this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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That's really the point of what people are arguing, that these are interested parties that clearly promote certain agendas pertaining to respective national interests. If you agree, then that's most of the meaningful discussion concluded, imo.
I am unimpressed. You are making the very common mistake of "critical of any individual or group within the US" being the same as "critical of the US". I can point you to a thousand stories of Orange Man Bad (a large portion of which are correct, albeit meaningless, for the record) from CNN or MSNBC, but that is because what they are doing is partisan reporting from within the frame of Republican vs Democrat politics. That the Dem-aligned outlets say the Republicans are bad and the reverse does not mean they are in any meaningful sense criticizing the US. In fact, this can easily result in whitewashing the US, as happened constantly under Trump, whether it was rehabilitating the war criminal Bush or indeed pretending VoA used to be impartial, a huge portion of these attacks rest on a framework that the object of criticism does not represent the agenda of the US and what its systems seek to preserve but is instead a rogue, an infection, or in some other manner foreign to or against those interests.
It's media criticism, and what I had to say was mostly regarding the overall argumentative arc of the article rather than trying to hit on small details out of context. Is my assessment at all incorrect? Obviously I included a sardonic joke about diplomacy being communist, but besides that.
Also, I'm not a fucking journo! I'm not pretending to be reporting on international news for the pure sake of keeping my audience informed on political developments, I'm just some asshole commenting. I also, unlike that journo, have a significant hostile audience that I am writing in the context of. That guy doesn't give a shit what China thinks of what he is writing. Your comparison is apples to oranges.
Did you not see the five or so headlines that made up basically the entire front page? I talked about those first to establish a baseline (there was one neutral one and one on basketball that I left out).
This is an anemic argument and you show that you know it. No, it's not stormfront, but that's because it has an extremely different audience and a different set of liabilities than stormfront (and obviously a neoliberal ideology rather than a Nazi one). If you thought the argument you were saying was worth anything, then I can just say "What's your issue with Fox? OANN is way further out there. What's your issue with OANN? Breitbart is way further out there. What's your problem with Breitbart? It's a little edgy but nothing like the unhinged rants at InfoWars. InfoWars? Please, they look like liberals compared to stormfront."
These are different factions with different audiences, different styles, and different ideologies. Being able to point to something more vulgar is no defense, especially because -- as others have stressed in this thread -- that creates a huge, multi-layered bias towards establishment media relaying a centrist, neoliberal message! The place that happens to be America's political center has no particular reason to correspond with what an informed and "impartial" observer would conclude except by cosmic coincidence, because the American center (as with any country's political center) is historically arbitrary and constantly changing! We can't just tacitly assume that the establishment ideologies are what are most reasonable and the fairness of all other things must be measured against that. It's part of this myopia that I explained at the top of this comment about how people are so stuck in partisan shitflinging and those sorts of issues that they have no idea of what "impartial" could even mean! And I say this as someone who thinks there is no such thing as "unbiased," that there are stronger framings for what is theoretically a pillar of your ideology, which I oppose, than what you have put forward.
You cannot escape your own perspective, your own circumstances and interests, but you can do a better job than you currently are of stepping outside of the bubble of Mainstream American Political Discourse and investigating what people from other countries not aligned with the US say, or even a more serious investigation of what fringes within America say.
Oh, and out of pure spite, I will inform you that NPR is a zionist rag that does nearly whatever the Democrats want. It's laughable to call it unbiased, even if we pretend such a thing is real. They are partisan hacks and apologists for the neoliberal project with a progressive veneer faintly glossed overtop.