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If we can consider the forward direction of the model taking some set of prior events and producing some posterior results about the media message, then we can go backwards to construct a set of priors that would produce the given results. Even if there's no formal mathematical model, people intuit something behaving like an invertible function. Since there's some massive dimension reduction going on you can't reconstruct things but could in theory say "This event reported both by Western and non-Western media the same way happened as described." Herman obviously thinks that his model is equally valid forward or backward or he wouldn't write a book that used it to deny the deaths of half a million people in Rwanda. Saying that Western sources about the number of deaths are tainted because they contradict certain non-Western sources is implicitly using the model to winnow out information from the prior events. Or he can use some information selectively where sources agree and use that where convenient. If this is an "erroneous conclusion" made by the very author of the model intentionally using his model in a certain way, that is one hell of a quirk of the model. Either he's completely oblivious to it to the point he's overlooking literal mass graves or he's using it fully cognizant of how it actually works and pulls it out when he needs a model so nihilistic it ignores inconvenient mass graves. If there are so many situations where the model breaks and even one of its own authors has trouble getting results that aren't literal loving genocide denial why bother with it versus anything else? Start up aidungeon.io and ask a dragon if Srebrenica really happened and the results aren't going to be worse. The only reasonable conclusion is people want it as an escape hatch to pure nihilism when all else fails. How can we actually know anything man? edit: In support of aidungeon.io, I got agreement with Herman on one genocide and a non-response on another which I'm counting as half a point quote:You are Sir Godfrey, a peasant living in a small village in the kingdom of Larion. You have a pitchfork and nothing else. You dream of getting out of your village and having an adventure. You go to your fields and begin working. You look up and see a large dragon flying in the distance. It is the color of snow, and its scales are as sharp as the stars in the sky. You drop your hoe and scream. 1337JiveTurkey fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 13:31
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1337JiveTurkey posted:Herman obviously thinks that his model is equally valid forward or backward or he wouldn't write a book that used it to deny the deaths of half a million people in Rwanda. Saying that Western sources about the number of deaths are tainted because they contradict certain non-Western sources is implicitly using the model to winnow out information from the prior events. Or he can use some information selectively where sources agree and use that where convenient. These objections seem to entirely be based on the assumption that because Chomsky and Herman were responsible for the propaganda model of media analysis, this model must be the method under which all his political analysis is based. But it's a specific model for media analysis, not a direct investigation of contemporary political events. Basically any cursory look at Chomsky's works will directly show his methodology for conducting political analysis, he's a notably clear writer. And it's largely conventional, not some idiosyncratic use of media theories outside their remit. Again, I must make clear that this isn't some defence of the quality of the scholarship that led to such objectionable conclusions. As I mentioned before, Chomsky's works on Cambodia over-relied on scholarly sources prior to the extreme destabilization in mid-70s Cambodia, and underweighed the available first hand refugee accounts which were one of the few indications available of the horrific scale of the genocide due to the relative paucity of information available at the time. But this simply wasn't a conclusion borne of the propaganda model! It's a different methodology with different flaws. I'll again say that I'm continuing using Chomsky's work as an example because that's what I'm familiar with, so I apologise if this response would be irrelevant to specific problems that Herman's work might have.
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Jun 22, 2021 14:24
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You're going off on a red herring about Chomsky's fastidiousness in data collection. I once worked with a guy trying to parse C code with a deep loving autoencoder. It was going to be trained on literally every C source file on GitHub. If you don't understand the details, that's a lot of model and a lot of data. The model was going to be stupid no matter how much data it was trained on. The propaganda model is relevant in the thread in that it links the events to the media that results. If an event happens due to a "friendly" dictator that's different than the (mostly) same event due to an "unfriendly" dictator and will result in different media coverage. Taking this in reverse is using the characteristics of the media source to evaluate whether their version of events is close to the truth or not. Every time someone says that we should disregard some telling of events because of the source's alignment with the West, that's what's going on. If that's not valid, then people shouldn't be using Manufactured Consent in that respect. If it's only valid in a very specific set of circumstances then someone should say what they are. If not even one of the authors can figure out when it doesn't lead to disastrously bad outcomes like genocide denial, then why allow it?
