How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[poesel]

1 hour ago, alison said:

 I get the sense they are both pandering to voters who do not care even a tiny little bit about what is happening around the rest of the world or America's unique role in maintaining the rules-based international order.

It's not that they don't care - they don't know. And this is not(!) because US citizens are stupider than other humans. No - stupidity is very equally parceled out to everyone.

The problem is that it is quite difficult in the USA to access good information (news) about what's going on in the world.
News channels in the US depend on ad revenue (=viewers) to sustain themselves. But most of the news is pretty boring. So channels need to hype everything up and make it as confrontative as possible to attract viewers.

The end result is, that you know what a person will vote by knowing which news stations he watches. And the information you get will always be very biased.

I was there recently and failed to find a good and free news channel. There may be better ones behind a subscription, but I didn't have one.
As a side note, I got my kicks out of watching OAN. Pure comedy gold. Unfortunately, they don't know it...

When you travel, you always learn something from your home country. During this trip, I learned that easy access to good news is not a given.

[alison]

17 minutes ago, poesel said:

It's not that they don't care - they don't know. And this is not(!) because US citizens are stupider than other humans. No - stupidity is very equally parceled out to everyone.

The problem is that it is quite difficult in the USA to access good information (news) about what's going on in the world.
News channels in the US depend on ad revenue (=viewers) to sustain themselves. But most of the news is pretty boring. So channels need to hype everything up and make it as confrontative as possible to attract viewers.

The end result is, that you know what a person will vote by knowing which news stations he watches. And the information you get will always be very biased.

I was there recently and failed to find a good and free news channel. There may be better ones behind a subscription, but I didn't have one.
As a side note, I got my kicks out of watching OAN. Pure comedy gold. Unfortunately, they don't know it...

When you travel, you always learn something from your home country. During this trip, I learned that easy access to good news is not a given.

Completely agree. I highly recommend watching PBS News Hour, if you are interested in American politics and don't want to put up with the sensationalistic reporting that pretty much all the other American "news" outlets tend to do. You can watch for free online: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/ I occasionally drop in on that one if there is something notable that happened in America the day before, but otherwise I stick with international newspapers. Television news in general isn't great.

If you're a DC nerd, during the early years of GWoT and Iraq War I used to listen to WTOP and Federal News Radio, plus CSPAN for the full sausage-making experience. I don't think most Americans follow or care about that inside the Beltway stuff, but it does give you a much better idea about how their government works on day-to-day basis than the latest social media outrage.

Actually, I think it's social media that's the big differentiator nowadays - and this isn't only limited to the US. The people I know who primarily consume their news through social media have a very different perspective on what is happening in the world, and tend to be very emotionally invested in whatever is currently going viral, even if it doesn't affect them personally - or indeed many people in total - at all.

I feel like social media tends to make it easier to distort the impact of certain events. It can give people the false impression that they are getting to see the real truth of things, unfiltered by the journalistic elite, bla bla bla, but actually what they're seeing is just America's Funniest Most Controversial Home Videos, followed by ground-level hot takes from amateur commentators who imagine that what's happening in one person's backyard must automatically also be happening in every backyard in the country. The sky is falling!

Previously we could identify and discredit purveyors of yellow journalism who were the middle-men/agitators, but now that layer is gone we're facing broad communities of people who essentially rely on gossip for their understanding of the world. It makes me worried, but perhaps it was ever thus?

We've talked about it on this thread before in the context of trying to understand the war just by listening to what the PBI are saying on socials - real news, direct from the trenches! What I gather from people with better military analyst chops than me is that while it is a useful input to have that level of reporting, to truly get a good insight into the war you also need to consider higher level strategic decisions and macro topics around the economy, technological advancement and international affairs. It's a tall order to expect generalized media outlets to do this, so there is always going to be some degree of simplification required... But for me personally, I would rather depend on outlets that let the topics breathe for a bit before reporting, and make sure that when they do report they have tried to gather enough context to simplify the topic in a useful way, than to drink from the firehose myself and prematurely imagine myself an expert on something I probably am not, and maybe nobody is yet because it just happened 5 minutes ago. It's perhaps a less immediately rewarding way to look at the world, though, because everything ends up as a depressing shade of gray with the end conclusion being "it's complicated" rather than just having a simple good guy/bad guy story.

Although, to be honest, for good guy/bad guy stories, I prefer fiction. [Insert your favorite LLF movie meme here.]