> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.

Checks out:

Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner

June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia

April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery

I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.

No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?

they'll just use AI like everyone else but charge extra for it

Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism

Seems very rational to me.

I'm sure they'll love it when this AI bubble pops too

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania?wprov=sfti1

...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....

https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...

Aren't you people supposed to say "Israelis" so that you can pretend your antisemitism is "legitimate criticism of the country of Israel"?

Some of the most anti-Israel-aggression people I've met in my life have been Jewish, which makes perfect sense as they're generally more interested in the actions of Israel.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/paramount-merger-settlemen...

Hypothetically California could have done something to prevent the merger. Then they [Paramount] leave California, as threatened, and then complete the merger.

The Federal government is the entity which needs to be the enforcer of antitrust. Otherwise major companies like these WILL pick and and leave the state blocking them. It's a 111 billion deal - this is worth moving states for the parties involved.

Here's the issue: nothing stops them from leaving the state anyway after the deal is made. The concessions lack any weight. California folded potentially for nothing.

At the same time, this promise to "support labor" falls flat when they have been actively combatting with it for recent years. Their words ring hollow.

And if we're being realistic: this is mostly Newsom trying to cover his tracks and look "strong" for 2028.

> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.

> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.

So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?

1: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... 2: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/15/qatar_is...

Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.

I think you could make a graph showing the inverse relationship between how pro palestinian a country is, versus how crap of a place it is to live in.

So you're saying if a place is more pro-palestinian it's less crap to live there. Makes sense.

With that introduction, is there a quick sum up somewhere to get someone like me to understand why there's so much division on this topic? All I really know is that in the most recent stuff with Gaza, people think that Israel's actions are too much, but I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of those Middle East scurmishes are about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...

If you're genuinely curious about why people's views on Israel have shifted you could've got yourself excellent information with a simple prompt as such:

"Give me a brief neutral summary backed with reliable sources on the state of tensions in the Middle East today and the role played by Israel and other states. Help me understand why people's views on Israel have shifted so much since the start of the war in Gaza?"

He is the largest private donor to the IDF and literally vetted Marco Rubio for Israel, https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/larry-ellison-vetted-marco-ru...

The US couped, invaded, and destroyed tens of countries since WW2 until now. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza during a ceasefire and continuing their pogrom in the West Bank, killing people and stealing more lands. This is your example of human rights?

As for your charges against Israel, they are factually incorrect. Israel is not still massacring civilians in Gaza, neither did they at any point engage in anything like a systemic, strategic program of killing civilians in Gaza. If you want to know what the casualty figures would look like if that was indeed the case, look at Iran which did do just that with the protests last year where they succeeded in murdering in one week roughly the amount of people Israel killed in Gaza in an entire year of active fighting. The worst you can accuse them of is of not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties. I will argue they did plenty but that's for another time. As for "progroms" in the West Bank, I would love to see what you're talking about. For your reference this is a wikipedia page on progroms[1] For some context, the number of extremist violent settlers that the whole world is fixated on numbers according to estimates in the dozens to hundreds.

Finally, I will leave it up to your imagination what it would look like if the roles were reversed, if the Arabs were dominant in Israel and the Jews were a minority, to help things along, here's examples from the wider Arab world[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

the systematic killing is pretty clear - tell people to evacuate to an israeli defined "safe zone" and then drop bombs on it. other defined policies had the idf mowing down escaped israeli-citizen hostages waving white flags and approaching the gaza border. assigning snipers to get headshots on children.

its a system informed by the fact that going too hard would result in instant sanctions, but the intent is made plenty clear, and the results are easily visible by counting the number of living gazans still in northern gaza.

palestine was under arab and turkish rules for centuries, and jews did much better than arabs are under israeli occupation

if the west was more values-similar with israel, there would be constant swastikas drawn on everything jewish owned or in jewish view, with a couple real true blue nazis going around beating up, killing, and stealing jewish property, and the government would keep pardoning them and insisting its not a problem because its only a couple hundred thousand nazis in a country witb many millions.

i sure saw in that video where cnn gets attacked by the idf clearing the way for settlers that the west bank is covered in stars of david, drawn the same way swatstikas are to terrorize people

Civilians like maybe Ali Al-Amoudi? Or maybe Muhammad Yazouri? Nayal Abu Obeid? Izz al-Din al-Beik? Izz al-Din al-Haddad? Mohammed Odeh?

Is there any combatant Hamas doesn't call a civilian?

Since Hamas hasn't disarmed and Gaza wasn't demilitarized there is effectively no ceasefire. There is a war and Israel is attacking military targets as it is allowed to do under international law. Minimizing civilian casualties as it is required to do.