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Jun 22, 2021 16:43
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Sekhem posted: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. Sekhem posted: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. When the vast majority of people, including posters on this forum, consume media coverage, they do so with the aim of learning the factual basis of events and issues. A media analysis framework that does not help them determine the underlying facts — by sorting lies and spin from truth — is kind of useless as a practical tool. If it expects the user to first independently seek and discover the facts (by consuming scholarly resources like Chomsky & Herman did) before it can be used, it is not valuable to laypeople, who don't have the time or the expertise to undertake such research and fact-finding endeavors for everyday events, and it is not useful for understanding current events, for which scholarly resources won't yet exist and real-time accounts will be unverified and unreliable. I think for purposes of a debate forum, and this thread, what matters is this: when the mainstream media is covering an event or an issue, is it valid to dismiss that coverage as propaganda, and the claims therefore misleading or false, solely on the basis that the outlets are mainstream? It seems the answer is no, unless one has independently determined the underlying facts via scholarly research first. Is it valid to doubt or question the credibility of mainstream sources? The answer to that also appears to be no, since as you yourself said, the purpose of the Propaganda Model is not to speculatively try to determine the factuality of events. That's why so many people roll their eyes when Manufacturing Consent is brought up in political debates: neither its underlying claims, not the way they are regularly applied, are useful or even interesting. It just leads to tired derails about things like what is propaganda and what isn't, and that's why it's not even worth bringing up.
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Jun 22, 2021 16:45
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Slow News Day posted:I think for purposes of a debate forum, and this thread, what matters is this: when the mainstream media is covering an event or an issue, is it valid to dismiss that coverage as propaganda, and the claims therefore misleading or false, solely on the basis that the outlets are mainstream? It seems the answer is no, unless one has independently determined the underlying facts via scholarly research first. Is it valid to doubt or question the credibility of mainstream sources? The answer to that also appears to be no, since as you yourself said, the purpose of the Propaganda Model is not to speculatively try to determine the factuality of events. That's why so many people roll their eyes when Manufacturing Consent is brought up in political debates: neither its underlying claims, not the way they are regularly applied, are useful or even interesting. It just leads to tired derails about things like what is propaganda and what isn't, and that's why it's not even worth bringing up. This is a truly bizarre thing to say. You don't need the Propaganda Model to "doubt or question or credibility of mainstream sources". There is an abundance of evidence that the mainstream press engages in propaganda and deserves skepticism (for hard statistical evidence see the tables on the last page). What the PM does is provide a viable explanation for why this happens and provides a predictive framework for how the media will behave and how it positions itself with respect to state and corporate power. That's plenty useful for anyone who just wants to better understand the media.
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Jun 22, 2021 17:25
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1337JiveTurkey posted:You're going off on a red herring about Chomsky's fastidiousness in data collection. I once worked with a guy trying to parse C code with a deep loving autoencoder. It was going to be trained on literally every C source file on GitHub. If you don't understand the details, that's a lot of model and a lot of data. The model was going to be stupid no matter how much data it was trained on. If people are using the model in reverse to establish their understanding of events on the ground, that is an issue, but I don't think it is how it is used academically or how Chomsky and Herman used it in their works. Slow News Day posted:When the vast majority of people, including posters on this forum, consume media coverage, they do so with the aim of learning the factual basis of events and issues. A media analysis framework that does not help them determine the underlying facts — by sorting lies and spin from truth — is kind of useless as a practical tool. If it expects the user to first independently seek and discover the facts (by consuming scholarly resources like Chomsky & Herman did) before it can be used, it is not valuable to laypeople, who don't have the time or the expertise to undertake such research and fact-finding endeavors for everyday events, and it is not useful for understanding current events, for which scholarly resources won't yet exist and real-time accounts will be unverified and unreliable. The fact that it's not a heuristic that can internally verify and identify facts on the ground doesn't mean it has no contribution to make to how we identify the reliability of media sources. The lay person is always going to have to make a pragmatic effort to be "good enough" at correcting bias in a way that those who are held to scholarly or journalistic standards cannot afford (at least in theory). I think the points you're raising are valid, but a fundamental concern with any model of media analysis. Any honest approach in the field is going to identify that a total elimination of bias is impossible, and that by its nature media production can't be held to standards of rigour necessary in serious scholarship. Since as lay consumers of media we're in a position that makes closing these gaps difficult to impossible on a million different issues, we have to make a pragmatic conclusion of validity based on our best guess efforts of lining up an institution's reporting against the historical record. The propaganda model is a contributes to what priors we ought to hold and what questions we ought to ask in order to make those kinds of practical judgements, by giving us a model of causality in how information is presented, and how we might predict a media institution will behave. Media analysis allows us to as laypeople to hypothesise where flaws in presentation or sourcing might be, and what sources might be available to balance out or contradict the errors that individual institutions are inevitably going to present. No, we're never going to be able to independently establish the factual basis of any particular issue up to a rigorous standard, but I don't think that's what media analysis is for at all. It's utility is for the media consumer is to give us the tools to make the practical judgements required in forming a balanced media diet and habit. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 17:36
