Mainstream media

Overview

The term "mainstream media" (often abbreviated "MSM") generally refers to the most popular conventional sources of factual (non-fiction) news and discussion, i.e. television and print media (newspapers and magazines). It also refers to any information published, via whatever media, by companies whose primary business is one or more of those traditional media.

The term appears to be more intensively used in the United States, where the largest media companies are privately-owned and have no significant competition from government-run services or from each other – and, unfortunately, very little accountability as to the accuracy of those views.

Pages

• Distortions in the mainstream media are particularly harmful.

Companies

this is a partial list

Broadcast

• CNN (site): cable TV, web
• Fox News: broadcast TV
• NBC / MSNBC

Content Creation

• Associated Press writes news articles which are widely syndicated
• Reuters

Print

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post
• The Washington Times (aka The Moonie Times)

Non-US

• German license-funded TV

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia sees the revocation of the fairness doctrine and the beginning of Rush Limbaugh's radio career as the two main events in the history of the MSM; also, there is apparently a "leftist news" where writers are only allowed to write what they are told (as opposed to Conservapedia, where you just get reverted or banned if you write anything they don't like)
• dKosopedia: no equivalent page (as of 2009-02-13); see Media.
• SourceWatch

Related

• 2014/07/23 [L..T] MSNBC's Sole Palestinian Voice Rula Jebreal Takes on Pro-Israeli Gov't Bias at Network & in US Media "A week after public outrage helped force NBC's reversal of a decision to pull veteran reporter Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza, the sole Palestinian contributor to sister network MSNBC has publicly criticized its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. "We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue," Rula Jebreal said Monday on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily, citing a disproportionate amount of Palestinian voices and a preponderance of Israeli government officials and supporters."
• 2014/05/14 [L..T] How Five American Companies Control What You Think
• 2014/05/14 [L..T] Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Corporate Media is "Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete" "In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media's response to his reporting on Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents."
• 2014/05/02 [L..T] Images and Video from East Ukraine that the Corporate Media Will Never Show You "Today the provisional government in Kiev launched a military offensive against the eastern city of Slavyansk using tanks and helicopters, but the mainstream media will never show you what actually happened."
• 2014/04/01 [L..T] The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood's Exclusion of Women "... we found that the data doesn't appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don't."
• 2013/10/12 [L..T] Despite what you may have heard in the press, Germany's transition to renewable power has been a stunning success. Energy analyst Chris Nelder runs down the facts. "Major English-language media have been propagating a false narrative about the stunning success of Germany's transition to renewable energy: the Energiewende. To hear them tell it, the transition has been a massive failure, driving up power prices, putting Germany's grid at risk of blackouts, and inspiring a mass revolt against renewables. Nothing could be further from the truth."
• 2012/05/03 [L..T] What you know depends on what you watch: Current events knowledge across popular news sources "The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly – a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all."
• 2011/07/23 [L..T] headline::Norway, Islam and the threat of the West Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a "madman". He may well be, but this is one way that the motivations for heinous crimes can be airbrushed out of the story before they have the chance to take hold in the popular imagination.
• 2010/12/09 [L..T] Voters Say Election Full of Misleading and False Information Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that a number of false statements relevant to the election were, in fact, true.
• 2009/07/27 [L..T] Chris Mooney is Not My Friend Anymore “It was not until a Boston Globe article in which Mooney and Kirshenbaum place the blame and responsibility squarely on the shoulders of scientists that the camel's back broke.”
• 2008/07/18 [L..T] Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 “That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation – like, "too many guys in one-night stands don't know how to satisfy women" or "women are better at sex than men" – you could construct another story around this data that was ... more plausible than 'women are programmed to want long-term relationship'...”
• 2008/06/22 [L..T] Lara Logan, I Tip My Smack-o-Matic 3000 to You “You know, I was asked once, 'Do you feel responsible for the American public having a ... a negative view of the war in Iraq?' And I looked at the reporter and I said, 'Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. ... Who in America knows what that looks like? Because I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does.'”
• 2008/06/10 [L..T] Countdown: The Impeachment Of George W. Bush «Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich spent some 290 minutes on the House floor Monday, reading Articles of Impeachment against President George Bush. Not that you would notice, as there was a virtual media blackout on the story, but Keith Olbermann ran with it right out of the gate...»

Video

• 2014/07/23 [L..T] MSNBC's Sole Palestinian Voice Rula Jebreal Takes on Pro-Israeli Gov't Bias at Network & in US Media "A week after public outrage helped force NBC's reversal of a decision to pull veteran reporter Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza, the sole Palestinian contributor to sister network MSNBC has publicly criticized its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. "We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue," Rula Jebreal said Monday on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily, citing a disproportionate amount of Palestinian voices and a preponderance of Israeli government officials and supporters."
• 2014/05/14 [L..T] Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Corporate Media is "Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete" "In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media's response to his reporting on Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents."