You're really giving too much credit to podcasts here. If you were to look at your argument from the other side, the fact that it costs next to nothing makes it a really cheap way to spread biased/false information. (See: Alex Jones)
The majority of podcasts I've listened to have an obvious political bias, even the ones I would deem mostly objective clearly show some of the hosts biases. I've actually stopped listening to some because of this. ('Reply All' and 'Rich Dad Radio Show', for example, at opposite ends of the spectrum.)
If you know of a podcast that purely, subjectively presents news, I'd love to hear it!
Reply All is (or was, before it imploded) an interesting one as a stand in for how this has played out on the left. They got more and more blatant about their views over the years, and even though I generally ascribe to the same views, I would rather not have them put forth so blatantly, especially in a program that purports to be investigative.
My assumption is that with the increasing polarization, many shows followed their audiences to the poles. It feels rare these days for someone to not stake out a stance on some culture war battle, whether subtly or not.
It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there, or the least biased in a consistent direction at least. You also get a lot of off the wall crazy shit on there, but honestly someone willing to have enough of an open mind to have people on like that not just to make fun of is a nice change of pace, even if the things are ridiculous, given how entrenched everyone else is in their positions.
Eh, it is pretty tough to stay purely objective about political reporting these days. "Both sides" play political messaging games, but the Republican party led by Mitch McConnell is a pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system. They'll destroy all Americans' faith in democracy and each other, if it means the GOP can suppress minorities and keep their own pockets lined.
So while "Pod Save America" for example is biased, I still believe their takes on what is happening at the federal level are informative and thought-provoking.
Take a look at this opinion from a distance and see if you think it accurately reflects the views of half of the American population or if you might have internalized some biases
And the politicians in red states are conspicuously making efforts to restrict voters, in ways that they know are more likely to apply to voters who oppose them, going well beyond just voter ID:
So no, it's not just the OP's internalized bias. It's a simple, objective fact that they are attempting to make it harder for their opponents to win elections, based on an objectively false narrative.
I will bend over backwards to try to reach a common point from which to move forward and share a country together. I want to be aware of my own biases and the places where I disagree with the people who share some of my views. But that simply cannot happen in an environment like this, and nothing I do can change that.
It's what they are saying, in public. The large number of them saying so doesn't make it less true, only much scarier. It would seem impossible that so much of the country should be so objectively deluded, but it's literally their own words.
With the amount of people in the country that are not legally allowed to vote it is not crazy or restrictive to require some proof that you are a citizen to vote in a national election.
That issue is a perfect microcosm to explain both the problem with polarization and information silos, and why progress on an issue like this is so hard, and why no progress is made forming consensus because neither side wants there to be.
The left presents the issue as:
- People already verify themselves
- Voter fraud doesn't happen
- This is used to disenfranchise voters by making it harder because poor people are less likely to have a valid ID.
The right presents this as:
- No proof is required in many jurisdictions
- There are instances of voter fraud, and while few, there may be a lot we don't see
- Voting is important, so we should take it seriously and require people prove their identity to vote
The problem is that both of these sides are entirely true. Namely, verify != proof, and people talk past each other on this, and selective omission of the other side's valid points lets people believe the other side is irrational or wants it in bad faith (Republican operatives may want to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote, but from what I've seen Republican citizens do not).
The respective parties have no interest in bringing people to consensus on this issue because right now it's one that activates the bases of the respective parties. It's a way to take moderates that might be tempted to vote against the party line or for the other side for select positions and people that they respect and radicalize them by papering over the real positions of those people with the twisted narrative put forth by the media that caters to that side.
People are for the most part rational and compassionate and don't want to hurt each other. But people are also easily misled into believing things because of curated information presented when they don't have counterexamples that they trust or first hand experience to the contrary, and those beliefs cause what is considered rational and compassionate to differ from person to person. We shouldn't hate or dislike the people on the other side, they are just like us. We should engage them usefully, and the first step of engaging usefully is accepting that we're like them also in that we're presented with curated facts, so we should be open to their points when we engage and accept them in good faith.
I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen, that is demonstrably false. There are a few convicted vote fraud cases annually. The claim is that it is insignificant.
> I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen
Some will claim it, or say it's a myth, and if anyone points out those few cases, they'll say it's statistically insignificant to the point of not being something we should worry about.
It is strictly incorrect, but colloquially accepted as okay to say, which is yet another thing argued about from each side.
I suspect that you thinking you haven't seen it is likely because you're interpreting their intent and not reading the words strictly, or they followed up to clarify and that's the part you remember, because it's common to see. The problem is that the other side remembers the first claim or the strict interpretation of the statement, so both come away thinking they were correct, one in that the statement was "true", the other that the person was not being "truthful".
