I want you guys to return to our teenage years and try to remember the run up to the Iraq War. We were already in Afghanistan thanks to Osama bin Laden. It made sense for us to be there because we were out for blood, so the Bush administration had lay groundwork to turn our attention to Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with September 11th. Probably the most memorable part was Colin Powell in 2003 bringing a bottle of anthrax into the UN, but the process was already beginning the year before. Cheney was making speeches declaring Iraq had WMDs, citing The New York Times as proof. From about September 2002 to April 2003, Times writer Judith Miller published a series of articles detailing Iraq's WMD program and the government ran with it.

Which is weird because last I heard the media was a liberal bastion and foe of the conservative president at the time. Bush and Cheney themselves would bitterly complain The New York Times published biased articles against them because it's in Democrat New York City. How can they be simultaneously liberal and yet not only let the Bush administration get away with false accusations but also fuel the justification?

I think whenever people complain about "the media," they really aren't looking at it. Or they just pay attention to 24-hour cable news. Or their perception just is derived from reading shit off of Facebook. And it's funny because reporters can never win. Conservatives hate them because supposedly they're all liberals deep down, and liberals hate them because it's filled with white men who silence minorities. I feel none of these people actually open up a fucking newspaper and look at the whole thing.

For example, right now I keep hearing people whine how no one is talking about the police brutality around the North Dakota pipeline protests. Guess what? All the major newspapers are covering this story. NPR touches on it several times a day. It's just not paramount because our president-elect is announcing his picks for the cabinet, and that's way more fucking important. If the news decided to ignore that and focus on a bunch of people fighting law enforcement in the cold, I'd actually be pissed off. I'd rather be hearing about the people who may shape our healthcare system, our treaties and relations with other countries, or our environmental policy than that. And the editors know it, so the pipeline business, whilst not unimportant, got bumped to page five or so.

Are there biases in the news? Undoubtedly. They know they won't get business if they tell uninteresting stories, so they tend to hype up shit or ignore horrible things that happen repeatedly. Let's go back to the Iraq War. During 2005-06 there were horrific bombings every single day as the country devolved into sectarian violence. All those stories got less prominence because, and this is going to sound terrible, people get bored after hearing about another eighty people who died in a suicide bombing. Hundreds of people are dying each week trying to cross the Mediterranean, but unless it's a large amount of people drowning in one boat those headlines are mentioned only in passing when compared to the US election or some sort of governmental scandal or whatever major sports victory happened last night. And yeah, the reporters may have their own personal proclivities as well. CNN was depicted as racist after Hurricane Katrina because it said whites were scavenging for food whilst blacks were looting stores... but then again no one would've given a shit about the Duke Lacrosse team case if the stripper wasn't black.

I find if you look at the top stories, the editors are able to identify what is most pressing and across all the newspapers it's usually reported with almost the same information. There's no extreme differences in portrayal. When Castro died, that was what everyone was talking about. When the Volkswagen emissions scandal broke, that too was on the front page. And when Ferguson was turning particularly gruesome, then you could view a plethora of videos and photos. Just because you personally are invested in an issue — Harambe, the shooting of Tyre King, gun rights — and the media isn't all over it, it doesn't necessary mean discrimination. There could be more fascinating shit going on. Or people have stopped talking about it because the news cycle has moved on. Instead of whining about it, why don't you actually read this stuff? Because I don't get my news from social media and somehow I'm abreast of all the issues... by consuming media.

Jesus, sorry I've been busy either in SF or Harlan came over. Will try to update diligently.