Is this true? Didn’t MSNBC exist prior to Fox news? I thought Fox basically existed to give a more fair and balanced voice (I choked a little saying that) to an otherwise entirely leftwing media? I’m talking about TV, radio has lots of extreme right wing personalities. I always sort of assumed that’s why Fox is so over the top, it has to be shock and awe to try to offset some of the left wing extremism – which is equally extreme, just not as overt about it in a lot of cases.
The media in general has to be left wing (populist) since that is the larger advertising / revenue base to draw from. Fox seems to exist just to give this system a black eye while itself benefitting (from the same system of advertising dollars).
Personally, the whole thing is a sham. If you exclude a few social issues like religion, gay marriage and abortion, the parties are almost entirely the same. I suspect the social issues are only talking points for the most part to try to win different parts of the voter base. They’re certainly no where close to the polar opposites that the media tries to paint.
A long time ago MSNBC was simply NBC - national broadcasting corportation and fairly middle of the road. Tom Brokaw was the anchorman at NBC for many many years. He hardly sounds like an extremist point of view.
Then Microsoft merged with NBC (bought previously by Comcast) in 1996 to form MSNBC, because - obviously - a software company and a news company were clear synergy. The firm made an immedate jump to the far left by hosting Ann Coulter and Laura Ingrahm on the show The Contributors and the like. In the early years, MSNBC was actually fairly conservative.
In the 2000s, MSNBC started getting more political, at least according to the Wikipedia history. Late in the decade it started to get more clearly left leaning, when Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow started getting more press. The polarization of politics in the 1990s and 2000s worked to its advantage, I suppose. Since the right wing screaming spot was already taken by Fox, it made more business sense for MSNBC to cator to the outrage on the left. As for whether the management leans right or left, it’s probably all just a business decision and not a political one, although - having made that decision - it probably means that new hires tend to come from the new political viewpoint, and that may create institutional memory and preferences as long as the firm remains profitable as a place for leftists to go.
As for the right and the left being exactly the same… I think you only have to look at Obamacare and questions of banking regulation (possibly unionization rules too) to conclude that there are more differences than just gay marriage and abortion dividing the parties. Sure - no parties are advocating the abolition of private property - but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is on the same page in terms of economic policy.
Good catch. It’s obviously because the military contracts are only awarded to big, rich Republican donors, and the military only serves to protect the interests of the big, rich 1% who own half the country. You know, Big Oil and the like.
I think you guys are drinking the Kool Aid. Go down the list and they are basically the same:
Middle East policy: The same (drop bombs on women and children to ensure low cost oil to the US)
The deficit and USD currency: The same (do nothing, pretend it doesnt exist, debauch the currency)
Taxes: The same (tax more, the only question is who)
The nanny state: The same (provide tons of free hand outs in exchange for votes)
US foreign policy: The same (exploit the third world and people we don’t like with our hundreds of military bases around the world and massive defense budget)
Corporate America: The same (accept huge donations for political sway, support the plutocracy)
The middle class: The same (you, sir, are f*cked)
Spying on its own people and illegal persecution: The same (you have no rights, The Constitution is void)
etc., etc.
It’s true that there are some minor variations within the broader themes – for example, Republicans think we should have dropped more bombs faster on women and children in the Middle East and/or should be sucking the region dry of oil at an even faster rate, but it’s not like the Democrats / Obama are actively trying to end the wars over there (despite his campaign lies).
Basically, if you line up the two parties side by side on a continuum of potential political affiliations, they are right next to each other. Not 100% the same, but maybe 90% the same. Don’t say the Democrats are about increasing the size of the government while Republicans aren’t, they’re both about big government.
All you have to do to know they are the same is to say, “Republicans want to do X, and Democrats have really actively tried to do the opposite of X” where you measure actual outcomes, not just talk. This is hard to do. Mostly they are the same. “Democrats want to actively cut the defense budget… oh, no, actually they also spend hundreds of billions a year on defense.” Go down the list of major political issues and they almost all fall into this camp.
Neither party did anything to fix the banking system.
Neither party did anything to fix healthcare. The argument is about whether the current policies (which ensure that the US goes bankrupt even faster) will remain or be repealed.