As I said, the laws in question have nothing to do with the basically-nonexistent "voter fraud". Nothing about voting on Sunday could possibly have anything to do with voter fraud, but that's one of the things they're trying to ban. They're limiting voting hour and removing polling stations, and then making it illegal to give people water while they stand in line.
Even if voter fraud were a problem (it isn't), they're not even pretending that these measures have anything to do with it. And that makes it incredibly clear that they don't believe that voter fraud is the reason for any of it.
Where in the US do you think you can vote without providing any proof that you're a citizen? Tell me, and I'll tell you what proof was actually required.
California is the big one. Many states only require proof of residency to vote. Any state that allows something like a utility bill as ID is allowing all residents regardless of citizenship to vote. Not being a citizen isn't an issue for state level elections if that is what the state chooses to allow. But, national election voting rights are only extended to citizens.
Thank you for being specific. You're ignoring the fact that for the requirements listed here [1] to be valid, you need to have already registered to vote. To register, you need to (among other things) sign an affidavit affirming that you are a US citizen. It sounds like your real complaint is about CA not following through on punishment for those who lie on this form.
If all it takes is a simple lie, you’re not really doing any meaningful verification. If that level of trust was good enough, why not just drop all checks entirely at voting booths and just have a brief questionnaire that asks “are you allowed to vote?”
Higher ID requirements increase security, but also improve republican result b/c democratic voters are less likely to have certain IDs (I think). As a result this can be spun either way as Republicans restricting voters, or Democrats opposing countermeasures to fraud.
Personally I don't know, I think I'd focus on Democrat behaviour; Given they just got off the back of Russia-gate, and accusing a foreign superpower of interfering in the election, they should also theoretically have a stake in voter fraud. I'd expect them to be focusing more on driving their demographics to acquire ID, rather than loosening requirements. Mail-in voting is a hard one though.
As an aside - I'm unconvinced by reports that voter fraud are low. No evidence of fraud isn't evidence of no fraud, and too many news articles or "explainers" seem to focus on lack of evidence versus a secure and airtight verification process.
election officials .. referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting.. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.
Forty of the jurisdictions .. reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting..
In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting..
In .. the states where Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official we spoke with identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016
The headline claims "no noncitizen voting" but the actual process implies "no noncitizen voting, that officials know about, (or are willing to say)". What it doesn't account for is incompetence, poor vetting/fraud detection and complicity among officials. For the strong claims coming from self-proclaimed voting experts, I'd expect some kind of random sampling of votes, not "we asked the people who counted the votes" - well, they're not likely to condemn their own reports, are they? The fact that a lot of hot air and political context is upfront, and self-critical analysis of their own process is not is what makes me doubtful of these kind of text, despite the credentials/qualifications of the authors.
You conflate election fraud (hacking machines), voter fraud (individuals illicitly casting ballots), and state-sponsored misinformation campaigns. Those are three distinct problems with very different challenges.
You say "no evidence of $x != evidence of (not x)" which is true in theory, but let's step into reality: "No evidence, despite systems built to detect evidence".
You act as if people aren't already on the lookout for fraud, or that systems are not already resistant to them.
You're asking people to spend a lot of time, money, and political capital, on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem. I'm sorry, but that is not reasonable or realistic. I understand the whole issue of "no evidence of fraud doesn't mean no fraud" but if we treated every problem like this we would never run out of problems. When you combine all of what I just said with the fact that we know certain groups are disproportionately effected by these rules...it just comes across as you saying "yes I know there's no evidence that this is a serious problem but I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect."
> on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem
Because "no evidence" isn't relevant. If it was, no one would care about Trumps taxes; and the IRS would happily decrease reporting requirements, and work on an honour system.
The mechanism by which the ruling powers of the nation are decided is pretty important, so the requirement on "time, money, and political capital" is not at un unreasonable - it isn't important if "we treated every problem like this.." because every problem is not equally as important.
The fact is there are huge incentives to cheat, and undeveloped nations across the world are characterised by unfair elections, it's not unreasonable, then, to place importance on the veracity of the election process, more than just a glib "there's no evidence that this is a serious problem".
> I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect
fairness is dictated by the rules you dismiss as "abstract and theoretical". You talks about "facts" and what "we know", but that is the very issue - what we don't know. It's convenient to discount the value of what we don't know when the current worldview favours your opinion. I don't know anything about undetected fraud, and neither do you; neither of us know how much a problem this is, or who/how it affects people. The only solution is an airtight process, and you seem to dismiss that, worse still, attempting to characterise me as unsympathetic for placing value on such a thing.
