Vox: Domestic terrorism is on the rise. Why won't cable news networks say so?

[TygrBright]

Cable news aims not to inform but to placate. It facilitated the rise of our current hellscape.

But sooner or later, it all comes back to TV news. A recent story in the Atlantic made me realize that much of what we’re dealing with is the logical endpoint of television’s cultural dominance over the past half-century. The story, by Alexis Madrigal, presents a Pew Research Center study in which respondents of various ages were presented with several statements and asked to identify which ones were fact and which were opinion.

The difference seems obvious: Statements of fact, even ones that aren’t true, can be definitively verified or debunked. Statements of opinion are based on the speaker’s own thoughts about how the world works or should work. But older Americans — those most likely to be in Fox News’s core audience — were most likely to fail to properly sort the statements between fact and opinion.

Those older Americans are still the audience that’s most likely to get its information from sources like TV news, and they’re more likely to be whiter and more conservative, too, than their younger cohort. So when you consider just how much TV news has blurred the lines between fact and opinion in the wake of Fox News’s success, the results of this study feel much less surprising.

Chasing this audience has led TV news to a place where NBC News is hiring Megyn Kelly despite having no clear role for her, and where networks struggle with how to talk about a wave of violence emanating most clearly from one corner of the political spectrum. There are certainly good-faith arguments against labeling this kind of violence terrorism — most of which have to do with waiting for the FBI to issue that label, or with the fact that definitions of terrorism usually involve some sort of organized, radicalizing sect, rather than a bunch of lone wolf operators who have been emboldened by YouTube, or Fox News, or the president.

A long article, but very insightful.

appreciatively,
Bright

[Caliman73]

1. Simplified - Because terrorism in service of White supremacy is not terrorism

To many people, while they "abhor" violence and send "thoughts and prayers" to the victims, they have never equated "terrorism" with White people.

They may say that the KKK was hateful, but terrorism is reserved for Black and Brown people, and leftists. The Black Panthers were a terror group, the SLA, the PLO, Cubans who hijacked planes, the Earth Liberation Front, and of course Muslims. Those are all terrorists because they try to subvert the established order.

White terrorists, while using tactics that make everyone, including many White people uncomfortable are using those tactics in service to the status quo. They are (inappropriately) defending White culture and power structures, not trying to change things.

People will not admit to it, but that is the reason these people are not called terrorists.