media influence

Should Politics Be On The Playing Field? . Why has just about everything within our lives become political including sports. Should athletes use this form to be political or should they do it off the athletic field and on their own time?

WWF Muppets. In this corner, JD Vance, Vance Refrigeration. And in this corner Governor Tim Balz.

These guys are muppets. They’ll put on a good show, do their best to get folks riled up and to convince everyone that it’s really important, maybe even existentially important, that their side win. Or, more accurately, that they defeat the other side at all costs.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

Sure, Trump is an egomaniacal con man. And Harris is the definition of a career politician and a Washington insider. There’s plenty to dislike for both sides.

So by all means, let’s get riled up. Let’s cheer for our guy and boo the other guy. Let’s celebrate our side’s victory if they win.

Let’s dissect their promises and marketing pitches, and weigh the merits of their perfectly crafted personas.

But let’s not forget that these guys are politicians, in 2024. They are, in many ways, the dregs of a system in its drawn-out death throes. The oily residue that floated to the top of the barrel. They are the chosen muppets, the winners of the focus-group olympics.

They’ll do their dance, just like WWF wrestlers do. But let us never lose sight of their inherent muppetness.

End of cynical rant. ; )

Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.