“We’re shutting it down,” Elon Musk said over the weekend in reference to USAID, the country’s main aid agency, which oversees around $40 billion a year in spending and has been around since the early 1960s. Following two weeks of chaos across the aid industry after the new US administration ordered a 90-day freeze on nearly all foreign assistance, it appears the Trump administration is attempting to move forward with a plan to close the agency and merge its responsibilities with the State Department, though legal challenges are likely.
I’m only pointing out he’s trained as a physical therapist to highlight that he is not trained in a field relevant to this whatsoever, you can be a critical thinker without being a journalist or going to college, but this person just decided they would be the arbiter of what media bias was in the 2016 US election and has just run with it. Most people do not realize this is just some guy’s opinions, if it was named “David Van Zandt’s blog on media bias” people would probably trust it less than naming it “MediaBiasFactCheck” which makes it sound like it’s not just the opinions of one random dude.
I always thought the ratings were based on a community or a team of people deciding based on hard criteria. Shame…
Yeah, I think it’s very deceptive in how it markets itself. I think the only reason you see it so much in sites like lemmy and reddit is it went viral during the 2016 US election, where discussions of “fake news” and media bias really took off for the first time and people have just been trusting it ever since.
😂
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: This is an undisclosed bot account.
I’ve taken Van Zandt to task before:
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I try to point people toward developing real media literacy: https://lemmy.ml/comment/12094932