Media criticism from American left-wing with window of opportunity in 1989 . . . High Trajectory?

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Yes, it looks that way.
 
Media Group Assails 'Nightline' for Being Too Narrow : Koppel, Producer Challenge Report, Say Show Is a News Program, Not Equal-Access Forum

Los Angeles Times, Judith Michaelson, Feb. 6, 1989

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-06/entertainment/ca-1298_1_news-program/2

[Ted Koppel speaking]

" . . . we've been dealing with a rather conservative Reagan Administration. If we had a liberal administration in office, you would suddenly see an enormous disparity in the other direction."

"We were in the middle of the Iran-Contra hearings. Everyone wanted to talk to [arms dealer] Richard Secord but not to give him an opportunity to ask his views, but to ask a lot of tough questions."
Even before the ads, this story had legs!

And Koppel is making it worse by giving such poor justifications. We had a bunch of conservatives on the show because we had a conservative president?

But we still asked a bunch of tough questions!

Well, how are we going to know what "tough questions" to ask unless we talk with a range of people, including many who oppose certain policies of the Administration?
 
Okay, this leftie group was and still is Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). Yes, the name sounds very similar to certain rightie groups.

Their publication every other month was called Extra!


[May 2011 issue]

And it looked largely the same back in the early 1990s. I'm remembering they did a lot of coverage on my country's rather awful policy of propping up dictatorial regimes in Central America. My fellow citizens aren't that interested in that. I wish they were, but they just aren't.

potential POD: Other left/liberal groups very patiently and factually make the point, a big reason we lose jobs in our country is because we prop up dictatorships abroad who are friendly to American corporations, and guess where the jobs go!
 
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I'm a little confused on what the topic is about?
A more left-leaning United States, and a "moment," which may have actually lasted a year or more.

And slightly before the right-wing media criticism which started around 1993, left-wing media criticism and analysis steals this thunder! :cool:
 
and the big one —

POD: The American left hits upon the criticism of "political correctness" first! , and primarily in response to all kinds of bullshit governmental and corporate policies.
 
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A more left-leaning United States, and a "moment," which may have actually lasted a year or more.

And slightly before the right-wing media criticism which started around 1993, left-wing media criticism and analysis steals this thunder! :cool:

So the idea is that the political left ends up becoming the one associated with critiquing the mass media instead of the right wing? It would be interesting, given media's history of being associated with the left though this could bascially develop a three way system of this new rising left, the centralist media and the right.

and the big one,

POD: The American left hits upon the criticism of "politically correctness" first! , and primarily in response to all kinds of bullshit governmental and corporate policies.

So here, "political correctness" would have a different association to it than in OTL?
 
So here, "political correctness" would have a different association to it than in OTL?
Decidedly. :)

For example, when corporations used the term “downsizing” as a euphemism during the 1991 recession to refer to layoffs, and later briefly used “rightsizing,” those terms would be roundly mocked and criticized.

Clinton still wins in ‘92, and in a flight of fancy largely from more vocal popular pressure sees health care with the intuitive poker skills of Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, and sees that half-measures with a welter of complications just won’t be popular. He pushes for a straight up-and-down vote on whether to expand Medicare to 0-18 and 50-and-above.

All in all, both a more left and a more successful Clinton administration.
 
Decidedly. :)

For example, when corporations used the term “downsizing” as a euphemism during the 1991 recession to refer to layoffs, and later briefly used “rightsizing,” those terms would be roundly mocked and criticized.

Clinton still wins in ‘92, and in a flight of fancy largely from more vocal popular pressure sees health care with the intuitive poker skills of Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, and sees that half-measures with a welter of complications just won’t be popular. He pushes for a straight up-and-down vote on whether to expand Medicare to 0-18 and 50-and-above.

All in all, both a more left and a more successful Clinton administration.

So basically Medicare is expanded to include minors and people starting at 50. I think that would definitely work pretty well and so on. I do figure that longer term rammifications of this would actually mean the media would probabyl become more diverse and become more neutral and possibly more trusted among undecided folks though at the same time, it could be subjected to more scrutiny to corporate influence. Fox News might actually get gimped here since it can't portray itself as being "not-liberal" media and this could mean the left's criticisms of it (especially over it not actually being news) could have more impact.
 