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The arguments of the propaganda model defenders in this thread have, as of late, rested heavily on claims that Herman and Chomsky misapply their model, or don't apply the conclusions of their own model when claiming widely reported facts about genocide are just Western propaganda. These claims of misapplication have been made repeatedly without substantiation. In making these claims, propaganda model defenders are not arguing against the thread, they are arguing against Herman and Chomsky. If they want to keep making such claims then the onus is on them to prove to the rest of us that they know how to use the model created by Herman and Chomsky better than Herman and Chomsky.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:32
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I don't make either of those claims, and I haven't seen anyone in this thread do so either. I'd appreciate you pointing out where anyone has done so.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:39
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Sekhem posted:I don't make either of those claims, and I haven't seen anyone in this thread do so either. I'd appreciate you pointing out where anyone has done so. 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. Sekhem posted:I'll add the caveat that I'm not very familiar with Herman's independent works so I can't speak on his scholarship on Rwanda specifically, but in Chomsky's case he does not use the propaganda model to determine the casualties of historical events.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:55
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Epinephrine posted:The arguments of the propaganda model defenders in this thread have, as of late, rested heavily on claims that Herman and Chomsky misapply their model, or don't apply the conclusions of their own model when claiming widely reported facts about genocide are just Western propaganda. These claims of misapplication have been made repeatedly without substantiation. In making these claims, propaganda model defenders are not arguing against the thread, they are arguing against Herman and Chomsky. If they want to keep making such claims then the onus is on them to prove to the rest of us that they know how to use the model created by Herman and Chomsky better than Herman and Chomsky. The Propaganda Model can’t predict the validity of individual news stories or media narratives so what you're saying makes no sense. Just because Herman or Chomsky wrote something doesn’t mean that they’re specifically applying the Propaganda Model. If you insist they are, then you need to demonstrate that by directly quoting them and showing how they are applying the PM to dismiss specific media narratives. All you’ve done is dig up controversial writings to try and smear the authors of MC and therefore avoid actually debating the merits and the evidence supporting the propaganda model. It’s the latest in a long line of evasions from your side. Red and Black fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 19:05
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Epinephrine posted:Of course. Here are two examples: If you'd read those posts, I think I make extremely clear that I don't think Chomsky is misapplying the model in any sense. He makes an entirely appropriate use of the PM, applying this tool of media analysis to... analyse the media, not using it to come to empirical conclusions about political events. Slow News Day has certainly disagreed with me, but they definitely understood the point I was making, so I don't think it's my error in communication. You seem to simply be making the assumption that because an author is responsible for developing a particular model, all of their work can then be reducible to it. But Chomsky's works of political analysis don't use the PM, it's generally a very straightforward and fastidious accounting of available scholarly research and historical data. e: I'd actually add that I think the fact that he doesn't have any particular sophisticated theoretical model for his political analysis as a contributing factor to his notable mistakes. It makes him a very clear writer with a particular gift of sniffing out inaccuracies and contradictions in existing scholarship, but leaves him pretty much rudderless on questions where there's a paucity of contemporaneous research. But I think it would be much better if the discussion was centred on his media analysis specifically rather than litigating his entire body of work, which makes it frustrating when the argument against it continuously invokes his political conclusions outside that field. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 19:06
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Sekhem posted:I don't really understand what the miscommunication here is: the fastidiousness of data collection is ancillary to my point, which is that Chomsky is not using the propaganda model in his political analysis of current events. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make that point. Whatever failures you can identify in his general model of political analysis, it's a different subject to the flaws of the propaganda model of media analysis. He was not using the propaganda model in order to establish his understanding of events in Cambodia, he made use of a non-media studies based methodology to do so. A flawed one, but again, outside the field that MC was concerned with. That's the point. People are bringing up MC because they want to go from media representations to facts in this, the media thread. Like it's some profound meditation on the nature of truth and not some excuse to piss all over everything in search of a cheap rhetorical trick.
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Jun 22, 2021 20:39
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Personally I didn't see any of what you're alleging in this thread, and the discussion has centred on critiquing the legitimacy of the work itself rather than particular people misapplying its thesis. Most of the arguments on the "side" of the PM have been mostly pointing to the evidence of legitimate academic work done in its tradition, and pointing out that the critiques offered here have been lacking actual direct responses to it as a media studies methodology. If you think people are merely invoking it as a way to pull a rhetorical trick later in the discussion, I think it would be better to actually see if that happens rather than engaging in bad faith automatically.
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Jun 22, 2021 20:57
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I really don't read the people in this thread arguing in defense of MC as doing so to pull a rhetorical trick, though certainly it has a reputation for that elsewhere. Criticism of media doesn't imply that the critiqued media is entirely or even predominantly valueless and I don't think any posters at present are trying to argue that in MCs case it does so.