You can hardly say these are examples of extreme policy divergence. Both policies are designed to enrich large corporations at the expense of the middle class. In this respect, the parties are identical, the mechanism of action is just a little different.
Just who are these “large corporations” that are being enriched? How do you “enrich” a corporation? By giving it a better diet? Give it three weeks of vacation instead of four? When a corporation gets rich, does it buy its clothes at Neiman Marcus instead of Macy’s? Maybe it prefers to wear a Cartier watch instead of a Citizen?
No, and I don’t need to. I need someone to answer the question, “How does a corporation get richer?” When corporation get richer, do they take extended weekends? Do they sleep later? Do they get better-looking girlfriends or boyfriends? For that matter, how do we know whether a corporation is a boy or a girl? Can they be gay? Are more corporations becoming religious or atheist? Do Jewish and Muslim corporations get along?
This is interesting. Usually, people who lament that the two parties are “virtually identical” are lamenting the absence of a socialist or communist party in the United States and saying that the Democrats aren’t nearly radical enough to be considered a separate party from the Republicans. I assume bromion is not upset about the lack of support for communism, but wants more representation on the economic right - something like the tea party being a separate and powerful party. Or is it something else? I’m not being sarcastic in any way here, just curiosity.
Ah. I see. Corporations suffer from personality disorders. I remember one corporation that I went to boot camp with. It got sent to Iraq, then came back with PTSD. Another corporation here at my office had a baby corporation, and the baby has the flu, so now I have to do both my work and the corporation’s work, too. If those stupid corporations would stop sending their baby corporations to corporate daycare, this problem would have been solved.
To take two contemporary examples, you could repeal Glass-Steagall. What could possibly go wrong there? You could also force through legislation that does not address healthcare costs, but which dramatically expands the number of insured lives. I’m sure that has nothing to do with making Big Healthcare more profitable though. You could funnel huge amounts of money to a select set of defense contractors that have connections to Congress. From an accounting perspective (since you’re an accountant), you could consider enriching a corporation expanding its bottom line. Did they cover net profit on the CPA exam?
I’m not sure what the Tea Party represents. It seems to be a quasi-religious organization that hates brown people. I could be wrong though, I really have no idea. If Sarah Palin is the spokesperson, I am skeptical. I’m also not sure nearly identical is itself the problem. If you had two parties that generally did the “right thing” in trying to represent the people, then it wouldn’t matter as much if the parties were more or less the same. The problem is that our government is clearly broken and not designed to represent the common man (as was the founding premise of the country). I am not sure how to fix this. Taking money out of politics seems like a good place to start. My main point is that there is a false dichotomy between right and left, and it doesn’t really matter who is in office, they are mostly going to persist with a common status quo. That should be obvious into Obama’s second term. He is effectively the same as Bush on the majority of issues.
Finally, someone who brings up some good points about corporations. But alas, all these things were done by people. Just like the corporation has a bottom line (called net profit), which is ultimately paid out to investors–either in the form of dividends or in the form of capital appreciation. These investors are—you guessed it—people. “But wait, Greenman! Some investors are institutions, like Texas Teacher Retirement System or American Funds Growth Fund of America”. Yes, they are. And they manage these funds for the benefit of—people. Real people. People like you and me. I’m really tired of people saying that corporations are people. Corporations are not people. Corporations are a group of legal documents put together by a lawyer that gets sent to the Secretary of State in the state capital. It is not a person. It is a bunch of paper. (Sorry if this seems like a rant, but it’s a pet peeve of mine.)
Legally, corporations have the same rights as people. As to whether they are literally people, that’s different. Juridically, they are the same in the eyes of the law.
Yes, I agree with you here. It seems that the context in which government operates is such that which party is in power matters only in terms of the speed at which things are collapsing, and who takes the biggest fall hardest. In the 1960s people were worried about “ungovernability,” that social protests over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, etc. were so destabilizing that government really wasn’t able to do anything. Then in the 1980s-2000s conservatives managed to strip government of many powers and in many ways “starve the beast” so government isn’t managing massive protests, but still isn’t able to do very much on its own, except hand out tax rebates to preferred constituencies while raising overall taxes because of budget concerns. As a result, it manages to tilt the competitive field towards those who can pay for access, even as it implements things (like the sequester) that people generally dislike (but which - in a general sense - may still be necessary).