The US is the richest country in the world, and it's government richer than most nations of the world. Why should it lack the resources to secure the most significant process in the nation, while poorer corporations (mastercard, veritas etc), and even the military can secure their own, lesser processes much better.
My local concert venue could sign their tickets with 4096-bit RSA, and make us take our shoes off and go through an x-ray before we come in like at an airport. They could have an airtight process; it would stop almost nothing, while making the process far more difficult for patrons.
Yes, I dismiss your desire for an airtight process, because I think it's security theater, whose actual outcomes would be massive and largely detrimental relative to the actual desired outcomes.
I am talking about the usefulness of security theater on the margins. At a concert venue, and at a polling place, we can do things that, in the abstract, increase security, but provide little to no actual benefit and actually serve to make the process more difficult and unpleasant on the whole.
(Ignoring RSA tangent, making all concert-goers go through an X-Ray to screen for weapons and drugs would catch more weapons and drugs than the current pat down/bag check process does. It would undeniably increase the security of the venue, while slowing down entry, exposing concertgoers to X-Rays, and IMO providing more annoyance than actual extra security)
It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off. I do not.
edit: not disagreeing that signed tickets would prevent fraud. Disagreeing that it would be worth, say, an additional $5 fee on the tickets, plus slower more expensive readers to verify that they're signed correctly, plus plus plus etc etc. My entire argument here is based on the net utility of additional security measures, not whether or not those measures provide additional security.
Security theatre often refers to security from physical threat. I'm not talking about undetected fraud in a sense where that makes sense, but rather a verifiable, auditable process.
The only thing you referred to that was process related (versus physical security) was use of encryption keys. Why not talk about the pros/cons of that?
> It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off
With respect to x-ray screens? Not at all, nor did I say such a thing. Nor do I think all things that could be described as "security" are exactly equivalent to each other, such that you can mention x-ray scans, and the argument automatically extends to RSA keys.
...I'm putting myself in the shoes of a person who is in the united states without authorization...and with that in mind, why in the world would I risk exposing myself and my illegal status by participating in something as pointless as voting in US elections...
I just don't see how an average person concerned with being deported is willing to risk exposing themselves by registering with the state government, especially in the last 8 years of ICE really pushing the limits on what they can do.
It is a fact that there was an insurrectionist attack on congress on Jan 6, that there were obvious lies about false election fraud pushed by the president and eventually by the majority of the Republican party.
What are you getting at by saying whether it reflects the views of half of America? Those views are objectively incorrect, not based on reality. Reality here is not based on someone's opinion, no matter how widespread the belief in it is.
Note that I said the Republican party. I know there are many decent humans in this country who have small-c conservative beliefs, and I can have reasonable discussion with some of them.
And I pity those who don't take the time to create their own philosophical defense of their beliefs, and only parrot what Fox News tells them to think.
When I start getting into a heated discussion, I like to turn away from arguing about specific people (too much) and say "What do you want this country to be? What matters to you?" and the discussion becomes a lot more enlightening.
So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.
> So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.
For someone who extols “philosophical defenses of beliefs”, you certainly make use of shitty straw men to do so. I suppose you didn’t say anything about the quality of the philosophy.
>pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system
It's quotes like this that make it hard for non-Americans like myself to take American political discourse seriously. To me, takes like this are at a similar effort level to the "Obama is a socialist!" cries heard in the 2008 election. Yawn.
So, are you a bot? Or are you just not thinking independently? I strongly suggest spending less time on social media. You’ll find that both sides of the political spectrum are just people, like you and me. Not “monsters” as the news would like you to believe.
I think plenty on my own. Like many humans, I occasionally use terms in vogue to get the point across. You must not work in technology or communications. (see how asinine that sounds?)
I'll forgive you for not seeing my other comment in the thread, but to be clear, my beef is with the political establishment on the right. My feelings toward "normal human beings" who are conservative are much more varied.
The Republican party as an organization at the federal level is indisputably a less patriotic, more malicious organization than the Democratic party, which has its own problems of infighting, horse-trading, and "everyday" corruption.
But instead of posting the latest trove of articles describing McConnell threatening SCOTUS appointments again, or Trump trying to use the Justice Department to investigate debunked claims of voter fraud for his own benefit, or the million other datapoints about how awful the GOP leadership is - please, continue calling me a bot.
I didn't mean to insult your intelligence. I see plenty of intelligent people acting irrationally these days.
I suggest checking out right-wing Twitter/corporate news to see how they're using the same words ("unpatriotic", "malicious") in the exact same way to describe the democrats. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. It's not black and white, evil vs. good. At least not in the real world.
