Lord of Lies posted:

Lord of Lies posted:

The bolded part is important because the Propaganda Model does just that: it treats mass media as "a monolithic entity to be confronted." From this, we can safely assume that the reason it is used as material in this particular course at least is as an example of how not to approach media literacy.

quote:

Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results. It is well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of an institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organizations have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. These considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts.2 The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

joepinetree posted:

First, I am fairly sure that whatever criticisms can be made of Freud, no one would consider him "outside the field." Second, a 1988 book cannot be compared to the role a foundational but outdated reference plays in a field. Third, the "Current Debates in Media" MIT course I linked to is a graduate level class, which, by its very name, indicates that it is about current debates. Fourth, besides the syllabi I linked, I also linked to a reader for the field and reflections from someone on teaching media literacy. But let's flip this around: what would you need to see to determine whether media studies people think that book and the authors belong to the "field?"

evilweasel posted:

the critique he is offering is, specifically, that chomsky's work isn't very good and that the parts that are good have been done better by actual experts.

joepinetree posted:

But it wasn't a rebuttal to "MC offers little to no useful material," because that is a non-statement that can't be argued. It was a rebuttal to it being for "lay persons" from someone "outside the field." It is clear that people in the field don't think of Chomsky as being outside the field, and it is clear that, to criticize it or not, it is included in a number of academic curricula (and one of the syllabi is from a graduate seminar). I don't think my post in any way was an argument that the book is good. It was simply pointing out the absurdity of an appeal to authority about "fields" and lay persons that simply wasn't true.

Red and Black posted:

Does it? Here's an excerpt from the introduction, literally the first couple pages of the book:

You said you read MC three times??

Epinephrine posted:

You're missing the point. Freud is relevant to psychology; Freud is, at best, a joke in the science. In both undergrad and graduate school a common practice is to require students to read and analyze bad papers so that they can see what a bad paper looks like and in the future identify bad papers as they come up and avoid making similar mistakes to the authors. This includes papers written in the past several years that are indisputably in whichever field the program is in. Whether or not the book is on topic doesn't matter here in the slightest, the question is whether Chomsky is useful for the purposes of this discussion. In other words,

evilweasel posted:

stuff

joepinetree posted:

Like, funny thing: manufacturing consent is Chomsky's most assigned book:
https://opensyllabus.org/result/author?id=Noam+Chomsky
...
This is one of the clearest examples of motivated reasoning in these forums, where every bit of inconvenient data is explained away without ever having to present your own. But hey, there are 553 syllabi out there online with manufacturing content on it. Can you find say, 5, where it is clearly being presented as what to no write as you claim here?

quote:

All shared syllabi are ‘private’ by default—they will not be available for display or download. But we are also building a public collection that we will make available for download. If you are willing to share on this basis, please put ‘public’ in the email subject line.

evilweasel posted:

interestingly, this boring meta-argument is actually relevant to this thread in an odd way, even if it was touched off by someone just saying "read chomsky" and getting

in short, the criticism of chomsky's work that was leveled is that he is not an expert in the field, and that his book is directed at lay audiences.

the former is simple enough: a non-expert telling you things is less reliable than an expert telling you things. the fact that his work has been discussed in the field since then does not make him an expert - i read plenty of books in my college classes (a long time ago) that were on the syllabus to explain their impact, not because they were right. that said, of course, a non-expert can be right and an expert can be wrong: but it is a useful heuristic that you should be less trusting of a non-expert than an expert, and if you are going to take the time to read a book on something you may want to invest your time in works by the best-regarded experts - you do not, after all, have infinite time.

the latter is getting glossed over and should not, because that's the part that's most relevant here. the problem of a book directed at lay audiences is in the incentives, and in the measurement of success. in short: the goal is to sell books to as many people as possible, and your success will be dictated by how well you sell books to as many people as possible. that introduces several biases. one is accessibility: the material needs to be intelligible to a layperson. that's mostly good - it forces you to refine your thinking and understand it better in order to explain it in a simpler way, without jargon. but it introduces a strong bias to simplify not only the explanation but the concepts as well, and that introduces a problem. for a complex subject, a popular book will tend to elide over the complex stuff that cannot be meaningfully explained to a layperson - but without making clear it is doing so, because a book that leaves the reader feeling they understand the subject will sell better than one that leaves the reader with further work to do.