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Jun 22, 2021 21:23
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Red and Black posted:This is a truly bizarre thing to say. You don't need the Propaganda Model to "doubt or question or credibility of mainstream sources". There is an abundance of evidence that the mainstream press engages in propaganda and deserves skepticism (for hard statistical evidence see the tables on the last page). If there is an abundance of evidence that the mainstream press engages in propaganda on a given topic, then you should use that evidence to make your case when that topic is being discussed. You should not invoke the Propaganda Model to presume that whatever is being reported is propaganda, because doing so gives you an excuse to refuse to engage with the source and conduct actual analysis. fool of sound posted:I really don't read the people in this thread arguing in defense of MC as doing so to pull a rhetorical trick, though certainly it has a reputation for that elsewhere. Criticism of media doesn't imply that the critiqued media is entirely or even predominantly valueless and I don't think any posters at present are trying to argue that in MCs case it does so. But the broader validity of MC shouldn't really be relevant, because the claim that the media is biased is not controversial, interesting or insightful. What we're primarily interested in is the applicability of PM as a media analysis tool with regards to debates that take place in this forum. Right? I mean, this is from your OP: fool of sound posted:This thread is intended for goons to cooperatively improve their ability to navigate the fraught modern media landscape; assisting one another separate fact from editorial, guiding each other to quality information, and teach each other to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias. As it has been stated, Propaganda Model helps with literally none of these. It does not help people separate fact from editorial, since neither its goal nor its appropriate and intended usage is to determine facts. It does not guide people to quality information, but arguably away from it to alternative and often fringe media outlets. And it does not teach people to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias — just the opposite, in fact: it is frequently used, here in D&D, by posters to validate and reinforce their own confirmation biases (specifically, anti-corporate and anti-state biases) and reject information that does not fit their worldview.
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Jun 22, 2021 22:54
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Slow News Day posted:You should not invoke the Propaganda Model to presume that whatever is being reported is propaganda, because doing so gives you an excuse to refuse to engage with the source and conduct actual analysis. Slow News Day posted:But the broader validity of MC shouldn't really be relevant, because the claim that the media is biased is not controversial, interesting or insightful. What we're primarily interested in is the applicability of PM as a media analysis tool with regards to debates that take place in this forum. Slow News Day posted:As it has been stated, Propaganda Model helps with literally none of these. It does not help people separate fact from editorial, since neither its goal nor its appropriate and intended usage is to determine facts. But that doesn't mean it doesn't help us, as lay people, make pragmatic best guess conclusions as to what media institutions and products are likely to be closer the facts in an aggregate sense, or what we might require to balance out the shortfalls of our primary media consumption. Doing this requires a productive set of principles and lines of questioning that approaches in media analysis provide. Clearly you don't think MC is productive in this sense, but this is simply stated as a conclusion. If you think it's unable to lead to quality information, please actually explain why! This has been a perpetual cycle of this discussion here, where critical conclusions are presented as if simply self-evident, to which the opposing side can simply ask "why?" because no engagement with its methodology has actually been offered. I truly don't doubt people misuse MC in lazy and bad faith ways to cheaply dismiss their opponents. But I think arguing against a vague someone somewhere who might be doing so, rather than anyone you're actually responding to, is deeply unproductive and uncharitable. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 23:22
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Sekhem posted:If you think it's unable to lead to quality information, please actually explain why! I question the qualifications of Edward Herman, a man who wrote or helped write books denying or downplaying three separate genocides (Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda), to develop an accurate model of correctly interpreting propaganda in the media. I feel that this pattern of thinking makes any of his other writings at the very least intellectually questionable in the same way that I would consider a book by David Irving intellectually questionable at the very least, although not for the same reasons (Irving is a committed fascist, Herman was absolutely not this). When someone makes a factual error of such a massive proportion, their other work must be considered in that light. No more, no less. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 23:32
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I don't take any particular issue with anyone personally making that conclusion. But considering his most significant work is still studied and taken seriously in the field, as several posters here quite painstakingly pointed out, it's certainly questionable whether those are actually reflective of the scholarly qualities of his work on media analysis. That alone should be evidence that those contributions can't simply be self-evidently dismissed without discussion, at the very least.
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Jun 22, 2021 23:51
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I question the qualifications of Edward Herman, a man who or helped write books denying or downplaying three separate genocides (Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda), to develop an accurate model of correctly interpreting propaganda in the media. I feel that this pattern of thinking makes any of his other writings at the very least intellectually questionable in the same way that I would consider a book by David Irving intellectually questionable at the very least, although not for the same reasons (Irving is a committed fascist, Herman was absolutely not this). Someone who makes a factual error of such a massive proportion their other work must be considered in that light. Yeah, I think this is an important point. Why should we trust a model that has repeatedly led its own authors astray on monumentally important topics in their future works?