If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.

Israel has only attacked the safe zone when there were military targets present, such as the attack on Mohammed Deif. That's on Hamas. Once you get the civilian/combatant breakdown from Hamas then we can check how many civilians per capita were attacked in humanitarian zones (very few) vs. zones that were evacuated (the majority).

EDIT: Re: The Ottomans. Massacred Jews in Safed in 1517. Ethnically cleansed Jaffa of Jews in 1917. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No comparison whatsoever to Israeli Arabs who are equal citizens in Israel. As to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they're not citizens. Also AFAIK the Jews didn't mount a campaign of suicide bombings against the Arabs or fire rockets into Arab cities.

Arab jews did not want to move to Israel, they were fine living among muslims. Mossad faked terrorist bombings in Baghdad and killed bunch of jews to create an illusion of jew hatred in Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bomb...

Jews were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries.

Re: your link. I mean the Iraqi authorities said so. Yeah right.

israel doesnt at all align with (modern) western values, instead more like the old apartheid south africa, or really, more like nazi germany in terms of supremacism and industrial might put towards surveiling and killing the less-than-human people you allude to as being less-than-human.

the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.

sure, the US was half supportive of the nazis too, but that wasn't a good thing.

Argument: Unproven claims, there are virtually no jewish terrorists, anyway in your own distorted mind Israel is a terrorist state.

Counterpoint: Oct 7, Bibas family, Hamas, Palestinan Authority/PLO, Islam.

>the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.

........

...

I mean, lets just take a moment to reflect on this. For more context Israel has a pretty strong gay culture, so your complaint is about a legal technicality. So you are mentioning that in the same breath as the the death of 70,000 Gazans? And you think that's somehow an argument that makes you look good???

I am a pretty outspoken supporter of Israel, but I have never come close to that level of disrespect to the Palestinian people as you have managed.

>the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.

The causation of all those failed states is Third World values. Like blaming everyone else for their own failures.

Instead of understanding that these governments use the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a scapegoat, and Israel as a boogeyman, just to make the populous blind to the true cause for their suffering.

who do you think is it fault for those dead Palestinian children ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...

https://greydynamics.com/sayanim-jewish-diaspora-mossad-supp...

Larry Ellison:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/larry-ellison-vetted-marco-ru...

>Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel

Indeed Israeli media covers this also:

https://forward.com/fast-forward/853703/david-ellison-appoin...

>David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios

The same thing happened with the Tik Tok purchase, the entire point of handing control of the Tik Tok algorithm to Larry Ellison was so that they could clamp down on the discussion about the genocide in Gaza. You can see the results of it in the reports that the world Jewish congress put out directly:

>https://wjc-org-website.s3.amazonaws.com/horizon/assets/YNN3...

>TikTok is the exception, removing 64% of content overall (and 71% of content formally reported to it), compared to 12–15% on every other major platform.

>other countries rarely get talked about in this same way

They actually do, but the Israeli lobby has grown so powerful that it is now dominating most of the political action in the USA in a way that has become impossible to ignore.

There are actually plenty of conversations to be had about Indian ethnic affinity and lobbying. USINPAC is the Indian lobbying organization which is actually modeled after AIPAC (the notorious Israeli lobbying group which has political control over most of the US congress).

https://www.trackaipac.com/

There is a looming argument which hasn't yet entered the public mainstream discourse about Indian foreign influence and Indian ethnic nepotism in the United States, but that is an entirely separate conversation.

Most Indian CEOs are the same caste (Brahmin) and there is a good argument that many of them have been nominated by the boards of their companies and institutional investors with large stakes so that they can navigate India's notorious bureaucracy and deepen ties to the country, which supplies much of the cheap labor for the tech industry. Many of them have direct ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and can use the access to people like Modi to access more Indian labor as well as build more in India. Modi talks openly about exporting human capital and using its diaspora to wield influence in the United States. One can argue that they are taking a cue from Israel here.

>Narendra Modi urges the Indian diaspora to become an extension of foreign policy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/narendra-modi-...

Yes it was. My comment was directly in response to someone saying "it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over". I know that was not your argument, but it was someone's argument and I responded to refute it. I don't know what point you thought was being discussed, but it's now clear you misread the conversation.

If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.

>But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields with which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that's going on right now is? Tik Tok. Number One.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs

Later, control of the Tik Tok algorithm was given to Larry Ellison and they immediately used it to clamp down on discussion of the genocide in Gaza (as well as any other types of discussion they deem "antisemitism").

Now Larry Ellison's son has been given control of all these other media companies and has appointed an Israeli to run things.