more problematically, however, it introduces a bias towards what readers will like as opposed to what is correct, malcom gladwell is a good example. much of his stuff is utter nonsense, that actual experts hold in complete disdain. but he's a very good storyteller and makes a reader feel they understand a subject and feel they have learned something, even though they haven't. and this is where the "accessibility" thing rears its ugly side: an accessible, but wrong, explanation will sell worse than one that is less accessible, but correct. further, it can lead to active biases against being correct: a book that is correct, but does not offer pleasing conclusions to the reader will sell more poorly than one that is incorrect but offers pleasing conclusions to the reader. ra-rah history books are perhaps the most obvious of these, but the problem is pervasive: the incentives in book-writing are not aligned with being correct, they are aligned with being popular.

works aimed at other experts or to advance scholarship will have other biases - towards being correct, or at least not wrong (the two are not the same) at the expense of being useful to anyone but the author and a handful of other experts, for example. but given that they will rise and fall on their merits to a greater degree there is, at least, a greater pressure to being correct - and if they are not, other expert works will likely explain why.

now, does this mean a popular book, or one directed at the public, is always wrong, always useless, etc? no, of course not. for one, it is often necessary to simplify concepts in a way that is wrong (but yet teaches you something useful) even to people intending to become experts. but if you simply say "read x book to understand this subject" it is a valid response to say "that's a book aimed at a lay audience" to make clear that no, it's not for understanding the subject, it is likely at best useful for an introduction to the subject.

it is a consistent problem that people read introductory material, that dramatically oversimplifies things, and assume they understand it. my personal bugabear is people who took an econ 101 class and think that what they were taught in that class is how things work, instead of incredibly simplified models that have been deliberately simplified to eliminate any need for calculus in introductory classes, to just sort of illustrate a general concept. much in the same way molecules are not, in fact, hard balls with tubes connecting them to other molecules, except with even less intended connection to reality. but that's the thing about a popular book - people want to feel they understand the subject, they do not want to be told they need to understand calculus to even get the basics right, and they do not want to be told "these are really broad general concepts to illustrate things you need to think about, not How Things Work"

now, at the end of the day, it matters if the underlying stuff is right or wrong - again, plenty of popular books on academic subjects have valuable insights. but this whole digression happened in response to someone who identified none of the underlying ideas they wanted to talk about - merely to recommend the book. you complain that the criticism was not detailed enough to point to specific ideas that were wrong - but of course it would be silly to do that when the ideas the poster wanted to discuss were not identified. instead, it was a "this is why that's not a useful use of your time, and you should look to other sources instead" which is a helpful and useful response to someone discussing reading a book (not exactly a one-minute affair) as opposed to a short article or the like.

it should go without saying that a book (or any other work) that does not intend to do something, and indeed says that would be a mistake, can go right ahead and make that mistake anyway.

evilweasel posted:

quote:

it should go without saying that a book (or any other work) that does not intend to do something, and indeed says that would be a mistake, can go right ahead and make that mistake anyway.

evilweasel posted:

i spent a while thinking perhaps i just could not figure out how to find the syllabuses on this site because i hadn't had any coffee and was missing the obvious, but finally found this in the "about" section:

so i do not think that anyone can meet that standard, because I think the site doesn't have that public collection yet! and even if it did, most would not be in it. however, in response to your argument from syllabuses: https://opensyllabus.org/result/author?id=Malcolm+Gladwell

joepinetree posted:

Epinephrine posted:

You've now missed the point, and twice, and it's beginning to look intentional. Your metric for "in field" is not relevant to the question of quality.

