanding that ABC and Disney fire the late-night host over a roast joke about Melania Trump — that she had the “glow of an expectant widow,” a quip delivered two days before the April 25 shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but that Trump’s allies grotesquely linked to the apparent assassination attempt — Kelly, who had spent the prior week calling the joke “sick” and demanding accountability, abruptly reversed course. “It’s very inappropriate,” the former Fox News host said on her SiriusXM podcast. “The president of the United States should not be calling for any private company to fire any employee, especially over free speech.”

The Kimmel affair is a case study in how the Trump administration has weaponized federal regulatory power to settle personal scores. Within days of Trump’s demands, the FCC — whose chairman, Brendan Carr, had already threatened ABC affiliates with “news distortion” investigations — issued what the National Association of Broadcasters called a “nearly unprecedented” order forcing Disney to reapply for spectrum licenses for all eight ABC-owned stations on an accelerated timeline. Carr denied any White House pressure, claiming the action was about diversity, equity and inclusion investigations, not speech.

But ABC is not the only television network facing pressure from the administration. Even after the agency’s own expert staff found no legal basis for it, the FCC revived a complaint in 2025 against CBS over edits to a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris and held it over the head of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, while a merger requiring FCC approval was pending. In the meantime, Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was canceled and a “media monitor” to screen CBS content was installed. Then, on April 26 Trump sat down with Norah O’Donnell for his own “60 Minutes” interview after the shooting at the Washington Hilton. Much of the president’s remarks — including a rant comparing anti-Trump protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, musings about his Secret Service agents’ looks and a bragging session about his planned White House ballroom — were edited out without objection from the White House. This is the same president who sued CBS for $20 billion over its editing of the Harris interview, extracting a $16 million settlement and forcing the network to agree to publish full transcripts of future presidential interviews as a condition of FCC merger approval.

Conservatives once argued that even the hint of government retaliation against media organizations was intolerable. Now they are being asked to accept that a regulatory probe targeting a network criticized by the president is merely coincidental.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The US right wing media is suffering some loss of traffic as their god-emperor's lack of robes is becoming apparent. Mainstream media as well though their losses aren't as significant. I'd been seeing notes about the 'Daily Wire' having difficulties, including laying off a significant number of their staff, but it seems they aren't the only ones in that are suffering.

'All Top 20 Right-Wing News Websites Suffer [Year-Over-Year] Declines in May Visits'

The 20 most popular right-wing news websites all posted declines in year-over-year (YOY) visits in May, according to TheRighting’s exclusive analysis of mobile and desktop traffic based on Similarweb data. Ninety percent of the top 20 right-wing sites monitored by TheRighting experienced double-digit declines. Only two sites – the Epoch Times (-2%) and Truth Social (-9%) – had single-digit drops.

“It’s certainly an alarming development for legacy media outlets on both the right and left but not a surprising one,” noted Howard Polskin, President, TheRighting. “The trend in 2026 has definitely been downward, but it feels like the descent is accelerating despite major events like the war with Iran which should have attracted visits. May’s number represent the first time this year that every site I track has shown negative year-over-year growth. I would attribute some of it to the exponential growth of news and opinion options that are multiplying by the day on a variety of platforms.”

All three mainstream news websites TheRighting tracks on a regular basis had YOY decreases in visits: The Washington Post (-24%), CNN (-23%) and The NY Times (-5%).

...

–The Federalist (-52%)

–Daily Wire (-47%)

–The Blaze (-46%)

[Sean Hayden]

That has to be a good sign.

[Brian Peacock]

I wonder how much of that is down to search engines now offering AI summaries and their own algorithmic 'news feeds', or the growing consumption of SFVC (short-form vertical-content) as a primary news source, further reducing 'traditional' routes of news participation?

Reuters, Jan 2026:...

We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.

Understanding the impact of these trends, and working out how to combat them, will be high up the ‘to do list’ of media executives this year, despite the unevenly distributed pace of change across countries and demographics.

Existential challenges abound. Declining engagement for traditional media combined with low trust is leading many politicians, businessmen, and celebrities to conclude that they can bypass the media entirely, giving interviews instead to sympathetic podcasters or YouTubers. This Trump 2.0 playbook – now widely copied around the world – often comes bundled with a barrage of intimidating legal threats against publishers and continuing attempts to undermine trust by branding independent media and individual journalists as ‘fake news’. These narratives are finding fertile ground with audiences – especially younger ones – that prefer the convenience of accessing news from platforms, and have weaker connections with traditional news brands. Meanwhile search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, where content is surfaced in chat windows, raising fears that referral traffic for publishers could dry up, undermining existing and future business models.

Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism....

If you're rampantly right-wing you're probably getting your news from Twitter (yes, I'm still calling it that), Facebook, YouTubers, and like-minded Telegram groups etc. That said, across the board people tend to prefer news content that they can agree with, which I'm sure is only going to end up driving journalistic clientism ever-deeper into the system, and by that reducing 'traditional' news participation even more.

Over here for example, the Right are going heavy on the BBC, an organisation with a statutory obligation to impartiality, but which they've rebranded the British Bias Corporation. You see, questioning, challenging or criticising the Right isn't journalism, its a deliberate unfairness that inhibits an impartial appraisal of the issues and any accompanying judgements about them - like trying to be impartial is actually a prejudice! (tbh, we saw this slight-of-hand many times here from that guy who used to post a lot - you know, the one who was radicalised by the podcast algorithms and the protein shake manufacturers. )

If you can't trust 'traditional' news outlets then you'll probably be using some alternative means to find out about what's going on in your community, region, nation or the world. Just like if you can't trust doctors you'll be much more likely to seek out and put your faith in 'alternative medicines'.