Two recent studies show how the consumption of, and trust in, American news is dangerously polarised. Europe should take note.

In my experience that massively depends on the country: some countries such as the UK are as bad as the US when it comes to a captured Press who pride themselves on being "Opinion Makers" - which gets reflected on how much the locals trust the local press (at least some years ago it was the least trusted in all of Europe) - whilst in other countries the Press is a lot less polarized and has far fewer newspapers and TV channels which dedicate to "opinion forming".

My own experience moving from Britain back to Portugal was like night and day when it comes to Press Independence.

Not to say that Press in the latter is this utopia of truly independent and professional Journalism, it's just way less propagandistic and biased that in the UK and here some newspapers actually \*gasp\* try and be independent and have Journalistic Integrity (whilst in the UK pretty much only the satirical magazine Private Eye is a "no sacred cows" publication that speaks truth to power)

In a slightly better reality, it should be mandatory for them to use the word "entertainment" instead of "news" for their channel.

All of it concerns me. Everyone is fucked as long as they are living for this culture of 1st world western life. Everyone's picking plays out of the same play book because they never learned how play real universal chaos. ...so nothing changes. They just play the moves that will always keep things the same, mainly because they are taught to and that that is the only way to live. ...because they made it that way.

Thanks for the detailed perspective. And I'm pretty sure you can't say class war, or you're immediately enemy number 1. At least for a good amount of people. 😅

As someone in the US you're not that far off even with the sarcasm.

A lot of us are still blind to it, but around the 2010 period we had a massive consolidation of news media by major corporations. The entirety of our "legacy media" are corporations that only care about profit and creating a "news product" for their intended audience. I can't think of any well known publication that is "independent" from corporate propaganda influence let alone political. The right actually does recognize this to some extent and get really irritated about focus on social issues related to identity as that's the only "safe" conversation for corporations to have that feed their intended "news product audience." So they see that news as manufactured and it reenforces their desire to seek "other media" that confirm their biases.

What I do know is the right wingers are having a feast. Their media embraces the worst of their far right troglodytes as they always embrace the Republicans mission of feeding the wealthy. The so called "left wing" media will join in on the bashing of anyone to the left of Joe Biden as they also aim to protect the status quo of "feed the wealthy."

There's no real culture war, there is only class war. :/

the alt-right podcast swing in the younger generation is really concerning to me. gen z used to pride themself on their political activism and progressive beliefs but I went to the No Kings protest in my purple county and there were so so few young people to the point where someone saw us and said "finally some young people!" Most people there were decades older than us. My generation has disappointed me these past few years.

I think most of us is well aware of that. In the USA you either watch the one propaganda channel, or the other one. But realistically only your grandma does that. The younger people consume some alt-right internet content and think drinking bleach is a good thing, you need a trad-wife and NOAA or whoever is turning some frogs gay. At least that's the picture I get. Okay, I let my sarcasm get the better of me. But we really know media in the US isn't good. Neither is social media and all the political bubbles.

But Europe already took note... and then copied them meticously to produce a massive shift to the right to weaken social programs, privacy rights, environmental protections and human rights in the name of fabricated immigration issues (read: actively sabotaging integration then flooding everything with xenophobic bs -with some culture war non-sense sprinkled on top- to divert from their looting and pillaging...).

Daily reminder that FOX themselves said that their News channel is not news but entertainment, and people cannot be expected to take it seriously. ... Then why is it still OK to call it News?

And don't get me started on certain far-right podcast grifters.

I don't see Europe much differently, propaganda but for different purposes, EU has everything to gain by being a moral voice

Another one of the signs of fascism checked off!

And Canada. They’re seriously ramping up there.

OP, why post the text as images when you could have copied and pasted it? That makes it unaccessible to readers who depend on screen readers.

Why are we even bothering to discuss US affairs here? That's something for Reddit and Facebook... I'll stick with Reuters.