You assume that if it shows up a lot in syllabi then it's worthy of discussion and you then use the open course website to claim that Chomsky qualifies. Let's play that game out and see what other books are worthy of discussion by your metric:
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: used in 3,473 courses, including 1,192 in history
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver: 400 courses, including 77 in mathematics
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: 877 courses, including 190 in psychology
- Outliers: The Story of Success: 1,710 courses, including 173 in criminal justice and 123 in psychology
- The Bell Curve: 443 courses, including 117 in psychology
- Mein Kampf: 1,115 courses, including 146 in political science!

joepinetree posted:

But the argument never got to the question of quality. Because Discendo Vox never actually made a point about quality. He instead argued that it was "outside the field."
And you keep ignoring the fact that presence in syllabi was only one of the things i pointed to. As if the open syllabi project was my only source. You haven't gotten to the part where it was included in the reader for the field, cited in professors' reflections on teaching in the field, that the authors were hired to teach in the field. Not to mention that google exists. We can look up the level and the context in which the books you looked up were used. But hey, if you really care, I can go back and edit my post and remove the reference to the open syllabus project. We can just focus on the part about inclusion in readers, citations about experts teaching in the field, and hiring decisions at top communications schools.

Epinephrine posted:

You've now missed the point, and twice, and it's beginning to look intentional. Your metric for "in field" is not relevant to the question of quality.

You assume that if it shows up a lot in syllabi then it's worthy of discussion and you then use the open course website to claim that Chomsky qualifies. Let's play that game out and see what other books are worthy of discussion by your metric:
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: used in 3,473 courses, including 1,192 in history
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver: 400 courses, including 77 in mathematics
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: 877 courses, including 190 in psychology
- Outliers: The Story of Success: 1,710 courses, including 173 in criminal justice and 123 in psychology
- The Bell Curve: 443 courses, including 117 in psychology
- Mein Kampf: 1,115 courses, including 146 in political science!

Sarcastr0 posted:

It seems to me that arguing whether the definition of 'outside the field' can include works that are a useful reference but not part of the current thinking is pedantic and not useful.

We should return to discussing the merits of MC when thinking about reading media. Actually, I'd prefer to discuss Red and Black's framework because it's right here and it looks like he's arguing it follows the same paradigm.

While I absolutely think that the you should read media thinking about the demand signal the audience they're aiming act gives them, and any other ideologies in the mix of owners, authors, editors, etc. But reading with one eye on the incentives and hermeneutics is not the same as ignoring it a priori as a pack of lies. And I am skeptical of framework that include discarding sources that don't agree with said framework.

Which means I've read Rand and The Bell Curve in order to argue cogently about it. Not that I have an open mind, but I try to understand them as more than dunking fodder.
To decide to ignore as corrupted anything written without your particular ideology is just wallowing in confirmation bias, which is not going to get you to any truth you have not already decided on.

But of course there are limits to this - I'm not going to read Camp of Saints or Gateway Pundit. Some ideologies I disagree with are more loathsome than others. And if you think all ideologies you disagree with are equally loathsome, that's another problem beyond media literacy. Or maybe that's actually the core question.

Main Paineframe posted:

Looks like there are thousands of college courses that think those books are worthy of some kind of discussion!

How are they being discussed? We don't know, so we're left to just theorize and guess based on our own preconceived feelings about those books! Or, y'know, we could just admit that we don't know and that this line of argument is a dead-end we don't have the data to pursue. Instead of theorizing about the contents of college courses that none of us have ever taken, and relying on appeals to authorities we've essentially made up, why not focus on the actual arguments themselves?

Is Noam Chomsky "in the field"? I'm not sure where we're drawing the boundaries of a field that first appeared in academia when Chomsky was already in his 40s, but the writers of the whitepaper DisVox is reposting here aren't trained media criticism academics either.

Red and Black posted:

A whole lot of words but zero concrete criticisms of the content of MC. You mentioned that Chomsky and Herman excluded news stories that would contradict their thesis... but offer no examples. You say the propaganda model is “unfalsifiable”... but obviously you could challenge it by finding, for example, instances where presumably “unworthy” victims are covered as much or more and with similar quality as “worthy” victims.

quote:

Does it? Here's an excerpt from the introduction, literally the first couple pages of the book:

quote:
Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results. It is well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of an institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organizations have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. These considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts.2 The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

You said you read MC three times??

Red and Black posted:

As for the argument from authority meta-debate. Saying “my argument from authority is valid because my expert is a real expert” begs the question: who decides who is and isn’t an expert?

