The Young Turks is a news show that claims to be on a mission to counter big corporate news like Fox, ABC, CNN and MSNBC. The main host Cenk Uygur was on MSNBC and claims to have left, because he would not tone down his rhetoric to please MSNBC sponsors. His ratings were high so this may be true. Honestly unless you are liberal you will not enjoy the show. And you can't be any old liberal you need to be a very special type of progressive liberal who feels Obama and most democrats who aren't Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren sold out out to the man. The man in this case being corporate interests. If you do fit into that category this is probably the show for you. Basically if you ever watched MSNBC and said "damn why are they so conservative on this show" this is your show.
The main pro to the show is that they cover stories that honestly won't get covered on mainstream news or they will cover the same stories from a completely different angle. The cons outweigh the pros unfortunately. You will only ever hear a progressive view espoused on the show and the only disagreement in the staff will be between someone who wants to go progressive or someone who wants to go somewhat progressive on an issue. It turns into a strange sort of echo chamber. Arguments never get serious or heated and sometimes the staff seems to agree on issues so completely that the argument itself seems contrived just to give them something to talk about. If you are someone who wants balanced news you would need to watch this show and fox news and then come to an opinion. Strangely the show seems to be set up specifically to encourage this viewing behavior as a good chunk of the young Turks is devoted to showing clips from Fox news and then dissecting what they said. The best portions of the show are where Cenk takes two or three hours and interviews someone like Sam Harris. This doesn't happen all the time as not everyone seems to want to go on the show. Harris himself said he felt pressured to go on the show in order to rebut Reza Aslan who was also interviewed on the show. Another pro for the show is that while you may not agree with the stance they will take politically incorrect stances on issues while mainstream news won't take a side or will dance around the issue. The show for instance is pro legalization of prostitution and does not feel all religions are equal or the same. Mainstream news anchors would never admit such positions.
My main problem with the show is that it is an amateur operation. In theory it is great that ordinary people are using the internet and Youtube to spread the truth and break the stranglehold large corporations and powerful individuals have on the news, but in practice it becomes frightening pretty quick. One of the unappreciated aspects of big business news is that they have lots of money to pay fact checkers, large staffs, and script writers. Young Turks obviously has a much smaller budget and has to make due. Big news obviously still make mistakes, but they are generally small things or when they are big mistakes the other main news networks gleefully report on their peers mistake so everyone ends up knowing the truth. On Young Turks if someone makes a mistake it will go unnoticed and unfixed. Nobody is going to report on CNN that the Young Turks made a mistake. A few examples of errors was one of their commentators after complaining the minimum wage was too low for several minutes admitted he did not know what the minimum wage was(not a guest a full time commentator). When reporting on the human torch in the fantastic four reboot being cast with a black actor the entire cast repeatedly referred to Johnny Storm as Johnny Fire. The fact that the Human Torch and the Invisible woman are brother and sister was never brought up. Sam Harris also brought up a legitimate argument citing probability theory in his interview and Cenk waved it off as incorrect. To be fair not many news anchors professional or amateur can weigh in intelligently on probability theory. Ultimately I fear this show is a harbinger of things to come where amateur journalists crowd the internet with competing versions of "the truth." The problem is of course that when everything is true then nothing is.
The main pro to the show is that they cover stories that honestly won't get covered on mainstream news or they will cover the same stories from a completely different angle. The cons outweigh the pros unfortunately. You will only ever hear a progressive view espoused on the show and the only disagreement in the staff will be between someone who wants to go progressive or someone who wants to go somewhat progressive on an issue. It turns into a strange sort of echo chamber. Arguments never get serious or heated and sometimes the staff seems to agree on issues so completely that the argument itself seems contrived just to give them something to talk about. If you are someone who wants balanced news you would need to watch this show and fox news and then come to an opinion. Strangely the show seems to be set up specifically to encourage this viewing behavior as a good chunk of the young Turks is devoted to showing clips from Fox news and then dissecting what they said. The best portions of the show are where Cenk takes two or three hours and interviews someone like Sam Harris. This doesn't happen all the time as not everyone seems to want to go on the show. Harris himself said he felt pressured to go on the show in order to rebut Reza Aslan who was also interviewed on the show. Another pro for the show is that while you may not agree with the stance they will take politically incorrect stances on issues while mainstream news won't take a side or will dance around the issue. The show for instance is pro legalization of prostitution and does not feel all religions are equal or the same. Mainstream news anchors would never admit such positions.
My main problem with the show is that it is an amateur operation. In theory it is great that ordinary people are using the internet and Youtube to spread the truth and break the stranglehold large corporations and powerful individuals have on the news, but in practice it becomes frightening pretty quick. One of the unappreciated aspects of big business news is that they have lots of money to pay fact checkers, large staffs, and script writers. Young Turks obviously has a much smaller budget and has to make due. Big news obviously still make mistakes, but they are generally small things or when they are big mistakes the other main news networks gleefully report on their peers mistake so everyone ends up knowing the truth. On Young Turks if someone makes a mistake it will go unnoticed and unfixed. Nobody is going to report on CNN that the Young Turks made a mistake. A few examples of errors was one of their commentators after complaining the minimum wage was too low for several minutes admitted he did not know what the minimum wage was(not a guest a full time commentator). When reporting on the human torch in the fantastic four reboot being cast with a black actor the entire cast repeatedly referred to Johnny Storm as Johnny Fire. The fact that the Human Torch and the Invisible woman are brother and sister was never brought up. Sam Harris also brought up a legitimate argument citing probability theory in his interview and Cenk waved it off as incorrect. To be fair not many news anchors professional or amateur can weigh in intelligently on probability theory. Ultimately I fear this show is a harbinger of things to come where amateur journalists crowd the internet with competing versions of "the truth." The problem is of course that when everything is true then nothing is.