I don’t know. People are incredibly bad at numbers and probability. But I think that’s somewhat secondary to claims around chloroquine, ivermectin, death counts.
“Bias” assumes you are shooting for some true answer, and miss systematically.
I‘be always been skeptical about saying that the MSM is biased to the left, because i’m not sure how to measure that. Similarly, i’m not sure how to say that about fox.
What i notice is that fox doesn’t really seem to be a news organization at its core. It’s got a news department it allows some airtime outside prime time. It also had to cancel lou dobbs under legal threat because the show host was lying about the election. More generally, it’s opinion pundits cannot be said to be biased because they seem to not be aiming for the truth anyway. They just make stuff up for ratings. Same with somebody like rush limbaugh, the godfather of conservative media.
I don’t think this is true of all conservative news. It’s not true of the wall street journal, for example.
So I think this is a completely false equivalence you are drawing. It’s not about news sources who are biased left or right. It’s about journalists who imperfectly their to pursue the truth, or people who just make stuff up for ratings.
What a nonsense post. Literally I said IN THE NEXT SENTENCE that data indicates that those who weren’t [vaccinated] had more severe cases. All of your posts show that you pick and choose what you care to focus on, which is why your post mocking people who subscribe to partisan news sites is so ironic.
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Everything you just said about Fox is also true for CNN.
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I bet it was a lot easier for you to fact check that post since you view me as a lefty partisan than it would be to call out the exact same comment posted on the right by someone on Facebook or Twitter.
Yeah if we filter on older age groups COVID is worse than flu, I agree. This is also because this is a new COVID while flu was already set up with vaccines and treatments. As they get on more even footing it’ll only become increasingly the case that a random person would rather have COVID than flu, despite COVID being scary because it’s newer.
Going forward is a different story, but I think you are still missing the key point. When conservatives make “better estimates” of the risk and understand CFR better than liberals, they leave out the 5-10x more likely to catch COVID than the flu, which pushes the overall risk of death from COVID higher for much younger age groups than CFR would indicate.
Somewhere in the middle is probably the real answer here.
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Having never really paid attention to these guys, my limited understanding is that Joe Rogan is identical to Oprah, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, etc… All talk-show celebrities that make you feel good, wise, empowered. And they’ve also all promoted pseudo-scientific garbage. I suspect it’s less because they are trying hard to win viewers, and more because both them and viewers like that kind of junk. Pseudo-science has always been immensely popular with all people, including a lot of experts.
I think at this point we’ve strayed pretty far from news bias, but I guess you could ask whether or not the current batch of Joe Rogans are more powerful or enchanting than Oprah? Or maybe it’s just that Covid is more touchy than other subjects since lots of people died.
I don’t see that it is.
There was a scandal at cnn because chris cuomo was giving his brother some political advice.
Hannity and other fox news personalities were apparently in the white house (at least by phone) helping to set policy. That is apparently all fine.
I’ll bring up again when fox had to fire a prime time host for propagating lies about the election. It only fired him because that particular set of lies caused economic damage to a voting machine company, opening fox up to liability.
CNN was created as ted turner’s dream to have a 24 hour news network, trying to report the truth (however imperfectly).
Fox news was created to counter the “bias” (which is still unclear to me how to measure) in MSM. In other words, to pursue a conservative agenda. That’s propaganda, not the pursuit of the truth. They do have a news unit, i admit.
I have read entire fox news articles that simply quote what a politician or republican web page says. That is not news.
And their articles are so trashy. Like People magazine did some coke, and got really angry.
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The lack of accountability on right wing media outlets is a real factor here, the consumers just don’t care at all what bullshit is presented, yet the moment CNN does something a bit dodgy, it is front page news across Fox for days.
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Joe Rogan has around 3 times as many daily viewers as Tucker Carlson. I don’t know much about his show other than what was reported on his spreading of COVID misinformation, which, at the time, had convinced a couple we know to skip getting vaccinated and send us clips of Joe Rogan as their source of information. I am not sure how much of that is him grifting on that to get more viewers, or him simply being an idiot buying into whatever false information his guests had to offer.
So yes, I think people dying of COVID makes it a touchy subject.
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I watch Joe Rogan and I’m not sure what COVID information he’s spreading but I certainly don’t get that vibe from him.
He questions almost everything and I think that’s actually a good thing. He also constantly updates his views which is also a positive.
So he is a mostly useful idiot.
Although hearing “question everything” makes me cringe and think of Tucker Carlson.
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The top stories on fox news right now, from top to bottom of mobile page:
5 links related to johnny depp’s suit against amber herd, with a big picture
One story on russia losing faith i. putin. it’s 3 short paragraphs, and refers to “a report”.
An article about how an “elite trans golfer” has something unexpected to say about woman’s sports. What could it be? Notice it’s just quoting somebody’s opinion. There is a sub link to some lia thomas story.
An article about how elon musk think netflix lost subscribers because of the “woke mind virus”, which is the kind of faux insightful pseudo philosophical babble we can expect from him. Another opinion.
Finally, an article about how students are “hitting back” on biden’s pause on student loan repayment. Quoting another opinion.
What is amazing to me is how little facts there are in these stories. And the facts presented don’t actually allow the reader to critically evaluate the given opinions in any way.
It’s just not really fact based news, in my opinion.
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He has his opinions. But he exposes himself to both dumb and smart people, left and right, so I would say he actually absorbs information from a wider range of people than most people in the world.
I value people who can change their opinions. I doubt Tucker changes his opinions much.
I find most of the cable news web pages to have similar levels of content with a less trashy look to them. I think CNN has better content on stories like the war in Ukraine as I think they have real people reporting (or a network of contacts abroad), but that is about it.
It doesn’t look the same to my eyes. In particular, fox news has many more of these “quote somebody and pretend it’s a news story” than cnn or msnbc does.
I am not a fan of any of the 24 hour news networks though. All news sources struggle to balance ratings and journalistic integrity, and i think the ratings needs just seem to be too high for the 24 hour news networks.
But i think fox is in a class by itself because it isn’t really a news organization.
Although, really, twitter and especially facebook are there with fox; they aren’t news organizations either. With those, we see ratings definitely win through the automatic recommendation algorithm that seems designed to show people only what they already want to hear. But they don’t pretend like fox does.
I think the issue popped up here–
He hosted a cardiologist vaccine skeptic / crazy guy / fan of hydroxy and ivermectin.
And the issue is really just that he let the guy talk without anyone to point out why the guy is wrong.
I think Oprah is similar, in that she once hosted Jenny McCarthy (less cardiologist, more former playboy bunny), and similarly let her share anti-vax messages without contradicting her.