Lord of Lies posted:

Others, especially evilweasel, have answered this more thoroughly, but my short answer is that there are many types of expertise, such as that which comes from years of deep formal study (e.g. Stephen Hawking was an expert physicist), and that which comes from years of experience (e.g. Sean Connery was an expert actor). Anyone can claim that they are an expert, and anyone who is using someone's material to support their Internet forum arguments can claim that that person is an expert on the subject at hand. In the case of Chomsky, the question is if he is an expert on media literacy, which is the topic of this thread. And the answer is a resounding no: he has no formal education in media analysis, he has not worked in media organizations and therefore has no first-hand experience as a practitioner, and Manufacturing Consent, while thoroughly researched and no doubt cited and/or covered in some college classes, is not an academic paper. It is a popular book written for laypeople and therefore has all the biases and weaknesses of such books.

fool of sound posted:

Yeah I don't this argument is particularly productive. Manufacturing Consent is indisputably influential and much discussed, and people disputing it need to debunk, not dismiss.

Lord of Lies posted:

But that's precisely what I mean by unfalsifiable: its scope is extremely broad — literally the entire mainstream media apparatus in the West and its coverage of a plethora of topics, both domestic and foreign — and the claims it makes are quantified only in the most superficial (although extremely laborious) way. For example, the authors have measured things like the length (i.e. height in inches) of newspaper columns on each topic, while completely ignoring other factors such as the placement of each column — that's an important thing to leave out, because a seven paragraph column on page 6 is not going to have the same level of exposure to readers as a two paragraph column on the front page.

quote:

I could spend several days and dig through the book's citations like I did eight years ago and provide you with counterexamples where "unworthy" victims were in fact covered by mainstream outlets, and you would respond with "well okay, but this doesn't prove that the unworthy victims were covered as much or more and with similar quality as worthy victims!" And you would be right, because it cannot be effectively proven or disproven.

quote:

I'm actually very glad you quoted that part, because it is a great example of how the authors try to have their cake and eat it too. They begrudgingly say that the system is not monolithic, and then immediately follow with "...but the various factors that make the system non-monolithic actually don't matter because they are kept within bounds and at the margins, since they don't interfere with the official agenda" which sounds intelligent, but is actually pretty meaningless because it is tautological and self-justifying.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

I like Chomsky and broadly consider him a net positive, but he needs to be understood in light of his own blindspots and especially the big one of 'what is the appropriate level of skepticism and scrutiny to apply when something truly horrible genuinely is happening and it aligns, at least nominally, with american (or chinese/russian for that matter) interests? How do you not end up years later having to explain why you downplayed the cambodian or serbian genocides because you assumed it was being exaggerated as an american casus belli?

It's popular because it's digestible and it fills a role similar to maybe 'a people's history' in that it's useful for getting through to people who still see the world through a highschool history textbook pov. I very much haven't seen or heard chomsky's scholarship brought up earnestly in ages. MC in particular is one of those books people should read, and then they should learn the critiques of and I'm guessing that's also the context in which it finds itself on most syllabi.

Worth remembering too that it came out at a time when Americans had grown up steeped in a bunch of fantastical cold-war narratives and just ridiculously exceptionalist propaganda that was by all accounts, earnestly bought into to an extent that there's no real contemporary comparison for. Injecting some doubt into the ways people related to media was much more novel and at the time even fringe. Now you can go on substack and find 50 different flavors of skeptical counter-narratives from open conspiracy to far right to far left to pro-china to anti-Russian and everything in between. Imo the last time the media ecosystem that Chomsky wrote about was the dominant media paradigm was the early 2000s up to maybe the mid 2000s.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

I don't really have a huge objection to people invoking Chomsky's book when discussing media sources, but it's one of those things where invoking it automatically signals something about the poster's level of... let's say, sophistication?