This is DIRECT evidence of Larry and David Ellison working directly with the highest levels of a foreign government to manipulate public opinion on behalf of that foreign government.

Obviously Larry Ellison had met with Netanyahu, or with someone in the Israeli government, and discussed the details of this deal. If the government of Israel can ask a citizen in a different country to do something on their behalf, that is a form of control.

Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.

Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?

Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.

Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...

From [1]:

> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”

When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...

Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.

There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.

It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.

That kind of describes my relationship with Nebula. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, and lately I have been watching it more than YouTube. But still, YouTube is where I tend to go when I’m looking to find something new that I genuinely haven’t seen before. I think the lower floor for production values is a big part of that.

Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.

Nobody listened.

Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.

https://x.com/andlikelaura/status/1392091221032460291

He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.

Evil maybe, but nothing moronic about it.

and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing

This is funny because I have stopped clicking YouTube links for the simple reason that every video seems to be 45+ minutes. Which I get is based on how monetization works on YouTube.

Like Old Twitter, short-form video is a forcing function with value in forcing posters to get to the point. (I have never seen a YouTube Shorts or whatever link in the wild.)

I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.

My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?

I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.

I've never watched a YouTube short.

My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).

But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.

> I've never watched a YouTube short.

Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?

> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.

Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.

Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.

I don't want to pay for that.

Depends on what you watch, as always. my YT feed is a mix of news, random gaming content, documentaries on a variety of topics, and odd little tech trivia. It covers all the bases at once.

Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch". Then I just pluck it onto my NAS and move about on my day. Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?

Nebula is the only other service I ever considered paying for. It's not a "Youtube killer" and misses out on a lot of the odd trivia sides of YT, but it overally feels more fleshed out on content than Netflix".

If there's even 1 show I want to watch, it's great to watch it. The problem with Youtube is even when they have stuff I want to watch, it's a pain to watch it. Their UI is atrocious!

> Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?

You just unsubscribe at that point.

Know how much stuff I had bookmarked on Youtube that is no longer available? A whole damn lot.

For me, the big screen and ambience play a big role.

I imagine they are that's why I pay for YT Premium, which I think is my most bang for buck subscription based on the amount of time I spend watching it

> Curation doesn't exist.

I don't find this a problem personally because 95% of my feed is just channels I'm subscribed to but YMMV depends on what you expect out of it

I used to pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads, but that doesn't include the in-video ads that content creators put in there - but SmartTube has that covered too, in most videos I watch the in-video ads are skipped too. I have 5 chromecasts on the 5 TVs around my house, and every one of them has SmartTube installed. I wouldn't want to watch Youtube without it.

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/releases

I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.

goebbels is the movie influence of hollywood. its appropriate regardless

Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.

Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.

They're certainly all friends with pedophiles, and they're certainly not opposed to human trafficking and pedophilia.

They could make it stop, but they're spending their money on yachts with many beds.

Frankly, to become a billionaire demonstrates a lack of empathy. Someday we'll recognize it as the mental health condition it is.

Assets: TNT, CBS, CNN, MTV, TCM, Showtime, Adult Swim, DC Studios, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, HBO/HBO Max, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network

Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse

Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.

Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.

Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(

Lower Decks was a reverse of that. Took a while to find itself but finished strong. I’d also highly recommend Lower Decks, albeit you need to watch it thinking of it as a beta-cannon type show (ie set in the ST universe but not itself a ST show).

Sora didn't die because UGC social media doesn't work. Sora died because UGC social media would just be reposted to Tiktok.

These new tech companies are still too obsessed with 2000's/2010's versions of monetization. sell it as a service on a subscription (with some free tier rate throttling) focused on content creators (who will make the money back by posting) and it would have at least lasted longer.

That said, as snowflakey as Star Trek fans are, I would love to see their reaction to Dora the Explorer ordering Batman to launch photon torpedos at Unicron. They'd probably complain about "yet another DEI captain."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_vs._Teenage_Mutant_Ninj...

https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6ac56dbab5448191866eb7c80c31c025

Do Trekkies not crave novelty?

Or did we decide that isn't canon?

Why? Does the population need movies? Who does this even benefit?

> (2) Domestic spending commitments, and

Never heard of Hollywood accounting? They have mastery of exploiting loopholes.

> (3) Separate cable package negotiations.

What's "cable"? Is that the 1900's alternative to putting up a TV antenna?

I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.

Post truth world. Sad stuff.

Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.

This merger is only happening because the deal that the seller actually preferred (Netflix buying them) was unlikely to be approved by regulators. The President literally came out right after the deal was approved and said "it could be a problem" and "I would have a say" in whether it went through.

