how to category
at sufficient levels of abstraction everything looks like everything else.
i first ran into this problem in building software, where i'd build these beautiful abstractions... that were beautiful until they weren't.
the trick to getting the right abstraction level tends, at least in software, to be about balancing the needs of the particulars with the needs of the system. it's about building a model that's not simply beautiful but useful.
all models are wrong as they saying goes and one way you can guarantee you're getting a model wrong is by making it so broad that it can't do anything.
so let's talk about the media.
there is a lot of frustration on both the political right and political left about the media. it's pretty easy to take a look at this and drawn an equivalence right away--in fact i've already done it for you. there is a lot of frustration. i find we humans have a tendency (whether that's a cultural thing or a substrate thing i don't know and moreover don't care) to look at two things that seem similar in aspect and bundle them together.
two groups are frustrated at the same thing. boom. done.
buuuuuut of course that's not terribly useful. yes, they're frustrated. but frustrated at what exactly?
now i'm not a particularly charitable person when it come to rightists. i think they're mostly a bunch of neerdowells who, given their druthers, at least here in the west, would subordinate everyone to a particular subset of cis white men, and they'd be happy to do so it the most gruesome fashion imaginable. the sort of people who while claiming not to be nazis for reasons of respectibility nonetheless in all but name are exactly that. and they'll tell you about it. at length. this is to be quite clear absolute depravity and the suppression and elimination of these delusional and harmful ideologies should be our highest priority as a society. it is a judgement upon us that we're doing anything else.
their problem with the news is that the news doesn't share their narrative. so they form their own news that does repeat their narratives, a revealed preference sort of thing where we have things are ostensibly news media but actually function as an organ (i'll spare you my opinion of what organ i'm thinking of) of a particular political party. they're unconcerned with facts. they're unconcerned with decency. they have an antipathy toward anything that doesn't further their ideological cause.
yet despite having their own rightist news sources that repeat rightist narratives and deal in rightist hatemongering, the rightist continues to whinge about "the media" as if their media isn't also "the media". this is strange until you remember that the rightist is a supremacist and while you may have some affection for liberal democracy the rightist absolutely does not (if they could get past their aversion to the word "liberal" as in liberal arts education so you could explain what "liberal" in this sense means, they would be opposed not just to the word, but to the very idea, which again i stress most of them do not understand).
so when we talk about the right having "frustrations" with the media, their frustration is that there is any media that disagrees with them. period. their frustration is that they do not exercise complete cultural domination.
the leftist on the other hand is in a different position. the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that, in the west at least, there is no leftist press to speak of. there's liberal press and a lot of it, but that's not the same thing at all. there's no press dedicated to the socialist point of view. there's absolutely no communist press at all, unless you count zines, and if you're counting zines can i suggest you are not a serious person and should step out of the discussion and do something more suited to your intellectual capabilities like perhaps playing checkers.
the leftist critique of the media is more about the fact--and this is a fact--that the media simply does not reflect reality.
let's take trump. and while we're at it let's throw in a little mamdani for flavour.
trump can give a rambling "speech" which you can listen to in absolute befuddlement, watching this absolute moron make a fool out of himself in real time, contradicting what he said an hour ago, baldly lying (or to borrow some parlance, "making false claims"), and you would be right in thinking that this guy is actually kind of stupid, or at least that his brain is a bowl full of jello and we're just seeing it jiggle and whatever falls out falls out.
but then! aha! you read some rag like the new york times or the atlantic and you see a journalist trying to assemble something out of all the puzzle pieces the toddler just spilled on the floor. and by gum they do it, the madmen! you can read what they say about trump's words. but you can also just go ahead and listen to his words. do both, and compare and contrast.
were you to only read what these rags printed for their well-heeled audiences you might come away thinking that this trump guy is wrong-headed but otherwise sensible. he's making some points. he's saying some things. he's not just jack kerouacing (apologies to jean-louis lebris de kérouac) whatever's pinging around in what passes for his brain at that moment.
it's so bad that we've had to coin a term, sanewashing, to describe what the new york times does for trump. because of course you can't print what he actually says or every headline would just be "deranged racist senior citizen blabs nonsense for a half hour" and who wants to read that?
regardless these precious papers of record have done a great deal for this guy simply by reporting on him as if he's a normal leader. that's actually a great way to think about it--normalization. they've made him look normal when he is very much not normal. they're refusing to write that the emperor is naked. they're refusing to write that the king is mad.
and yet... he is, right? it's right there on our screens.
then take a look at how the press talks about mamdani, as if he's agitprop incarnate, as if he's acid communism here do dissolve our precious capitalist utopia. he's antisemitic! he's got sharia law up his sleeve! the city of new york shall be leveled and sewn with salt, never to rise again!
and yet... if you look at what this guy has actually done, he's just a centre-left leader, dime-a-dozen in europe.
so the abstraction of being frustrated fails the usefulness test once we pop the hood and take a look at the engine. one of these frustration is serious, one is not. the correct abstraction is one side wants the media to reflect reality and the other side wants it to print nazi propaganda.