Q&A: Why Is the Media Left-Wing?
Why Is the Media Left-Wing?
Question
Why do you think that in Israel, the United States, and also in Europe, the mainstream media is always left-wing? True, in recent years all kinds of outlets have come in, like Channel 14, Fox News, etc. But the mainstream is still left-wing. Does this stem from a view that the right is fascist?
Answer
I don’t know. There’s something about art and the bohemian scene that tends to lean left. Those circles are also usually involved with different and diverse groups in society, and therefore are less inclined to favor their own group.
Discussion on Answer
In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, the publisher of The New York Times explained that his paper is biased simply by virtue of employing people with academic degrees (who tend significantly toward the liberal side). There is a close connection between political position and elitism and intellectualism; the right in the United States has adopted a distinctly anti-intellectual stance.
That’s completely true, except that intellectualism is no guarantee of wisdom or justice. On the contrary, in many cases intellectuals talk nonsense, as Orwell said: there are ideas so absurd that only intellectuals can believe them. Intellectualism pushes a person to sound unusual and deep, and sometimes that comes at the expense of truth. In my opinion, on the right there are no fewer intellectuals, and perhaps more (though on average they are less educated), but people don’t relate to them that way. Benny likes to say that the conventional view that the left is smarter than the right is true for the 5th through 9th deciles. The top decile is right-wing, and the lower deciles are right-wing. That is, of course, a wild generalization, but there is some truth to it.
By intellectualism I didn’t mean intellectuals in the philosophical sense, but rather in the most basic sense of learning and fact-based thinking.
See here:
The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.
“When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent. ”
/ https://www.salon.com/2024/11/08/americas-political-discordance-the-want-progressivism/
Channel 14 isn’t right-wing.
It’s just lies and craziness.
A very specific level and style.