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Comment by nickdonnelly | Hacker News Reader

Long and short of it: Ted Turner is the guy who created CNN, a very influential news source in the US. Many people consider CNN to be a "left-wing" news source, and in the clip King talks to Bill Clinton, a democratic politician, about Ted Turner "serving" Clinton after he was elected president.

The use of the word "serving" is the issue, as it sounds like a quid pro quo.

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It could just as easily mean "serve" as in your administration-- in a cabinet position for example.

>> Many people consider CNN to be a "left-wing" news source

Are their people that do see the clear bias of the network?

This is like saying "Many people consider Fox news to be a "right wing" network"

There is no doubt of the political leanings of either network. CNN is/was not called Clinton News Network for nothing.....

CNN is not really “left-wing” in a broad ideological sense. It’s the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the “liberal” side of the US culture war. Note for example how poorly they treated Sanders who was further left than any of the other mainstream candidates.

It is 100% NOT the liberal side of the cultural war. There really is no liberal side

The right side is theological authoritarian, the Left side is illiberal Identitarianism which is ironic because identitarianism started out as a "far right" ideology but in a real world example of the horseshoe theory of politics has become far-left authoritarian

I'm tired of fact-based and reason-based news being painted as 'left-wing". CNN is just the news. I miss when we all watched the same news and it tried to be objective and half the country wasn't watching provably false news and wanting to split off into madness and domestic terror cells and make the human race go backwards.

There is a difference between “this news source strikes me as not being too politically extreme in either direction compared to my own views” and “this news source is completely neutral and objective with respect to all political views.”

How can you be sure you’re not seeing the former and calling it the latter?

If you believe CNN is "just the news" then you are suffering from reinforcing confirmation bias as well as echo chamber.

You agree with the positions CNN takes there for it is "news" and outlets that have differing positions to those you agree with are "fake news" and "want to make the human race go backwards"

You have to see this through 90's lens: back then the media wasn't nearly as polarized, and the public had much greater trust in news networks, especially in CNN. "Fake news" was mostly relegated to the domain of conspiracy theories, and blatant promotions of political agendas as neutral news wouldn't fly back then (although, of course, the networks did have an agenda and did promote it, but they were... much more subtle and civil about the whole thing).

I was alive, and consuming news in the 90's

In the 90's the bias was shown in the stories they choose to cover and what they choose to ignore not in the coverage itself

this is still true today but now in addition to this bias there is almost zero "strait" reporting, everything has political commentary mixed in, some more subtle than others but it is still there. Even in places like APnews where it is more subtle

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