Reply #59: You believe - as most here at DU believe . .

[msmcghee]

. . that the news is heard by Americans and then carefully analysed as to it's truth. And only after passing that test do we accept it.

Actually - we all have a "world view" of how we "feel" about things that happen in the news. When we hear something new - if it fits well with that emotional world-view we accept it without question.

If it collides with that world view we reject it without question. Very few of us (on the right, left or middle) have the ability to allow truth to penetrate our emotional world-view with facts.

So the battle is not about the facts, which is where the dem leadership seems to place their bets. It is about world view and that is an ideological struggle that the right has been winning by default.

Without a coherent democratic or progressive world view (like Clinton's third way) we have already lost the battle - because the sheeple (I hate that word) will accept only the facts that support (mesh with) the world-view of the right or that are spun by the right to fit that world-view - that the RW have been injecting into their minds for 30 years as described above.

Added on edit: The media are out to make money although some do have an outright RW bias. They make money by packaging current events to mesh with a particular world view - the world view of their target market. Their stories and editorials will seem true to their readers. That makes their readers feel good because it seems to them that world events mesh with that world view. It makes them feel smart and in control and less threatened by those events. Readers (of the WSJ for instance) or watchers (of FAUX news for instance) will pay a lot of money and buy a lot of sponsors' products and services for that daily reassurance that the world is unfolding the way they already knew it would.