>It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there,
There are plenty of other hosts that do a much better job than Rogan (David French & Yascha Mounk). Rogan does indeed have a slant, it just doesn't fit into the most stereotypical red v blue one.
Alex Jones's biggest sin is he's boring. He repeats himself over and over again. You could listen to him for 30 minutes and then tune in 12 months later and it's the same stuff, whatever you make of it. Art Bell was a conspiracy theory guy back in the day on late night radio, but he was damned interesting and talked to all kinds of random interesting weirdos. Many of them not that credible, but at least interesting. Not to sound old and cranky, but back in my day, when you heard someone interviewed, it was up to the person listening to evaluate their credibility and not to be protected in a little bubble because one was assumed to be too easily influenced to listen to the unvetted.
Podcasts are by no means "The Truth", but at least they are not on the mainstream narrative script and they often don't have a purely political focus. As long as they aren't solely discussing the mainstream news narrative or reacting to it, they can be very interesting. I think Bret Weinstein can be pretty interesting as far as media criticism goes. The Other Life podcast[1] is an example of a podcast that's very disconnected from the mainstream narratives and feels like I'm sitting in a cafe in the 90s drinking coffee with a bunch of intellectual weirdos. Maybe not your cup of tea, or coffee, but it's better than listening to the mainstream news and filling myself with that garbage.
Also podcasts are mostly assumed to be biased by the host, as he directs the conversation. Mainstream news has more indirection from reader to writer so the bias is less tangible.
How could one listen to enough Alex Jones to know this? I like the idea of Alex Jones, paranoid style American politics is a tradition and has its uses, but it’s to me a bit like pro wrestling. It’s not content that’s pitched toward the upper 2/3rds of the bell curve. He is a canary.
With low budget operations there is at least the possibility of objectivity. When there is a bunch of money involved there is not. And that’s not my opinion, it’s the opinion and words of the technical director of CNN.
There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).
Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
Or let's use a real historical example: The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939. Without any context, the SU is clearly the agressor. But with the context of Polands invasion into the SU in 1919 things suddenly look different. And with the additional context of Russia annecting polish territory in the 18th century it looks different again and so on and so on. There clearly is no way to communicate this objectively (i.e. in this case, pro-Russia people could ask why I'd stop here and not with some polish-lithuanian action before the 18th century).
there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
Why? You can’t explain all the things (even if you’re backed with true data) in one article – that would take a library. A drought by itself doesn’t skew anything, but maybe your intent is more that just that.
The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939
This is a circular problem. Either do not call it “invasion” or do and so be it. The fact that some monkey punched some other in year 40000 BC has nothing to do with active political contracts. I will not even downvote you on the internet if I find out that our gggps shot at each other in ww1/2, it’s irrelevant now. Most of these people are dead. If you want to remain neutral (nearest to “objective”, which isn’t a thing in case of a physical land), call it a conflict based on historical events and let a reader investigate, discuss and decide who is right and who is wrong, if any, if they ever want that decision. Maybe most people don’t really give a genuine fuck about who is right (if that was a bet, I’d go all in with it).
I would even read political news then. Modern “good boys bad boys” or “oh see you see what you done” stories only make me laugh or facepalm. I’m a reader, not a puppet. No surprise younger people only want tiktok and clothes.
I think we'd first have to find common ground on what the purpose of a free press is. In my opinion the goal is to have informed citizens that can have informed participation in the democratic decision-making process.
For that, we not only have to know the what, but also the why behind a news item. We have to know the relationships between things.
So while we can't indeed can't explain everything completely, that doesn't mean we can't explain anything.
In hindsight the drought/global warming example is bad because there can indeed be another reason for the ocurrence, but even telling multiple possible reasons (e.g. by asking an expert) makes the news item more insightful than any context at all.
> This is a circular problem.
Yes, that was my point! There is no arbitrary threshold where we could stop referring to things happening in the past and get unbiased news.
Or yet another example: The current debate around minimum wage increases. The news could simply state the positions of the two parties, and the current nominal number of $7.25. But that wouldn't make this unbiased, because the $7.25 at inception had a different purchasing power than now. And a different ratio to GPD per capita. Thus omitting this context skews the news item towards the side that is against an increase. But adding the context favors the side that is for the increase.
