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Notes -
ABC morning news in 2022 reminds me of clips John Stewart would play of Glenn Beck in 2004. Even the pretense of objectivity feels like gaslighting. They don't care at all that you learn any facts about what happened, the only important thing is that you feel who are the bad guys (the Republicans) and who are the good guys (the Democrats).
Did you see the “Stewart -> Tucker pipeline” article linked on ACX? It’s a closely related theory that Stewart’s Daily Show sold networks on exactly such a tribal news-adjacent program. Obama-era Fox pundits just figured out how to target it for their group, and by today it’s what all the major programs are trying to tap.
I found it pretty convincing.
Yeah, I saw that. Pretty close to my existing opinion on the influence of The Daily Show, except I think TDS had a much more destructive influence on the lefter shows than Fox, because Fox was already pretty low-brow culture war. I think TDS taught an entire generation of progressives that political debate consisted of sneering at maliciously edited caricatures of the outgroup, and we are still deaing with the repercussions of that.
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