Herstory Begins Now posted:

Worth remembering too that it came out at a time when Americans had grown up steeped in a bunch of fantastical cold-war narratives and just ridiculously exceptionalist propaganda that was by all accounts, earnestly bought into to an extent that there's no real contemporary comparison for. Injecting some doubt into the ways people related to media was much more novel and at the time even fringe. Now you can go on substack and find 50 different flavors of skeptical counter-narratives from open conspiracy to far right to far left to pro-china to anti-Russian and everything in between. Imo the last time the media ecosystem that Chomsky wrote about was the dominant media paradigm was the early 2000s up to maybe the mid 2000s.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

I like Chomsky and broadly consider him a net positive, but he needs to be understood in light of his own blindspots and especially the big one of 'what is the appropriate level of skepticism and scrutiny to apply when something truly horrible genuinely is happening and it aligns, at least nominally, with american (or chinese/russian for that matter) interests? How do you not end up years later having to explain why you downplayed the cambodian or serbian genocides because you assumed it was being exaggerated as an american casus belli?

Stormgale posted:

This feels just re-litigating the "Out of field" discussion again, then idea that euphemistically calling someone stupid for using a widely discussed and read piece of media criticism reflects more on you than them to be honest.

If you think it's simple, talk about how it's simple, not this dance about a self evident truth.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

First of all, I wasn't talking about "out of field", I was talking about the fact that the Propaganda Model is elementary and introductory: it has a broad scope but does not go very deep. Second of all, saying that using an elementary model to try to explain complex workings and motivations of media outlets — and using it as a hammer and seeing everything as a nail — lacks sophistication is not the same thing as calling someone stupid. It means they lack sophistication on the subject and may want to read other materials.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

I like Chomsky and broadly consider him a net positive, but he needs to be understood in light of his own blindspots and especially the big one of 'what is the appropriate level of skepticism and scrutiny to apply when something truly horrible genuinely is happening and it aligns, at least nominally, with american (or chinese/russian for that matter) interests? How do you not end up years later having to explain why you downplayed the cambodian or serbian genocides because you assumed it was being exaggerated as an american casus belli?

Lib and let die posted:

One of the things that interests me that largely seems to go ignored is the political ethos of entertainment media. My wife and I, in a constant struggle of "there's nothing worth watching on TV" usually end up just kind of bored-watching a lot of police procedurals or real crime stuff and I'm constantly amazed at what kind of attitudes towards law enforcement, criminal justice, and the rights of the accused are normalized through shows like Law & Order or Criminal Minds. It's been a number of years since I've seen L&O, but we've seen about every episode there is of Criminal Minds. I don't think it's a stretch to say that by and large, people know that "zoom, enahance!" isn't how it really works, but I do think that there are harmful portrayals of citizens that know - and even more horrifyingly to the brave agents of the Behavioral Science Unit - invoke their rights against the police that are normalized through sympathetic police procedurals. In my (lay, of course) view, this is a natural extension of the "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" defense of domestic surveillance stuff like the PATRIOT act, PRISM program, etc - in much the way the if you're done nothing wrong argument comes across in our news media, "if you're innocent, you don't need to invoke your right to legal representation" is coming through in popular police procedurals like Law and Order or Criminal Minds (there's a metric ton of poo poo to unpack with NCIS too, like the normalization of foreign-embedded intelligence agents in our government and the absolutely astounding amount of extrajudicial nonsense the NCIS team members have gotten away with over the years but let's leave that off to the side).

The scene is always the investigator and the suspect in an interrogation room, and the investigator is grilling the suspect who immediately clams up with "I want to speak with my lawyer. Now." Camera cuts to the other side of the glass and two other agents are seen either congratulating themselves on getting the suspect to call his lawyer because that's an obvious sign of guilt or commiserating with each other that it just got a lot harder to prove this guy did it (a conclusion they've already drawn and are investigating from).

I'm often left wondering if - and how - the popularity of police procedurals in pop culture have impacted societal attitudes towards policing.

Lib and let die posted:

I would argue that we can't really fault Chomsky for being wrong on Yugoslavia and Cambodia - given that the US has been caught - red handed (hell, that's probably even an over-generous interpretation - they've been caught elbow-deep in a tub of red paint time and time again) manufacturing reasons to go to war from whole cloth, at some point it's only to be expected to default to a position of "this is bullshit" based on the source alone. Reflexively refusing a story or narrative's credibility based on the source alone is something that happens routinely here in D&D - a common refrain I'm exposed to a lot is "if Tucker Carlson said the sky were blue, that would be enough to convince me it were green." Of course, any one of us could walk outside and just...look up and see the color of the sky, but things get a little difficult when it comes to narratives on, say, Syria. If any among us (save for Brown Moses) can afford to just drop six months of our lives and just go to Syria and report on what's going on there, we'd probably get an interesting look at how much of what we hear repeated on The Trusted Sources(tm)(bluecheck) is objective truth, how much is subjective due to experience/bias, and how much of it is just fabricated from the ether - but I'd wager that the large majority of us have neither the personal means nor the financial support of the US intelligence community to hop a trip to Syria for a Goonclusive News Report.