In fact the very existence of Paramount Skydance itself, as a merged entity, appears to have been contingent upon Paramount modifying its own HR policies, placing a government ombudsman at their marquee journalistic outlet (CBS), and paying $16 million to Trump's "presidential library fund."

So 90% believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, but they aren’t stupid and it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that “Zionist” has become a kind of slur in the hands of so many.

It really isn’t hard to understand, it’s just convenient for people to hide behind. You meet a white nationalist and they don’t open with a Hitlergrusse, they talk about “preserving the family” or “13/50” and so on. You didn’t invent this shit.

And then you’re calling 50-120 million Americans “a weird cult”?

Are you a parody? I’m honestly baffled.

And by the way, it’s hilarious to claim that Ellison being Jewish (is he? I honestly have no idea) or Zionism would be “literally the only thing unique about him” compared to the rest of the media barons. Not only is there a lot of other stuff that’s unique about him/his company, as I’ve articulated, but also his Zionist beliefs aren’t unique whatsoever among his peers!

You truly live in a hall of mirrors.

Zionist is a slur, and not only is Ellison uniquely a Zionist, but it’s in fact the only unique thing about him and his company. Totally insane shit.

Never mind their overall impact on American policy and politics.

Yeah they’re all fucking crazy people.

Calling evangelicals evangelicals is fine. Calling zionists Zionists is fine.

Both terms have besmirched connotations because both belief systems are besmirched. Simple as that.

Best of luck to you.

a jewish state is the same in concept as a white state - a place where the non-white or non-jews are second class citizens, and really, should be removed because they have no place in the state.

even if 90% of white people believed in a white nationalist state, white nationalism would still be bad on its own merrits. its not racist to be against ethnostates, regardless of whos ethnostate it is

21% of Israeli CITIZENS… with full voting rights and legal protections, are Arabs. They’re no less citizens of Israel than black Americans are of the US, and yeah that comes with some measure of mutual ethnic and religious tension… it is the Middle East. That’s not the same as a white “utopia” or the usual South Africa comparison.

A lot of the talk around this is layered bad faith, misinformation, and outright bullshit that’s accepted simply because it’s convenient to do so. After all if you believe that shit you can feel justified in your enmity towards a whole people in the name of justice.

By the way how many Jews are citizens of Arab majority nations? How many even live there? Did they live there at one point and did they all magically leave or was there a huge explosion? Just some food for thought.

Still if I’m to consult my subconscious… it tells me that a lot of people use causes and movements to justify the sort of bullying, hateful, trend-chasing behavior they always displayed all along. It’s when people feel they have free license to let go that you learn more about THEM.

If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.

Do you think this is being prevented somehow? There are many left leaning news agencies [1]. Maybe the "problem" is that they're all for profit, most of which comes from ads, most of which are anti union companies.

What's the alternative? Mandated reporting?

[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...

No! but where did you get that from?

There is Fox news, X, and Truth socia for right leaning perspectives.

"We'll tell you the truth about the Dominion voting machines, which mainstream media WON'T tell you!" - Fox News, knowingly lying while also being literally the largest broadcast network in the country.

CNN nudging more towards the right doesn't somehow influence the overall left leaning spread [1], or is in any way indicative of a rising dictatorship.

[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...

And all of them rated it "highly factual"

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...

EDIT: And if you didn't mean it in that way, and were serious, consider looking at e.g. Ground News' rating of NPR: https://ground.news/interest/npr. They (and others) clearly show NPR to have (slight) left bias. This means you are almost certainly going to see woke perspectives there from time to time, and more often than other less-biased or right-biased sources.

I'm curious what you think your politics are then.

I have opinions on issues, and they can vary across the spectrum. On some issues (e.g. healthcare) I'm far to the left (well, in the US - would just be considered "normal" left in other countries). On things like immigration I'm either center or right (everyone seems to have their own idea of what "center" means). On gun control I'm both left and right - I'd like to outlaw them, but am opposed to some gun control initiatives.

On several social issues I can be far to the left on some and far to the right on others.

In an election, I voted both for a Green Party candidate and a Republican candidate (different offices, of course).

What I see is people who identify on the spectrum may have strong opinions on some issues (e.g. left), and then they adopt the leftist viewpoint on other issues - in order to be consistent. In my experience, these people are also more likely to follow "leaders" than be opinionated.

Famously fair and balanced, I know.

Here are all the headlines currently above the fold on the homepage. Don't see anything about a drag queen below the fold either.

Maybe something autocorrected in your address bar when you tried to navigate to NPR?

