Fritz the Horse posted:

For chrissake: how many genocides do you need to deny for your work to be thrown on the trashheap of history?

Slow News Day posted:

(on the basis that any coverage of events by Western media was labeled as genocide, and was therefore propaganda and false)

Fritz the Horse posted:

Bottom line for me: if you claim to be a serious academician on [subject], you aren't allowed to gently caress up publicly, repeatedly, on [subject] and publish books where you deny multiple genocides and blame them on the victims.

joepinetree posted:

How should a consumer of media have learned, exclusively through information available in said media, that most of the mainstream media coverage was based on either false or misleading information? There must be some very clear prescriptive theory as to how to do that, and do that without appealing to sources outside the media. And it must be fairly specific, too. Because if the answer is just some general "engage in critical thinking" pablum, then all the attempts to gatekeep what is "in the field" will have been clearly done to undermine discussion.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

To be honest, I don't understand piL's post either. It is a night-and-day difference compared to their earlier post in terms of clarity and conciseness. You could tell me it was written by another poster and I would probably believe you.

What it appears to be is an elaborate attempt to refute a strawman.

Discendo Vox posted:

Since I drafted that post you've expended a whole lot of words to indicate you're not familiar with the distinction between naïve and sophisticated falsifiability.

Epinephrine posted:

1) Is the model falsifiable?
Yes: continue
No: The model is unfalsifiable and has no value to this thread

quote:

"I prefer articles that cite their references. Here's an example of two articles discussing the same topic: one with references and one without. Though it's possible to misconstrue or misuse references. It seems easier to do additional research to test the veracity of a claim when sources are cited. In fact, I make a habit of checking a couple of references of any article I read before sharing it--it's not conclusive, but it keeps me from hate-sharing claims only to find out they were clearly false or made on misinterpretations."

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

piL seems to have latched on to what Epinephrine said about expecting a good model to help us make inferences about what happened based on what was reported, and the main thrust of their counter-argument, and what their word salad boils down to, is that it is impossible to determine or measure truth. But that is completely irrelevant because we are in fact not talking about epistemology here. We are talking about the reason why models exist at all: to act as frameworks that help us understand the world better, and to explain events as we observe them. Expecting a model to be falsifiable is not the same thing as expecting it to help you discover The Truth. But a good model should absolutely help you understand and make sense of new occurrences.

In philosophy of science, something being falsifiable means that there is a set of logically possible observations that contradict it. So what we mean when we say the Propaganda Model is not falsifiable is this: it passes any and every test thrown at it. This is not because it's an exceptionally strong and robust model, or that we haven't yet made any observations that contradict it (on the contrary!). Rather, it is because it is built out of "catch-all" clauses. For example, one of them states that if any media outlet publishes something that might go against the interest of elites, that just means the elites don't actually care about that topic. Another states that if the media reports something that goes against the interests of the elites on a topic the elites do care about, that just means the outlet (or the author, if it is an editorial) is marginal and lacks influence. The entire thing is catch-all clauses all the way down. As a result, any set of inputs fed into the Propaganda Model result in the exact same output: "Western mainstream media has an imperialistic bias." And if any contradictory examples are thrown at it, such as the BBC article linked earlier, one or more of the catch-all clauses are activated: elites don't actually care about immigration, BBC is mainstream but it's also not American and therefore has more freedom to criticize American immigration policy, etc.

Discendo Vox posted:

Per the OP’s introduction, SW is a model of communication; it's a simplified representation that explains one set of relationships by sacrificing detail elsewhere. The example in the OP isn't real and isn't a demonstration of applying the model to media. It's intended to illustrate what the parts of the model are, in the same way that a classroom map of the state won't help you get across town. My principal goal in writing up the model was to provide a functional vocabulary for further discussion. Toward this end, and in keeping with the pluralist approach I describe in the OP, I do my best to be clear about any limitations or simplifications of the materials I provided.

Discendo Vox posted:

This list is a bit of a mess of prescriptive and descriptive questions ("is this article true?" is an empirical question that, yes, I think we can specifically interrogate).