I don't really want to spend too much time on Chomsky because as I've alluded to earlier, I think the current iteration of Chomsky is largely outdated/irrelevant/out of touch but again I'm just a folksy, backwoods layperson with no fancy ivy league degrees that barely scraped through high school thanks to vocational school, and flunked out of New England Tech, of all the lovely, easy-to-cruise-through technical schools so I probably don't really have any business posting about largely academic stuff.

One of the things that interests me that largely seems to go ignored is the political ethos of entertainment media. My wife and I, in a constant struggle of "there's nothing worth watching on TV" usually end up just kind of bored-watching a lot of police procedurals or real crime stuff and I'm constantly amazed at what kind of attitudes towards law enforcement, criminal justice, and the rights of the accused are normalized through shows like Law & Order or Criminal Minds. It's been a number of years since I've seen L&O, but we've seen about every episode there is of Criminal Minds. I don't think it's a stretch to say that by and large, people know that "zoom, enahance!" isn't how it really works, but I do think that there are harmful portrayals of citizens that know - and even more horrifyingly to the brave agents of the Behavioral Science Unit - invoke their rights against the police that are normalized through sympathetic police procedurals. In my (lay, of course) view, this is a natural extension of the "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" defense of domestic surveillance stuff like the PATRIOT act, PRISM program, etc - in much the way the if you're done nothing wrong argument comes across in our news media, "if you're innocent, you don't need to invoke your right to legal representation" is coming through in popular police procedurals like Law and Order or Criminal Minds (there's a metric ton of poo poo to unpack with NCIS too, like the normalization of foreign-embedded intelligence agents in our government and the absolutely astounding amount of extrajudicial nonsense the NCIS team members have gotten away with over the years but let's leave that off to the side).

The scene is always the investigator and the suspect in an interrogation room, and the investigator is grilling the suspect who immediately clams up with "I want to speak with my lawyer. Now." Camera cuts to the other side of the glass and two other agents are seen either congratulating themselves on getting the suspect to call his lawyer because that's an obvious sign of guilt or commiserating with each other that it just got a lot harder to prove this guy did it (a conclusion they've already drawn and are investigating from).

I'm often left wondering if - and how - the popularity of police procedurals in pop culture have impacted societal attitudes towards policing.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

I like Chomsky and broadly consider him a net positive, but he needs to be understood in light of his own blindspots and especially the big one of 'what is the appropriate level of skepticism and scrutiny to apply when something truly horrible genuinely is happening and it aligns, at least nominally, with american (or chinese/russian for that matter) interests? How do you not end up years later having to explain why you downplayed the cambodian or serbian genocides because you assumed it was being exaggerated as an american casus belli?

genericnick posted:

But can you really expect any model to never lead you wrong? I haven't read MC or interacted with Chomsky's writing for something like 15 years so I'll bow out of that part of the discussion. However the only examples of him being wrong that I've seen brought up are Yugoslavia and Cambodia. And without looking at the claims in detail and whether they were reasonable at the time, being wrong two times in 50 years is not particularly damning of a world view. And I have to echo Ytlaya: What is the big risk in overcaution here? The US wasn't going to cooperate with Vietnam in taking out Pol Pot, no matter what Noam Chomsky says.

genericnick posted:

But can you really expect any model to never lead you wrong? I haven't read MC or interacted with Chomsky's writing for something like 15 years so I'll bow out of that part of the discussion. However the only examples of him being wrong that I've seen brought up are Yugoslavia and Cambodia. And without looking at the claims in detail and whether they were reasonable at the time, being wrong two times in 50 years is not particularly damning of a world view. And I have to echo Ytlaya: What is the big risk in overcaution here? The US wasn't going to cooperate with Vietnam in taking out Pol Pot, no matter what Noam Chomsky says.