* What happened during Christa Pike's failed execution

* Christa Pike conscious and able to speak after failed execution

* As Trump focuses the FBI on immigration, counterintelligence is falling behind

* Democrats' advantage is clear with less than a month to go in the midterm elections

* What voters in 6 key states could tell us about the 2026 midterms

* People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms

* Alaska's US Senate race collides with the pollock industry in a fight over fish

* Poll: Residents are losing faith in Vermont as a good place to start life

* In race for Tennessee governor, Blackburn refuses to debate Democrat Green

* Disney, ABC battle Trump's FCC in court over free speech protections

* New Hollywood era begins with an epic mega merger between Paramount and Warner Bros.

* She died covering war for Fox News. Her parents blame the network — and a star reporter

* Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey's new Pentagon roles raise ethics worries

* Jim Bakker, who built 'PTL Club' televangelism empire, has died at 86

* Cornell names former acting U.S. attorney general to review rape case

* Cornell students protest the university's handling of 2024 rape allegations

* Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in physics for work on high-energy neutrinos from space

NYT - i think so.

NPR - funding crisis.

The Atlantic - i don't read this - is this the one who's journalist was added in the top secret signal chat?

Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.

First, political views are not one-dimensional and so the "left"/"right" and far-extreme-ultra game is just "are they on my side or are they considered bonkers by my brethren?" games.

I believe that it's far better to consider news outlets as a product of their sponsors vs. their intended audience. By and large, they are all corporations trying to maximize revenue by attracting and maintaining a large audience for their materials, thereby paying their sponsors and advertisers the revenue they need.

So, they will produce stories that engage the audience. Whether that is enraging us, stoking controversy, appealing to us with smooth words: doesn't matter. There's no such thing as bad engagement. The corollary is that they don't want to lose audience members so any slide into supporting unpopular causes or candidates or ideologies is nipped in the bud.

Folks also can't seem to accept that editorial opinions or ideologies can shift, especially for example, if a news outlet supports "whoever/whatever is currently in power this year" or as a contrarian, opposes them, and riles up the opposition parties.

Wikipedia's relentless blacklisting and deprecation of "unreliable sources" is a great public experiment in this regard. If you really want a nice left-leaning anodyne view of the world, go with Wikipedia and "blacklist" or stop paying attention to any source they don't like.

Democrat Al Franken got kicked out of Senate when it was found he inapproprately kissed a woman. I can name a long list of creeps in the GOP side who received protection from their side. Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, Sexual Harassment Hegseth, Epstein-Friend in Chief. The GOP doesn't seem to have any principles about which sexual deviant they have, they just care about having the majority (in congress) or the power. Oh yeah, speaking of that, sexual assaulter Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh...

I'd trust left-leaning media to report wrongdoing whoever does it, whereas right-leaning media will gloss or bare-face lie about wrongdoing done by the right, and exaggerate about wrongdoings by the left...

The first group will define good/bad acts and then judge people by what acts they commit. The other will defines good/bad people, and then judge acts by which person is doing them. If you want investigative journalism, clearly group #1 is preferable.

On a similar note, I highly recommend a playlist of long-form videos from ~2016, titled (in the sense of an expose) "The Alt-Right Playbook". In particular, the video "Always a Bigger Fish" [0] tries to make sense of some persistent "how can they possibly believe X but not Y" disagreements when it comes to democracy and egalitarianism.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

Sorry for the sarcasm.

But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.

I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.

I would bet Ellison loses on this merger too. No one under the age of 60 cares about these legacy media companies to justify tens of billions of dollar valuations. At best, professional media studios are just an add on business for companies like Amazon and Apple and Disney and Sony, with Netflix being the outlier.

If we want to talk about monopolies, let's talk about YouTube. That's a far larger gatekeeper, and they have a proven track record of shutting people out for breaking their random rules, with little oversight.

I suppose if they did it gradually enough, they could potentially normalize more right leaning viewpoints to its audience without them noticing.

The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.

You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.

You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.

Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.

So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.

And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.

I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.

[1]: https://brobible.com/culture/article/david-ellison-tried-to-...

Fun fact: Ellison also started Annapurna, which is Megan Ellison's vehicle for pushing gay propaganda to children through games. "Mixtape" bombed hard despite overwhelming praise from bought critics.

Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my hobbies with 8 figures.

>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.

The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.

The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home on DVD for free as many times they want.

>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies

More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists to score brownie points with the public but with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9

They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.

DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.

Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)

* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.

* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.

I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...

Instead some individuals choose to root on the end of the artist.

r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.

The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.

As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.

is the thing he's bringing... advertising for the movies theyre going to make?