It’s a mistake to believe that conservatives would move to the left if they just had better information. Great journalism is out there. If an algorithmic echo chamber prevents people from seeing it that’s hardly the reporter’s fault. I’d go further to say that the algorithms can’t be blamed for giving us what we want.
What we learned from the documents made public during the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News was that the hosts, producers, and executives were terrified of upsetting their audience. After all these years of liberal commentators telling us that Fox was radicalizing Memaw and Poppop, when we got a peak into the sausage factory it was the opposite. The viewers were radicalizing Fox.
Conservatives don’t become deplorables because they’re misinformed. Conservatives get misinformed because they’re deplorable. Don’t get it twisted.
The fact that they have a “news” channel that just generates what its viewers want to believe in is the major issue for me.
Also, it angers me no end that in every other news org’s fight to be seen as “fair and balanced”, they tend to run a speech/interview with a conservative talking head and then a speech/interview with a liberal talking head. If what the conservative is saying is largely a fiction, why are they allowed to present it at all??
Take Trump as the biggest example of this. If interviewers just stopped him the first time he lied and wouldn’t let him go on until he had corrected that lie, people wouldn’t get nearly the amount of random misinformation out of him that they do now. My feeling is whenever someone is being interviewed, that should be the media policy. Just a flat refusal to let you lie on air. Unfortunately in this extremely commercially driven era, they basically want the controversy and the clickbait, so they happily let all the lies go by so they can throw gasoline on the fire and drag in more views.