Discendo Vox posted:

I provide tools to begin to address some of these questions in the OP material. These tools are useful because they do make causal claims and are based in defined terms or explanations. As Peirce, and Popper, and Shannon, and Weaver will tell you, information is useful to the extent that it can be falsified, to the extent that it is open to error.

Discendo Vox posted:

fake edit:
Since I drafted that post you've expended a whole lot of words to indicate you're not familiar with the distinction between naïve and sophisticated falsifiability. This model example you're presenting is, uh, creative, but has little to do with what's being discussed. We're not trying to solve the problem of induction here, and no one is holding PM to anything like that standard. We also do not have to pretend that all truthfulness is relative to observers in order to make specific observations about the mechanisms of specific media. The PM makes descriptive claims- it just does so poorly, for the reasons articulated many times over. Prescriptive claims have to rely on a factual substrate or, again, if they don't,

joepinetree posted:

Let me get this straight. The PM model is, simultaneously:
- Unfalsifiable
- Insufficiently tested
- Wrong

all at the same time? How can any coherent conversation come from such utter incoherence? It can't be tested, it should have been tested more, and it has been tested and proven wrong, all at the same time?

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

- Yes, the assumptions the model makes are unfalsifiable, due to a multitude of escape hatches in the model and other nebulous elements that Discendo Vox described.
- It's not that the model is insufficiently tested, but that it cannot be reasonably tested because it can be used to justify any position.

Stringent posted:

Hey, apologies if this has been asked already, I don't really follow this thread much, but I did do a few searches to do due diligence that it hadn't been brought up already. I've seen there's basically a full court press going on by the more neoliberal minded posters in here and elsewhere to brand Chomsky as a full bore denier of genocides, so I was wondering if anyone has any information/opinions on where those talking points are coming from and if possibly they share any common ground in methodology or ideology with the extensive efforts in the UK to brand Corbyn as an anti-semite or Bernie in the US as a misogynist?

I'll take my answer off air.

Stringent posted:

Just to answer the lazy troll part since I don't want to get probated over this, it's a sincere question since the point of MC isn't the verification or denial of genocides but rather how they're covered in major media sources despite conflicting evidence on almost any genocide. Again, I wasn't trying to troll anyone, it's something I've been wondering about and was just wondering if anyone else had any thoughts, please don't probe or ban me for genocide denial or whatever over this.

piL posted:

It is my stance that that the following idea is harmful to discussion: that only falsifiable models have value to this thread.

The reasons I believe it to be harmful are:

• Finding falsifiable models is difficult work,
  
• I can conceive of characteristics of media that intuitively lead me to consider an item more or less trustworthy than others, for which I am unable to construct a predictive, testable model (much less actually test that model),
  
• If the barrier of entry is a model that is falsifiable, we may get lost in academic specificity without being able to make easy, obvious, and beneficial assumptions. We will miss forests for trees.

Maybe I'm reading into that phrase too much. Maybe Epinephrine's intent is not that the model has no value solely because it is unfalsifiable. Maybe they mean that, in this particular case, that it is both unfalsifiable and it has no value to this thread. Or maybe that, based on the useful applications of that particular model it could only bring value if it were falsifiable and, since it isn't, its only applications are invalid. I take no issue with the second or third interpretation.

There would be value in a thread whose line of inquiry is only those demonstrable claims that are part of falsifiable models and therefore predictive models (because to be falsifiable, you must have a hypothesis to test). But then maybe there should be a separate thread where someone can make a claim, unaccompanied from a testable hypothesis requirement. A statement such as,

may have value to people discussing how they interact with, critique, and assess media without having been structured as part of a testable framework. Maybe that's too low brow for stickied threads in D&D,

Red and Black posted:

Epinephrine posted:

There are other models out there that don't wind up being used to let people deny genocides like the MC/PM does; perhaps we should consider those instead.

Epinephrine posted:

This is the second time this line has been put forward, and the reply is the same: You don't need MC/PM to acknowledge bad things done by the US. The critics of Herman and Chomsky I cited earlier in the thread also dislike what the US has done in the middle east. The framework outlined by MC/PM is used and has been used to build a intellectual framework to justify genocide denial and it can do this because the model is structured in such a way that it can justify just about anything. There are other models out there that don't wind up being used to let people deny genocides like the MC/PM does; perhaps we should consider those instead.