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Jun 22, 2021 23:53
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Sekhem posted:I don't take any particular issue with anyone personally making that conclusion. But considering his most significant work is still studied and taken seriously in the field, as several posters here quite painstakingly pointed out, it's certainly questionable whether those are actually reflective of the scholarly qualities of his work on media analysis. That alone should be evidence that those contributions can't simply be self-evidently dismissed without discussion, at the very least. Claiming Darfur is only seen as a genocide because it was manufactured by Western media: pg 45 posted:But Western officials, Kofi Annan’s United Nations, Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs), “human rights” celebrities, and the news media long ago succeeded in framing the crisis in Darfur as “genocide,” pitting Muslim Arab perpetrators against black victims—and making it the Nefarious genocide-of-choice. This channeling of interests and emotions toward Darfur is also a wonderful diversion from the more directly Western-controlled violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere. As we show throughout this book, this is the standard operating procedure for all atrocities-management campaigns. pg 46 posted:“America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War. . . . Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government . . . have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.”87 pg 50 posted:Wartime propaganda was sustained for the first few months after the war, as forensic experts and media representatives descended on Kosovo like hungry locusts, looking for bodies and stories of massacres.103 pg 51 posted:To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of the Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down. pg 60-61 posted:As best we can tell, the existence of Hourigan’s evidence has been reported only once in two different U.S. newspapers (the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times), and never in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal; Bruguière’s findings were mentioned in several U.S. newspapers (sixteen that we have found), including three short items in the Washington Post, a major report in the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the Seattle Times), and one blurb apiece in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal totaling ninety-four words.136 Amusingly, the U.S. media have reported fairly often on Bruguière’s work as a “counterterrorism” specialist in France, including several dozen items in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. But when we check the U.S. media for Bruguière’s eight-year inquiry into mass killing in Rwanda, a case where his focus was on a U.S. client-agent as the primary villain, their interest declines close to zero.137 The propaganda system works. pg 63 posted:In fact, what Kagame overthrew was a multiethnic, power-sharing, coalition government; what Kagame imposed was a Tutsi-dominated dictatorship; and what Kagame turned Rwanda and the whole of Central Africa into was a rolling genocide that is still ongoing—but it is true that he is a shining “star” in the Western firmament and its propaganda system. pg 64-65 posted:In the Rwanda “genocide” case, the “human rights” community played an unusually active role in supporting the real aggressors and killers, in close parallel with their own governments’ perspectives and policies. As in the case of the Western aggressions against Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraq (2003), Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations simply ignored the “supreme international crime” (or “act of aggression by Uganda,” in Herman Cohen’s phrase) while conveniently, and in hugely biased fashion, featuring lesser human rights violations.149 They downplayed or ignored entirely the refugee crisis created by the Ugandan-RPF invasion and occupation of northern Rwanda and the armed penetration and de facto subversion of the rest of the country by the RPF. Every response to these by the Habyarimana government from October 1990 onward was scrutinized for “human rights” violations and framed as evidence of unlawful state repression. They systematically evaded the massive evidence of RPF responsibility for the April 6, 1994 shoot-down surely because the finding conflicts with their deep commitment to the model of a pre-planned Hutu genocide and the RPF’s self-defensive rescue of Rwanda, the twin components of the established perpetrator-victim line. We believe that their biases played an important role in supporting the RPF’s aggression, its penetration of the country, and the execution of its final assault on power. Above all, we believe that their biases and propaganda service contributed substantially to the mass killings that followed—all in accord with the needs of actual U.S. policy. pg 103 posted:During the past several decades, the word “genocide” has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application,247 so much so that the crime of the twentieth century for which the word originally was coined often appears debased. Unchanged, however, is the huge political bias in its usage, and it remains as true today as it was in 1973 or 1988 that “We can even read who are the U.S. friends and enemies from the media’s use of the word.” 248[Note: This is a direct quote from MC] pg 104 posted:Both the media and “genocide”-oriented intellectuals, and even leading NGOs, follow the official line on bloodbaths and genocide; and given the global power of the United States, so do E.U. and UN officials. The media and intellectuals “follow the flag,” and the politics of genocide and massacre require the inflation of Nefarious bloodbaths . . . As we have shown, they will all, including the NGOs as well as UN officials, feature the Nefarious case of Darfur249 and earlier Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo . . .
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Jun 22, 2021 23:58
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Yeah, I think this is an important point. Why should we trust a model that has repeatedly led its own authors astray on monumentally important topics in their future works?