Lord of Lies posted:

There isn't a thing that the New York Times could publish that would make you go "wait a minute, the Propaganda Model didn't predict this and cannot explain it" because those things were pre-emptively identified and dismissed by Chomsky and Herman as still being within the boundaries but on the margins since they don't influence policy. That's why the model is unfalsifiable, and it's also why it's not very interesting or useful for media literacy: it doesn't grant the user any new insight or encourage them to dig deeper.

Sekhem posted:

Given that it considers relative marginality as something you can actually track, then surely it makes falsifiable predictions obvious? For example, it would be a blow to the thesis of the book if a bulk of NY Times editorial attention was given to narratives contrary to the dominant corporate-state interest, with relatively little support of it existing in the sidelines.

quote:

people disputing it need to debunk, not dismiss.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

In other words, the book does not provide a way to distinguish cause and effect, because the Propaganda Model is self-justifying.

Lord of Lies posted:

We should expect models to have explanatory power for new phenomena and prediction power for future phenomena. Furthermore, we should expect them to be falsifiable: if the model is so totalizing in nature and its building blocks so unprovable that it supports working backwards from a conclusion to justify why anything can fit it, that's not a good model.

Suppose the New York Times publishes an editorial tomorrow that says, "it is indeed time for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan." If the Propaganda Model is your "hammer", then you would see the editorial as yet another nail and say, "well obviously they are saying this, because the administration already announced they are doing it, therefore they are manufacturing consent for it through mainstream media outlets!" But if the editorial instead says, "the US should actually stay in Afghanistan because the Taliban cannot be allowed to gain power and influence" then you could also say, "the government clearly doesn't actually want to withdraw, that's why the NYT is manufacturing consent to stop and reverse the withdrawal". In other words, you could invent any reason you want as to why stuff you read on mainstream media is just state and/or corporate propaganda. There isn't a thing that the New York Times could publish that would make you go "wait a minute, the Propaganda Model didn't predict this and cannot explain it" because those things were pre-emptively identified and dismissed by Chomsky and Herman as still being within the boundaries but on the margins since they don't influence policy. That's why the model is unfalsifiable, and it's also why it's not very interesting or useful for media literacy: it doesn't grant the user any new insight or encourage them to dig deeper.

fool of sound posted:

I reads more as a critique of the lack of falsifiability of the misuse of the framework tbh. When you have to jump through that many leaps to sustain the theory it's probably not actually a quality argument. Misuse of a theory isn't evidence against it.

quote:

A lot of those bodies were combat deaths. One of the beauties of the Western propaganda system is that all the bodies they found after July, 1995, they count as executed, even though we know very well that a large number were killed in combat.
...
So, I regard the Srebrenica massacre as a tremendous propaganda triumph. The West wanted to go after Serbia and they avoided peace. They needed this massacre.

quote:

In 1979, Chomsky and Herman revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence and published it with South End Press as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights.[19] In this work they compared U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. They argued that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on that in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy.[20][21] Volume II of the book The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (1979), which appeared after the regime had been deposed, has been described by area specialist Sophal Ear as "one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution" in which they "perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media".[22] In their book, Chomsky and Herman wrote: "The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome" but questioned their scale, which may have been inflated "by a factor of 100". They wrote that the evacuation of Phnom Penh "may actually have saved many lives", that the Khmer Rouge's agricultural policies reportedly produced positive results and there might have been "a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge".[23]

the preface to this book, pgs 7-8 posted:

The institutionalization of the "Rwandan genocide" has been the remarkable achievement of a propaganda system systained by both public and private power, with the crucial assistance of a related cadre of intellectual enforcers.

pg. 346 posted:

Herman and David Peterson’s slender volume The Politics of Genocide was published in mid-2010 by Monthly Review Press – one of the longest-established and most prestigious leftist publishing houses. In the Rwanda section of their book, and in various online posts, Herman and Peterson allege that the “main-stream” depiction of events in Rwanda in 1994 “turns perpetrator and victim upside-down.” Rather than a genocidal “Hutu Power” regime massacring members of the Tutsi minority en masse (along with many oppositionist Hutus), they contend the regime was not “in control of anything” at the time of the mass killing; that the invading, Ugandan-based Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Tutsi exiles, was “the only well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994”; and that therefore, “the chief responsibility for Rwandan political violence belonged to the RPF, and not to...any Hutu-related group.”

