FAKE NEWS EXPOSED: A Service of PoliticalChat.com

[whell]

Originally Posted by finnbow

This post shows you don't understand Orwell. He was an outspoken advocate of a free press, something your post graphically depicts. OTOH, your Dear Leader despises a free press and prefers dishonest, sycophantic outlets like OANN, NewsMax, InfoWars and Fox News.

Your response shows you don't understand...well...a lot.

Of course Orwell wanted a free press. But even back in his day, he wasn't satisfied that the news media was delivering on this. He was concerned that journalists were self-defeating in this cause.

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Today's corporatization and extreme polarization of the media has made such "intellectual cowardice" a virtue to the extent that large media companies have found a way to monetize it.

To that end, Fox News buries or distorts elements of the truth just as frequently and aggressively as CNN does. The New York Post and New York Times will have very different takes on the same story. They do this to appeal to a particular audience: the ones most likely to gravitate to their pages or their channel based on their own biases or, to borrow from Orwell, intellectual cowardice.

Back to Orwell's quote that appeared in the picture Chicks posted, if journalists agree only on certain facts to appeal to certain audiences, there's a lot of public relations that take the place of news these days.

In the meantime, you and yours are subject to the same "criticism" that you attempt to level above: you gravitate to CNN, MSNBC, Slate, HuffPo, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and WaPo because they make you more comfortable with their slant on the news.