I see it as a source of events that then can be discussed with actual people around you to create a world view. This way an information either misses you completely or you relate to a trusted group that has it. In a world where news are complete, there is nothing to discuss, because authoritative (or not, it’s hard to check) sources already said everything. This swithces discussion from learning all the details to taking the presented details. This is a problem known as “what’s not being said”, and personally I see it everywhere now. I.e. if we disagreed on an interpretation, it was you versus me (both at least knowing each other). With context-ed news it’s your sources versus my sources, which we both are unable to really check adequately, because it’s a recursive problem. That induces beliefs instead of thinking. I believe that context should be left vague at least. If there are questions, press should formulate them, not answer.
I think the primary purpose of the press should be to hold people in position of power accountable for their actions. That's pretty much it. The role of reporting on world events and generating a shared reality can be useful and informative, but is mainly a distraction from the first (and primary) role that media plays in society.
The press is never unbiased - look at newspapers from the 50s or 60s which had strong anti-communist propaganda. Everything has a slant - I don't understand where the obsession with "unbiasedness" came from.
The only question that matters (in a democracy or anywhere with a free press) is - does the media hold people in positions of power (whether political-power, wealth-power or celebrity-power) accountable for their misdeeds or not. Bias is only a problem when it interferes [directly] with this purpose.
News doesn’t need to provide context. It’s possible to remove words like unprovoked from the reporting and just list the facts. We don’t hear that neutral point of view because it makes things boring.
That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.
There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event. The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
Ideally, the goal would be to minimize bias, however I see the opposite many times, and I see it actually as a result of reduced revenue for people that make news.
We, the public at large, responded to information that evokes emotion (especially outrage). We rewarded it with clicks, translating into money for the people that collect and curate it for us. And that is what we get now. We get information, that has been compressed, and while factual many times, it is without the necessary context to come to an appropriate conclusion.
I think the antidote to this might be consumers rewarding publishers and journalists that wait before publishing. They wait so that there is time for the relevant facts to be gathered, there is time for the editors and journalists to write and edit properly. And, to still keep in mind, that it is still insanely difficult to provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion. As one should know if they have ever read an article about a field they are intimately familiar with and have spent thousands of hours in.
> There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event.
Facts relating to events aren’t news their just facts.
> The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
You can come up with the threshold for what’s news long before individual stories show up. It’s filtering based on political context that’s the problem not simply filtering. Aka, decide ahead of time that a president being impeached is news that’s fine. However, if your coverage depends on their party affiliation that’s a problem.
> provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion.
I don’t see why people need to be making conclusions from the news. A Twitter account tweeting any earthquake over 7.0 is fine on it’s own.
If the news is that three people died in a shooting, would you not be better informed by knowing the context that they were drug dealers in a conflict over territory?
Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.
I don't think that it is difficult to determine the scope of the violence, eg: 'gang on gang' compared to 'an angry mentally ill person shooting random people'... which is typically peoples main concern, and you can explain that in a matter of seconds.
It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.
The root issue is I don’t want reporters to guess and report what something probably is. Flight 123 an Airbus XYZ crashed at on takeoff from location Z. Fine that’s all verifiable, what the cause was isn’t known don’t even guess you’re just wasting my time.
Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.
It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.
For something more recent, the Russian annexation of Crimea. Or rejoining depending on how you interpret history (or get your news) - but western media leaves the important historical bits out because they have a specific political agenda.
> There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).
> Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
There is an objectivity here: scientific consensus, aka naked provable facts. And climate change is proven to be man-made, and it is proven that if humanity does nothing to curb CO2 emissions it will spiral out of control.
Objectivity in news as a result means to not give those who go against scientific consensus any platform.
On the other hand if it's a low budget op it will be bought cheaply like buying troll farms or paying "influencers" to promote all kind of crap. In the end you may get the same crap but in a more distributed manner.
Doesn't Joe Rogan typically have a bigger audience than an average so-called-mainstream news program? The economics might play out that it is more expensive to get him to endorse something than get it run on a major network.
There aren't many (any, really) quality guarantees on non-podcast media anyway. It isn't like they get any negative feedback when they lie or make mistakes. Viewers can't even withdraw support for specific known liars on a channel. It is unclear why a podcast would be at a structural disadvantage to any other media source, and probably higher reputational stakes.
same here. spotify does not seem to get the user experience right unfortunately, particularly around offline/low data use. or may be it’s just me not liking “one stop shops” when it comes to podcasts and music.
Thanks, I looked it up, but it seems very left-oriented. So it really kinda confirms my point. Unless I'm missing something, since I only briefly looked into it.
The majority of podcasts I've listened to have an obvious political bias, even the ones I would deem mostly objective clearly show some of the hosts biases. I've actually stopped listening to some because of this. ('Reply All' and 'Rich Dad Radio Show', for example, at opposite ends of the spectrum.)
If you know of a podcast that purely, subjectively presents news, I'd love to hear it!