Let us be clear. In the Rwandan context, this is the equivalent of asserting that the Nazis never killed Jews in death camps – indeed, that it was really Jews who killed Germans. It is the most naked denial of the extermination of at least half a million Tutsis by agents of “Hutu Power” that I have ever read in an ostensibly scholarly source. And it relies on “evidence” that, even on cursory examination, proves to be the sheerest gossamer, when it is not simply hearsay and idle speculation – based on the declamations of “a tiny number of long-time American and Canadian genocide deniers, who gleefully drink each other’s putrid bath water,” as Gerald Caplan phrased it in a memorable critique for Pambazuka.org.

pg. 354 posted:

Like Herman and Peterson, the deniers cherry-pick a few useful factoids and declamations from serious scholarship on Rwanda (or halfway serious, like Davenport and Stam), while dismissing the vast bulk of the scholarly and human-rights literature as hopelessly corrupted by nefarious (Western/imperialist) interests. This has the additional advantage of cutting down on what would otherwise be an onerous reading list, since the literature on Rwanda is now so extensive, detailed, and utterly contrary to Herman and Peterson’s formulations.

Epinephrine posted:

The model allows anyone with any belief to claim that any widely-reported fact is just "Western propaganda" (because any widely-reported fact will be reported in Western media practically by definition of "widely reported") and therefore readily dismissed. In all the above cases, facts are dismissed on the grounds that the facts were reported by "Western propaganda sources" and therefore don't need to be believed, and then use that dismissal of the truth to insert their own beliefs.

Sekhem posted:

I think your argument is very unclear here, because you're purely discussing erroneous conclusions and not giving any example of methodology at all. This is simply pointing at the existence of evidently false conclusions, and simply speculating about what would have led them there based on your intuition. Which is, ironically, something close to what you're accusing them of doing.

Chomsky very notoriously got Cambodia wrong. But there's no indication that what led him to his erroneous conclusions there had nothing to do with the falsifiability of the propaganda model. His work on understanding the events of the time were an earnest attempt at tabulating available historical data and scholarly sources, even if these efforts were ultimately unsatisfactory. The evidence that Chomsky unfortunately dismissed was not media reports that he simply a priori dismissed as Western propaganda, but a scholarly account of first hand refugee testimonies which he underweighted due to a methodological concern about the reliability of first hand witness reports. Again, he was wrong to do so and it spoke to a fallibility and bias of his scholarship at the time (something nobody is free of) but the process which led to these errors has nothing to do with what you're alleging.

If anything, Chomsky is notorious for his collection of data and scholarship in accounting for events to the point of tedium. That's again not to say he is always successful at this, but that has nothing to do with the reliability of the propaganda model. Because that's simply not what the model is for - Chomsky and Herman do not use their model of propaganda as a heuristic to speculatively determine the factual basis of current events. They use their methods of political and historical analysis in order to critically assess the reality of events, and use the propaganda model to investigate in what ways the political reality (as they understand it) is presented and communicated in the media.

I don't know where your understanding of them as using the propaganda model as some kind of totalising heuristic to determine the factuality of events is coming from, because you just assert that this is how they use it without actually ever discussing or providing evidence for their flawed methodology.

joepinetree posted:

An academic book! By actual experts on the field! Who evaluate the propaganda model empirically! Which, by its very existence, invalidates the criticism presented in the past two pages!

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/27541

Free! You can download it now and read it for yourself!

Panzeh posted:

I think the problem here is that the propaganda model seems to be just an analystical tool for trying to understand current events sometimes, and then it becomes a heuristic for determining factuality in others.

Panzeh posted:

but if the PM is just an explanation of the banal point that the beliefs of corporate owners of a media color what gets published by said media entity, why bother criticizing a study that was trying to track the beliefs of journalists with the work they put out.