ITS ALL ABOUT THE BIAS: TRUMP, THE CNN ANCHOR, AND THE ABSURDITY OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA [4 MINUTE READ]

SOURCE: www.pexels.com

One of my friends told me yesterday that a CNN anchor had left CNN to work for Trump's daughter in law's "Real News" channel. The channel is broadcasting from Trump Tower. I told him you must be joking. He wasn't. It was one of the craziest things I had heard in a long time. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that maybe it wasn't really so surprising after all.

Scandals at CNN

Think about the recent scandals that have rocked CNN. In one of these, one of their anchors was apparently caught admitting that the whole Russia/Trump connection was made up. It seems like almost every story on CNN is not just anti Trump, but aggressively anti-Trump. To the point of absurdity. Almost as if they like the current relatively rational North Korean leader much more than Trump. 

But apart from these issues, it is just hard for me to see how they can survive over the medium to long term. Why? Because they don't offer anything besides mindless pseudo intellectual rhetoric. They cater exclusively for individuals taht INCERTO editor Nassim Taleb would call The Intellectual Yet Idiot. Taleb's influential article was published a little less than a year ago. In summary such individuals are characterized by the following:

• Education: Almost always attend “elite universities,” such as the Ivy League or Oxbridge. NOTE: Most students at these schools are not IYIs, but a decent percentage qualify.
• Industries: Tend to have experience mostly in academia, the government, “think tanks,” and the mainstream media.
• Skin in the Game: None. They advocate for or against policies from which they never feel the negative effects, making such advocacy meaningless.
• Media: Like The New Yorker and TED talks (ugh).
• And, most importantly, the IYI never deadlifts - they never really start from nothing and create something original

So it is for this reason that I immediately had a non-negative reaction to the news. 

I still wasn't convinced that it is a good development though. Not so much the fact that this specific anchor from CNN of all places had joined a pro-Trump news outlet. More the mere fact that such a news outlet exists! It kind of makes you think of places like the old Soviet Union or the current North Korea where state propaganda is so prevalent. Were they not as guilty as CNN then? In other words, not really reporting on news, but more just advancing some ideology or agenda?

ITS ALL ABOUT THE BIAS

Then I realized: this has nothing to do with "news." The tail has been wagging the dog so long in the mainstream media, that most of what we consider to be news, is in fact nothing but propoganda anyway. It is just part of our society. We feel uncomfortable with this kind of news outlet (the Trump Tower one) because the mainstream media has, along with creating news out of thin air, also succeeded in making us think that they are unbiased. 

Which makes even more shocking the extent to which Trump's feud with the mainstream media, presumably because of a disagreement regarding the future of the show "The Apprentice", has fuel Trump Hate. CNN anchors grimace when the talk about Trump's latest "scandal". Unbiased people are not supposed to grimace. Maybe they want us to think that, yes CNN like all others are of course unbiased, but this is so bad, that even an unbiased onlooker cannot help but feel offended/surprised/shocked.

I guess I haven't made my mind up completely yet. But one thing's for sure. I, along with many other people, are going to think twice about believing what we see on CNN in future. 

References:

https://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/how-to-beat-the-intellectual-yet-idiot/

https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.6ot3305bl - article extracted from Skin in the Game