Freedom of press.

[Dill]

(03-03-2017, 01:52 AM)Nebuchadnezzar Wrote: The problem with a poll such as this is that those on the Right believe that the majority of the press is on the Left, not just leans Left but full on Left. Those on the Right feel that the press is a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party and that the press doesn't tell the truth and has an agenda.

Calling mainstream media "left" already hints at the problem here.

If a group of people thinks in terms of black and white, them or us, friend or enemy from the get go, then they are likely to see most any analysis not favorable to them as "biased" and project conspiracies. This is a worldview intrinsically hostile to the concept of free press, not to mention of loyal opposition.

Since WWII there have been fringe right groups in the US calling everyone they don't like "leftist" and "communist" and what not. What has changed is that since the 1980s this way of viewing American politics has been mainstreamed, first by talk radio, then by Fox.

Today Rush Limbaugh was talking about the "deep shadow state"--the Obama operatives everywhere still in government who are leaking intel to de-legitimize Trump, a conspiracy to make Trump seem incompetent. To Rush and the listeners who call in, NYT reports about contacts between Trump campaigners and the Russians are wholly driven by what one frequent poster to this forum likes to call "butthurt" over a lost election. Criticisms of the White House now constitute a vast, coordinated liberal effort to bring down the Trump revolution with "fake news."  Contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, during an election cycle in which the Russians agressively intervened, are just no cause for alarm, and to think so reveals bias and immersion in progressive leftist groupthink.