I think of "the news" as what they are willing to let us know rather than what they could have shared with us based on unbridled curiosity. This is a massive lowering of the bar, of course, but this lowered expectation tamps down my daily sense of disappointment.
From Matt Taibbi:
Now the script is flipped. The press mainstream has borrowed from the old Fox model and not only (as Shapiro notes) excludes dissent via the “laundering of expertise” but leads interminable crusades against an exploding list of deviationists within their own ranks. You may have thought you were solidly a progressive, but you can catch a permanent green-room ban for going against narrative on any issue, whether it’s Syria or Ukraine or Russiagate or trans issues or any of a hundred other things. This is the same losing strategy that hurt the old GOP, which logically should lead to the same losing outcome, except this is a political atmosphere where no one seems to be winning.
Here are some examples that I have collected over the past two years. Bottom line: You should now expect that Left leaning news media will preach to you, not inform you with wide-ranging perspectives, on politically contentious stories of the day. Left leaning legacy "news" outlets like to think they are much better than Fox News, but they are often engaged in the same tactics.
Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well. Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks. Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.
[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes. I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race." I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman. In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]
What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":
I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.
Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.
Julian Assange discusses some basic truths about war and the "news media."
Matt Taibbi has shed light on this taboo story: "The World's Most Taboo Legal Case: While the media world wept over Amber and Johnny, a lawsuit filed by a feminist group over prison sexual abuse remained earth's most ignored scandal. Here is an excerpt:
"On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a class-action lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims. Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:
"Plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez (“Krystal”) is a female offender currently incarcerated in Central California Women’s Facility. Krystal was sexually assaulted by a man transferred to her unit under S.B. 132. Krystal filed a grievance and requested single-sex housing away from men; the prison’s response to Krystal’s grievance referred to her assault by a “transgender woman with a penis.” Krystal does not believe that women have penises…"
Chandler is the headline legal action in a nationwide battle over whether or not prisoners who self-identify as women, including those with histories of rape or sexual abuse, should be allowed to transfer to women’s correctional facilities. There have been both official and unofficial policy changes on this front in a growing collection of states across the country. These often happen little to no public debate, because this issue may be the most impenetrable media taboo in America now. The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns.
[There is a] a growing schism on what was once the political left. The ACLU just proudly announced an attempt to challenge Chandler with other “LGBTQ organizations.” It’s weird enough to see the ACLU — which historically has used most careful language in defending everyone from Neo-Nazis to NAMBLA — issue a press release bluntly describing a feminist organization like WoLF as “bigoted.” It’s weirder still when the complainants are women, many with extensive histories of sexual abuse, suing on behalf of a community that is disproportionately LGB, as 42% of incarcerated women identify as lesbian or bisexual.