Red and Black posted:

How does this address anything I wrote? I didn't even mention the PM, my point is that there is a level of genocide denial which permeates our society and is aided by the media. The post also isn't about how the US does bad things, but rather how the media doesn't inform the public about the genocides we participate in and that this has a real world impact infinitely higher than anything you can accuse Chomsky or Herman of. Maybe go back, read what I said, and try again.

socialsecurity posted:

Of course it has a higher real world impact? What is the point you are trying to make here? That Chomsky's genocide denials pale in comparison to other crimes? Of course they do I don't think anyone here has said anything of the sort or think's the media should get away with lovely framing of American war crimes.

Sekhem posted:

You've been consistently just repeating these points without responding to any of the objections against them.

Sekhem posted:

What strikes me as particularly unusual about them is that from my readings on the scholarly debate about the PM, these arguments are pretty much never raised by its detractors. Even its vociferous critics generally seem to quite clearly accept that it's an empirically testable hypothesis, but are critical at its success in doing so. You claimed that you were unaware of it being used to provide any testable predictions (which is unusual because from my reading, it's presented in a pretty straightforward fashion in the MC) and I gave you an example of such.

Sekhem posted:

Here's a quick example that directly attempts to test it, but really any look at the secondary literature and debates should make these kinds of predictions clear.
https://nacla.org/news/colombia-and-venezuela-testing-propaganda-model-0

quote:

The mainstream media is howling over Hugo Chávez's bid to change the constitution for a third term, while coverage of Colombia's Álvaro Uribe, a staunch U.S. ally, to do the same raises few, if any, questions in the media.

quote:

2. Presidential term limits. Between 2004 and 2007, both Chávez and Uribe attempted to extend or abolish presidential term limits in their respective countries; Uribe was successful, Chávez was not. Their proposals differed in three respects: first, Chávez included his request within a larger package of social, economic, and political reforms, whereas Uribe did not; second, the Chávez proposal and reforms were defeated by a popular referendum, whereas Uribe’s request was granted by the Colombian Congress and upheld by a Supreme Court ruling; and third, Chávez proposed to eliminate term limits entirely, whereas Uribe proposed to extend them. Nonetheless, both were proposals to expand executive power.

quote:

Even more so than the Times’, the Post’s coverage tended to glorify the protesters as freedom fighters confronting the repression of the Chávez government. During the two-week stretch immediately before and after RCTV went off the airwaves, the Post featured six updates in its World in Brief section that all cast Chávez in a decidedly autocratic light. Several also portrayed government forces as having violently repressed the protests in Caracas. The May 29 update reported that “[p]olice fired tear gas and plastic bullets into a crowd of about 5,000,” but the report did not mention that many of the protesters had themselves committed acts of violence. One later update noted that the protests were “sometimes violent” and another mentioned that “[a]t least 30 [protesters] were charged with violent acts.”

quote:

In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation that is logically possible—i.e., expressible in the language of the theory, which must have a conventional empirical interpretation.[A] Thus the theory must be about scientific evidence and it must prohibit some (but not all) logically possible observations.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Instead of posting original responses here, is there a peer-reviewed article or two someone could post that addresses the problems with Manufacturing Consent? That would clear up some points of contention here and make the debate less personal. Like maybe something that would be assigned in an intro-level grad course, like a methods class you’d take in your first year?

Cpt_Obvious posted:

You guys know that Popper's falsifiability metric was created for scientific fields, right? It's not applicable to media criticism and analysis, it's like trying to eat soup with a fork.

evilweasel posted:

in the "trying to explain anything about observable reality" sense of "science", yes. if you are trying to say the propaganda model is a work of abstract art not intended to convey any explanation about anything that has happened or will happen, sure, you are correct that it need not be falsifiable any more than my toddler's art does.

if you seek to be using it to explain anything about what is or is not reported in the media or how, then it needs to be falsifiable. because if it's not, by definition it doesn't explain anything or give you any insight at all.