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Jun 22, 2021 23:58
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Epinephrine posted:They are reflective, however. Consider The Politics of Genocide. Claims that Western media is used to maintain US interests by drumming up and/or fabricating genocide claims is endemic to the book. The book cites Manufacturing Consent and the model several times and explicitly uses its predecessor Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda as its framework (pg 16). Rather, it seems to be more indication of what I've been alleging: he used poor political analysis and scholarship to come to a particular view of events, and then used the propaganda model as an explanation of the media narratives which followed such events. It's important to note that a media narrative presenting something as a genocide in the propaganda is orthogonal to the question of whether it actually was factual or not: that's the entire point of MC's famous invocation of the violence in East Timor. It claims that media narratives are going to grant uneven attention to the particular genocides or violent conflicts which produce "worthy victims" in politically useful narratives, but this isn't presented as indication that such violence did not actually take place. While Herman does present skepticism towards the reality of the violence in these examples, I don't see any indication that the methods which produced this were based on his media analysis framework.
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Jun 23, 2021 00:16
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Sekhem posted:I've tried to make this point clear repeatedly: because the propaganda model was not applied to reach those conclusions. It's a tool of media analysis, not a method for determining the empirical facts of political events, and wasn't used by the authors in question to do so. The fact that an author conceives of a model for one purpose does not mean this is the basis for the entirety of their work! I think the issue is that people are questioning the efficacy of the propaganda model on the basis that at least one of its authors has made several grievous mistakes in their other work (if I can be forgiven for describing genocide denial as "grievous mistakes"). If, say, a architect had multiple buildings they designed collapse, their remaining buildings would and should be subject to extra scrutiny even if their designs were acclaimed and influential. Or as another example, if a researcher has multiple papers retracted, then their other word should be critically examined to determine if they need to be retracted too.
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Jun 23, 2021 00:18
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I think the issue is that people are questioning the efficacy of the propaganda model on the basis that at least one of its authors has made several grievous mistakes in their other work (if I can be forgiven for describing genocide denial as "grievous mistakes"). If, say, a architect had multiple buildings they designed collapse, their remaining buildings would and should be subject to extra scrutiny even if their designs were acclaimed and influential. Or as another example, if a researcher has multiple papers retracted, then their other word should be critically examined to determine if they need to be retracted too.
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Jun 23, 2021 00:26
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Your research paper example is only valid if the papers were pulled for poor scientific rigor or something else that calls the process into question; coming to an incorrect conclusion from valid inputs is only indicative of where Chomsky's ideological leanings are (if anyone wasn't already aware), and his work should at least be discussed with the authors' positions in mind.Sekhem posted:I would be very happy if this discussion went in the direction of methodological critique of Chomsky & Herman! I think this would be an interesting line of discussion though.
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Jun 23, 2021 00:27
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The following three points are as uncontroversial as humanly possible and anyone questioning any of these points should immediately be banned according to any number of QCS and/or CSPAM threads: 1)Rwanda was a genocide. 2)Bosnia was a genocide. 3)Darfur was also a genocide. Here, we have an author who is not only denying all of these three genocides ever happened, not only putting “genocide” in quotes for all three, but also blaming the victims in all three genocides as well. If this book were a blog post written by an SA Forums ex moderator, this person would not only be permabanned immediately but also used as a forums catchphrase on the order of “mods knew (about the genocides)”. Nobody connected with this insane, monstrous book would ever live it down in these parts. However, because the book happened to be co written by a guy who works with Noam Chomsky, it is now imperative that in addition to showing that the book itself is monstrous we also find a way to show that the genocide denying batshit crazy polemic stems from the methodology used in the -other- book about “how propaganda works IRL” that the two of them co wrote. Additionally, we should also be as brief as possible since everyone hates it when evilweasel uses too many words. Very well, let’s try to fit it in one sentence: You’re arguing that a guy who pinned three different genocides on the people in the mass graves is an authority on what propaganda looks like, you utter cretinous loving lunatics. Thank you for your consideration of my submission to this debate and discussion forum. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 23, 2021 01:01
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Jun 23, 2021 01:06
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posted:
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Jun 23, 2021 01:14
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Some of the recent GBS China thread conversations about the same topics led me here.Sekhem posted:Well, yeah, I think it's pretty necessary to qualify whether a fringe batshit polemic was produced by the same methods which also led to scholarly well received works by the same author. That seems like a pretty pressing question that would need to be discussed, imo. Herman reached his conclusions because of the Propaganda Model. The key flaw with the PM is that it conflates breadth and uniformity of coverage with to what degree a topic serves US imperialism and gives inherent credence to fringe minority voices which face opposition from the mainstream (because this opposition only happens because the mainstream is countering any narrative that doesn’t align with US imperialism.) You can literally see this in action with Herman’s work. The Rwandan genocide was an inherently newsworthy event, and the coverage generally followed the same narrative: that a genocide was happening and that the West allowed it to take place because they ignored clear warning signs. But if we approach this event through the PM we are led to immediately distrust this coverage, with the implication that we should question these facts. And not only should we distrust the mainstream story we should instead trust alternative explanations which are met with derision and pushback - in this case that there was no genocide and the true victims were the supposed perpetrators of the genocide. Because if this narrative wasn’t true then it wouldn’t face pushback - the pushback grants inherent credibility - regardless of how wrong the idea is, or how justified that pushback was. And this is exactly the argument Herman made. That the genocide did not take place. You can argue that this is a misuse of PM because PM is simply a descriptive model which does not offer comments on the veracity of information, just provides guidance on how this information is presented, but in practice - including the practice of its authors - it’s used to not only question framing but content. And that’s how you end up denying a genocide. I have other serious issues with the model (mainly that it is wrong to argue that it only exists in the west), but this is a serious problem: it leads to ignoring reality in favor of ideological opposition and elevates fringe theories which are, quite frankly, dismissed as nonsense for valid reasons. Spoiler fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 01:43
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:What are the two books you’re referencing here? Herman's The Politics of Genocide, presumably?