. . . Fox News might actually get gimped here since it can't portray itself as being "not-liberal" media . . .
Because much of the rest of the media is also being criticized as "not liberal," certainly on the corporate and business side! Will try to look up when GE bought NBC as a pretty glaring example.

Okay, Fox News is brash and in your face. They have good-looking women wearing Hollywood red carpet make-up. The women a lot of time seemingly sit in high chairs with glass table tops and side views, in tight skirts showing legs and curve of hip. Yes, really. No, I don't think the guys are similarly good looking. So, the show succeeds in being both sexy and sexist.

But then the shows sometimes talk down to their viewers, even as they attempt to make fun of someone else and take us along for the ride.

* just in case our UK friends aren't familiar with Fox!
 
Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy
The Guardian [UK], by Moira Weigel, 30 Nov 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump

' . . . One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned – under the headline “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” – that the country’s universities were threatened by “a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform”. . . '

' . . . Bernstein’s alarming dispatch in America’s paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the “brave new world of ideological zealotry” at American universities. In December [1990], the cover of Newsweek – with a circulation of more than 3 million – featured the headline “THOUGHT POLICE” and yet another ominous warning: “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment – or the New McCarthyism?” A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991 – inside, the magazine proclaimed that “The New Fascists” were taking over universities. . . '
So, starting in Feb. '89, FAIR can beat them to the punch.

* UK's The Guardian bats from the left side of the plate politically (as frankly, so do I ;))
 
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Might be significant improvement, but it is going to be expensive. But it is going to be straightforward.

Eh, depends if they actually grow a pair and tax the rich or at the very least, become harsher when dealing with insurance companies or when getting medical supploes.
 
Because much of the rest of the media is also being criticized as "not liberal," certainly on the corporate and business side! Will try to look up when GE bought NBC as a pretty glaring example.

Okay, Fox News is brash and in your face. They have good-looking women wearing Hollywood red carpet make-up. The women a lot of time seemingly sit in high chairs with glass table tops and side views, in tight skirts showing legs and curve of hip. Yes, really. No, I don't think the guys are similarly good looking. So, the show succeeds in being both sexy and sexist.

But then the shows sometimes talk down to their viewers, even as they attempt to make fun of someone else and take us along for the ride.

* just in case our UK friends aren't familiar with Fox!

What I mean is that Fox News tends to be touted by conservatives for being aimed at them; they're happy that Fox is not "liberal media." However, that advantage becomes absence in this case and indeed, if Fox would be targetted, it would likelier be for more objective criticial reasons that could not be dismissed as just political jabs.
 
Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy
The Guardian [UK], by Moira Weigel, 30 Nov 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump

' . . . Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: “Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvard’s brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers. Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution.”

'In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment described in the New York article had never happened. There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure “artistic licence”. No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. . . '
So, many of the stories of "political correctness" based on urban legend types of things.
 
. . . tax the rich or at the very least, become harsher when dealing with insurance companies . . .
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (Reagan and some Democrats such as Bill Bradley) both closed some loopholes and lowered the top individual rate to 28%. Although importantly, it kept as a loophole the fiction of real estate depreciation.
 
Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy
The Guardian [UK], by Moira Weigel, 30 Nov 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump

' . . . The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s – most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, . . . '

' . . . Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective “correct” there. But they didn’t use it in the way Mao did. “Politically correct” became a kind of in-joke among American leftists – something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. “The term was always used ironically,” Perry says, “always calling attention to possible dogmatism.” . . '
So, as an ironic joke, just like those on the political right might have ironic jokes.
 
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I remember being a college student in 1991 at age twenty-eight. The paper assignment for one class said, "This need not be followed exactly as long as the result makes sense." And when I got the paper back, which the grad assistant had graded, it said, "You have some good ideas, but you need to follow the rules."

I frequently struggled with papers. If I had it to do all over again, I would make more of a conscious effort to become bilingual, okay, papers are for formal writing, and then there's writing for real.

Now, in different circumstances I might have defined my frustration using the language of "political correctness," which I did not.
 
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