Slow News Day posted:

This is an odd thing to say. No one has raised objections to the extensive list of problems with PM that Discendo Vox posted on the previous page, as far as I can tell. Only two posters acknowledged his post, one got probated for obvious lack of interest in debate and the other said they found DV's arguments convincing in that PM is invalid, and further admitted that they have never read or used it. You, on the other hand, have completely ignored it, which is ironic coming from someone complaining about people not responding to objections...

Slow News Day posted:

In other words, you posted the top result for a "testing manufacturing consent" search on google, but did not even try to explain why it is a valid and proper test of the Propaganda Model in relation to the points Discendo Vox made. Nevertheless, I read it. It is farcical. The author — who at the time was a graduate student in history — looked at US mainstream media's treatments of Venezuelan and Colombian governments. He then attempted to apply the Propaganda Model by noting that because the US viewed Chavez as an antagonist and Uribe as sympathetic to US interests, one could expect that US media coverage would also reflect that bias when covering events in those two countries.

Slow News Day posted:

In other words, the two were not in fact the same: Chavez tried to abolish term limits entirely via a failed popular referendum, whereas Ubile proposed extending them by one term, which was approved by Columbian Congress and upheld by their supreme court. But the author did not think that this was an important difference.

Slow News Day posted:

Wow, the protests were not peaceful, you say? Some of the protestors themselves had committed acts of violence? Just like... Antifa? But, wait, we know that that particular talking point regarding BLM protests by right-wing media was pure horseshit — so why should we take it seriously in this particular context? Could it be that the US media did not report the violence committed by protestors not because it has an imperialist bias, but because the talking point itself would have been a lovely and bad faith attempt to undermine the protestors? Makes you think.

Slow News Day posted:

For example, the author cites language from NYT and WaPo editorials that state that the constitutional changes sought by Chavez would extend his presidency for life, and would greatly strengthen his already considerable influence. The author's objection? Oh, but Chavez would still have to be elected for each successive term! And then has the audacity (or stupidity — I can't tell which) to point out that US allies such as Canada and Japan have no term limits, and that the US itself had no term limits until 1951.

Sekhem posted:

I don't see how my points aren't an implicit response to Vox's arguments, even though I wasn't responding directly?

Sekhem posted:

That my example was literally the first google search result is my entire point: these arguments aren't obscure in any way, the most cursory look at the debate surrounding the model will show you that testability of its theses are the main focus of both its advocates and detractors.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

This is pretty bizarre. The way you respond to people's arguments on this website is by quoting them. If you want to respond to a single argument they are making out of many, you quote that part of their post. You don't just type words in response to someone else and then claim they were actually an "implicit response" to another poster.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

The other thing you're expected to do in this subforum in particular is "meet effort with effort". What this means is that if someone goes to great lengths to extensively catalogue the problems with a model, and one of their criticism is that the model is not testable, you can't just slam the first Google result in (implicit ) response, especially not without elaborating on why the link you're providing is sufficient refutation.

Epicurius posted:

I guess my question would be, how does MC's Propaganda model fit the Salvadoran Civil War?

quote:

“It ended with the catch-all where I just said, ‘Remember, we can ban you for any reason we like. So if something falls through the cracks here, we can still ban you for it,’” said Kyanka. Kyanka knew there were edgelords who’d push against the stated limits and see how far they could get before being banned.

quote:

A NAVY COUNTERTERRORISM training document obtained exclusively by The Intercept appears to conflate socialists with terrorists and lists the left-wing ideology alongside “neo-nazis.” A section of the training document subtitled “Study Questions” includes the following: “Anarchists, socialists and neo-nazis represent which terrorist ideological category?” The correct answer is “political terrorists,” a military source briefed on the training told me. The document, titled “Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations,” is part of a longer training manual recently disseminated by the Naval Education Training and Command’s Navy Tactical Training Center in conjunction with the Center for Security Forces. The training is designed for masters-at-arms, the Navy’s internal police, the military source said.

quote:

Now, the prime suspect in the breach has been identified: a 29-year-old former C.I.A. software engineer who had designed malware used to break into the computers of terrorism suspects and other targets, The New York Times has learned.