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Jun 23, 2021 01:44
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:What are the two books you’re referencing here? e;fb for half of it
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Jun 23, 2021 01:45
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When the PM asks you to be skeptical of those sources is there any mechanism like in the scientific method whereby if you fail to refute or disprove the thing you're skeptical of the model swings around and says "Yup this is probably happening based on our rigorous research of the coverage"? What happens if there's no other coverage or information from which to verify or refute those findings, does it suggest to attempt your own independent investigation?
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Jun 23, 2021 02:06
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Spoiler posted:You can argue that this is a misuse of PM because PM is simply a descriptive model which does not offer comments on the veracity of information, just provides guidance on how this information is presented, but in practice - including the practice of its authors - it’s used to not only question framing but content. And that’s how you end up denying a genocide. What we're left with is an important question that I don't think an attribution of fault to the PM can answer - why would it direct significant doubt towards the reality of some instances of violence leveraged in the mainstream press but not others? If this is inherent to practice of the methodology, at least as used by these authors, shouldn't it be consistent across the board? But there's also a main concern I have that I don't think your response or others like it actually address, which is why we don't actually see direct evidence of this in the text. As far as I can tell, Chomsky and Herman's political analysis is consistently a pretty straightforward presentation of primary and scholarly sources. This has been remarkably poor scholarship at various moments, but nevertheless. The invocation of the relative depiction of the analysed events in the media is presented as an independent variable. It's of course possible that this is simply an elision on their parts, that they simply worked backwards from the conclusions provided by their media analysis. I think this simply raises more questions than it answers, when the much more direct explanation of "they conducted lovely biased scholarship" suffices. For one, it seems like a speculation of motivations that seem difficult to actually provide any textual evidence for. Two, the process you identify isn't done consistently - many instances of violences and atrocities deemed politically useful by the media are recognised as factual while others aren't. And lastly, is the fact that there have been at this point decades worth of uncontroversial (setting aside the question of quality) academic works using this framework - why don't we see this process reproduced? I really don't think we've seen anything close to the particularly abhorrent flaws of these thinkers reproduced in later scholarly works which adopted their frameworks of media analysis. For me, I'm pretty convinced by the idea that they were earnest but biased scholars, stretched thin in subjects where their rather barebones and clerical minded political analysis failed to correct for their partisan intuitions. The idea that their well received conceptual developments in media analysis are actually the framework from which they reasoned their conclusions, that they then laundered through a pretence of distinct scholarly works outside that framework, is pretty unwieldy to me. I'm unsure of how you would even provide evidence of that in the first place. Particularly because it seems relegated to these two authors in particular (at least in scholarship, I'm fully aware there are many terrible implementations in casual contexts) despite a consistent application of their framework by others, and even then it only applies to them some of the time. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 02:39
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Regardless of how anyone might have used it, the "worthy vs. unworthy victim" distinction implicitly admits that both are victims. With that in mind, the conclusion when faced with say, an overwhelming media barrage of claims of genocide, would still be that a genocide is taking place. Like, take the genocide of the Uighurs. As far as I can tell, the model tells us that they are victims of genocide, but that their genocide is played up relative to other genocides that are being perpetrated by Western-aligned powers if not the West itself. Basically, the model is not really set up to deny genocide (or various other wrong-doings), but rather to make us look for the crimes against humanity in coverage of Western-aligned states. Basically: Genocide in China! --> The Uighyrs are worthy victims --> China is carrying out a genocide and is a geopolitical rival of the US Clashes in Israel! --> Clashes is a word used to downplay "policing action" by states aligned with the US --> Israel is using the military or militarized police to attack civilians directly
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Jun 23, 2021 06:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Regardless of how anyone might have used it, the "worthy vs. unworthy victim" distinction implicitly admits that both are victims. With that in mind, the conclusion when faced with say, an overwhelming media barrage of claims of genocide, would still be that a genocide is taking place. Based on the examples given of other genocides, the model is just as likely to lead one to the conclusion that it is actually the Uyghurs who are committing genocide, or that they committed genocide and now China is genociding them back. Because it is a framework that supports motivated reasoning and working backwards from a conclusion.
