Media Bias

 I typically start my day with a review of Google News because it's a decent aggregator of news from a variety of sources. My favorite mobile app for news is Ground News. For $10 a year they serve up the latest headlines while also showing you which news outlets are more (or less) biased. For a little more, they'll provide even richer data and allow you to customize your news feed and topics to avoid bias. They also do a great job of highlighting "blind spots" on both ends of the spectrum - topics that news outlets leaning right or left don't cover.

To summarily dismiss all media as biased is a cop out, and it's also inaccurate. In the US, it's what lazy Trumpies say to give themselves permission to not think critically, to remain willfully ignorant, and to fully embrace their own confirmation bias. Trump feeds this narrative because it works to his advantage. "I am the only source of truth, trust only that which you hear directly from me" makes his lies far more effective. When your entire campaign strategy is fear and division - convincing people that the world will end if "the other side" wins, that only you can protect them from the terrible evils that are about to ruin both their families and the country - having people inspect your narrative for facts is the last thing you want. Distrust of the media is the fuel that keeps the Trump engine humming along. If Trump's mindless sheep followers actually did 10 seconds of research on some of the total BS that flies out of his mouth, his whole campaign would vanish in a poof of orange smoke.

This concept also extends to fact checking. In Trump world, fact checking is the shadiest of media practices, because it directly undermines the Dear Leader's narrative. Anyone who watched the VP debate saw Vance's visceral reaction to Norah O'Donnell fact-checking him live during the debate. Dude was so pissed his eye-liner started running a bit. Then he said the quiet part out loud: "I thought the rules were no fact-checking?!" Why on earth would anyone oppose fact-checking? Oh, right, because they plan to lie a lot and fact-checking is super frustrating when lying is a key part of your message.

And now, after the Trump base totally embraced his notion that Hatian immigrants are eating pets, they've moved on to embracing his lies about hurricane relief. The entire fact-checking section of my news feed this morning was about combating the lies that FEMA is handing all its money to immigrants (lie) or they're only giving $750 to victims (also a lie). I think I'm most frustrated that the media spends any time fact checking Trump because it's a waste of digital space. Those of us who have critical thinking cells know he's lying, and his followers don't care that he's lying. Maybe fact check some other politicians, if it comes from Trump or Vance at this point we can just assume it's a steaming pile of BS.