Sekhem posted:

I don't think expecting a point by point rebuttal of every post is necessary for a productive discussion.

fool of sound posted:

I'd also really like people to respond to Disvox's post.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

Not every post, no. Just the ones the moderator asked for:

Sekhem posted:

I apologise if this is a cursory response to your questions, but Manufacturing Consent directly talks about the case of El Salvador in its second and third chapters. The response would be that while there might have been exceptional instances, on aggregate the bulk of reporting of events did downplay or ignore them.

Epicurius posted:

I last read it about 25 years ago, so I need to read that section again, because I really want to know what "downplayed" or "ignored" means? Like, what's the right amount of reporting the press should be doing?

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

Not every post, no. Just the ones the moderator asked for:

I see that DV made another post just now, so feel free to roll all your direct responses into a single post.

Sekhem posted:

That's not an ultimatum to require every response to do so. It doesn't preclude me from addressing your posts requesting examples from me personally, for instance. I don't think you're engaging in good faith here.

Sekhem posted:

I think a useful framing of the PM is that it understands the processes of bias as "filters" that data is processed through. It doesn't provide us with the methods for verifying the bare data that forms the inputs, but I don't think any media analysis framework will. We're always going to need to invoke political, economic, historical analysis in order to do that. What media analysis does help us do is recover the input data from the filters that impact its presentation. We correct for the distortions that over/underemphasis, narrative framing etc. present, in order to recover a presentation of facts that's as neutral and value-free as we can manage.

Sekhem posted:

It's not a normative judgement, it's a thesis from MC that describes relative media presentation of victims of violence. An example given in the book is the assassination of one Polish priest in the Socialist Poland paralleling the execution of untold numbers of dissident priests by right-wing death squads in Latin America during the same period. The former is deemed a victim "worthy" of persistent media attention, while the latter is "unworthy" of the mainstream media and relegated to a marginal concern.

The point of bringing this up is to question whether the propaganda model necessarily leads to skepticism towards the reality of events. MC doesn't question the factual basis of the assassination of Father Jerzy, yet recognises that the relative attention and significance given to this event in proportion to others is indicative of a political line.

This is a rejoinder to the claims that the PM necessarily implies a factual rejection of stories reported in mainstream media. Rather, it explicitly presents the "worthy" / "unworthy" lens as an illustration of how the reality of events is a distinct question to how events are leveraged narratively in the media.

Sekhem posted:

You're repeatedly saying that it can't reliably make predictive claims, is unfalsifiable and can justify anything, etc. but I simply don't see how this is true. The PM, to me, clearly seems to provide falsifiable claims about what narrative framing and what level of attention are going to be given to current events in a statistically significant aggregate sense. MC makes very clear direct quantifiable metrics that could be used to assess these predictions, such as number of stories, their relative wordcounts, placement of such stories in the outlet's pages, frequency of use of particular terms and designations, etc.

Sekhem posted:

I don't even particularly like Chomsky and am barely familiar with Herman's independent works. My posts have had some pretty critical things to say about both of them. Part of what I'm interested in is how this model - despite what some detractors have claimed, but I think their objections were pretty thoroughly dismissed in previous pages - is taken pretty seriously academically. That would be a very curious, and concerning, fact if genocide denial or related colossal failures of reasoning were implicit or endemic to this methodology.

Particularly what leads to me being skeptical of this is that MC is, as far as I remember, a very transparent and direct work. It makes its theses and methodology very clear, in a way that's pretty easy to isolate from anything else the authors might have written. If such faults were so endemic I think they would be very identifiable in the text itself, but the critiques and rejections here seem to be doing basically anything but engaging with its model of media analysis directly. Which is what this thread should be for, I think.

Discendo Vox posted:

I'm desperate to spend less time at the Omaha Zoo's latest exhibit

Fritz the Horse posted:

You have almost twice as many posts in this thread as any other participant. I'm now off work for the month of July so have been trying to catch up on this thread, and in all of your 39 posts I can barely find any positive arguments for the Propaganda Model.

Fritz the Horse posted:

If you're pretty critical of the Propaganda Model and Manufacturing Consent is a "very transparent and direct work [which] makes its theses and methodology very clear, in a way that's pretty easy to isolate from anything else the authors might have written" perhaps you could make a positive argument in its favor?