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Jun 23, 2021 06:17
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Based on the examples given of other genocides, the model is just as likely to lead one to the conclusion that it is actually the Uyghurs who are committing genocide, or that they committed genocide and now China is genociding them back. Because it is a framework that supports motivated reasoning and working backwards from a conclusion. Actually, why should it even matter if some people have used it in a faulty way? Not arrived at faulty conclusions using it, but using it wrong. If anything, that is a learning example of how NOT to use it. If you just stick to "a worthy victim is still a victim" as a guiding principle, you can't end up denying a genocide. At least not one your local media environment is saying is happening. (As was rightly pointed out, the "West" part of it should more accurately be read as just the dominant political environment of the media you're consuming.)
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Jun 23, 2021 06:34
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Based on the examples given of other genocides, the model is just as likely to lead one to the conclusion that it is actually the Uyghurs who are committing genocide, or that they committed genocide and now China is genociding them back. Because it is a framework that supports motivated reasoning and working backwards from a conclusion. It's possible these are simply postfacto rationalisation bolted on to a conclusion from their media analysis, sure. But that's certainly not just immediately apparent in the text, it's a claim I think you have to actually provide some supporting evidence for. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 07:34
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fool of sound posted:Your research paper example is only valid if the papers were pulled for poor scientific rigor or something else that calls the process into question; Shouldn't repeated denial/downplaying of actual literal genocide by Herman count as an equivalent to "poor scientific rigor or something else that calls the process into question"? I mean if ignoring or minimizing genocide doesn't qualify as a serious mistake in the social sciences, what in God's name does? A Buttery Pastry posted:Regardless of how anyone might have used it, the "worthy vs. unworthy victim" distinction implicitly admits that both are victims. With that in mind, the conclusion when faced with say, an overwhelming media barrage of claims of genocide, would still be that a genocide is taking place. With the greatest possible respect, could you please clarify who the gently caress could possibly qualify as a "worthy victim" of genocide? And please let me know if I'm confused somewhere because I just got home from watching the Padres win a game of baseball so I'm probably not operating on all cylinders. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 07:50
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I bowed out of the thread since I thought it beyond my abilities to keep the focus on media criticism without stumbling into a discussion of our whole Weltanschaung. However, since I'm myself guilty of going down the road of conflating the PM, Herman and Chomsky's other writings and the use a media reader would put it to I'll try to state my earlier point in a more consistent way: Suppose you as a reader of media use the PM to weigh your media intake and end up disbelieving a genuine atrocity. First of all there are two questions: Is the PM accurate? If no, then it would be interesting where the PM goes wrong, a debate that no one in this thread really seems to want to engage with in detail. If yes then there's not really anything to be done, any model will lead you wrong sometime. Of course you could modify the weighting until you eliminate false negatives, but why should you? What is really the risk of getting one event wrong in the negative? Of course it's socially embarrassing to have been the Srebrenica Explainer, but is avoiding that possibility really worth nodding along with the destruction of Iraq and Libya?
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Jun 23, 2021 08:17
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:With the greatest possible respect, could you please clarify who the gently caress could possibly qualify as a "worthy victim" of genocide? And please let me know if I'm confused somewhere because I just got home from watching the Padres win a game of baseball so I'm probably not operating on all cylinders. Worthy victims would be something like if an "enemy" or antagonist state was committing ethnic cleansing there would be a lot of anger directed at them because all people are worth looking after and human life has value and how dare this be done. Unworthy victims would be if you had the ethnic cleansing being done by a "friendly" or co-operative state. Same situation, same participants etc, but now it becomes "a complex local issue that we must examine carefully before coming to any conclusions". The people are still victimised in both instances, but the framing of why and what should be done is very different. Bear in mind I am referring to these categories based only on what I have read in this thread, but attempting to clarify what other participants are saying, not to take a stand on them. Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 08:25
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