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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Perhaps we should consult a psychologist to better understand why someone who self-banned from D&D might come back later and immediately start making GBS threads up an important thread like this. Yeah I'm gonna quote this just in case you decide to edit it to avoid your punishment for making GBS threads on mentally ill people. Anyway, it appears I am unwelcome so imma take my own advice and leave. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 28, 2021 22:37
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Spoiler posted:On some level you're the audience for this thread, where are you falling right now in terms of how useful the PM is? It's hard for me to say exactly, since it was formative in my own political awakening and more or less introduced me to the idea of bias in media beyond simple party alignment. The idea of corporate/political/media interest overlap still informs my approach to media criticism, so as a layman on the topic I have a hard time believing that MC has nothing useful to say. That said I think it does a much better job of presenting an explanation for identified bias, rather than a toolbox for identifying the bias in the first place. I imagine for someone who already has a degree of expertise in media criticism, it comes off as extremely basic, maybe even overly simplistic. It certainly sees a lot of misuse among certain groups of leftists who seem to consider it the first and last word in media criticism, and who routinely misapply it to justify universal skepticism. I think my position could be summarized as "important to read, but also important to make it not the only thing read".
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Jun 28, 2021 22:40
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I listed 4 examples in the post you quoted: The field of psychology, dark matter, dark energy, and String Theory. In terms of actually researching/utilizing physics, testability is right at the core of the the last three there. Look at just how much of physics research in recent decades has been about finding and applying testable hypotheses for dark matter and dark energy, or for finding other explanations for the way our observations of the universe don't line up with other theories. In fact, it's notable that both are actually just a collection of theories joined mostly just by the unexplained observations they try to explain, and include numerous subtypes and relatives which have been discarded because they didn't hold up to testing. String theory also has people trying to turn it into testable/falsifiable hypotheses but it's a harder nut to crack and may not be testable at all in the foreseeable future. That has been a HUGE impediment to it becoming a comfortable part of any scientific consensus or a valuable part of making theoretical predictions. It's still widely dismissed as pseudoscience, and even many of its adherents have an open stance of "yeah it's untestable philosophy but we're only using the working assumption because all the competitors so far have been explicitly debunked."
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Jun 28, 2021 22:40
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fool of sound posted:It certainly sees a lot of misuse among certain groups of leftists who seem to consider it the first and last word in media criticism, and who routinely misapply it to justify universal skepticism. I think my position could be summarized as "important to read, but also important to make it not the only thing read". I feel like if the skepticism was in fact universal (also applied to say, Chinese outlets and sources of information) it would be much better at what it does but that's mainly just my gut feeling. Killer robot posted:In terms of actually researching/utilizing physics, testability is right at the core of the the last three there. Look at just how much of physics research in recent decades has been about finding and applying testable hypotheses for dark matter and dark energy, or for finding other explanations for the way our observations of the universe don't line up with other theories. In fact, it's notable that both are actually just a collection of theories joined mostly just by the unexplained observations they try to explain, and include numerous subtypes and relatives which have been discarded because they didn't hold up to testing. At the risk of continuing the physics derail, the advantage String theory has going for it is that given certain conditions i.e 11 dimensions; the math does work and often in science if you can mathematically describe something you are probably on the right track to discovering something eventually.
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Jun 28, 2021 22:52
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Raenir Salazar posted:I feel like if the skepticism was in fact universal (also applied to say, Chinese outlets and sources of information) it would be much better at what it does but that's mainly just my gut feeling. What I mean to say is that even given that advantage, it being so hard to test in real-world observations is enough of a flaw that even many string theory proponents describe it as a theory of last resort due to the failure of all alternatives. Even in the really esoteric mathematical wings of physics, a theory being non-falisifiable is a really big deal and limits how much weight people in the field of study are willing to hang on it, even after numerous alternatives have been tried and failed.
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Jun 28, 2021 22:58
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fool of sound posted:It's hard for me to say exactly, since it was formative in my own political awakening and more or less introduced me to the idea of bias in media beyond simple party alignment. The idea of corporate/political/media interest overlap still informs my approach to media criticism, so as a layman on the topic I have a hard time believing that MC has nothing useful to say. That said I think it does a much better job of presenting an explanation for identified bias, rather than a toolbox for identifying the bias in the first place. I imagine for someone who already has a degree of expertise in media criticism, it comes off as extremely basic, maybe even overly simplistic. It certainly sees a lot of misuse among certain groups of leftists who seem to consider it the first and last word in media criticism, and who routinely misapply it to justify universal skepticism. I think my position could be summarized as "important to read, but also important to make it not the only thing read". I think MC's a useful read, even if the overall theory's a bit of a stretch. I think it's a pretty good book at studying the media of its time, but honestly, the modern media environment is not dominated by a few large entities any more. In the modern day and age, it's not really hard to find the perspective one would want on any particular event or issue. There's not the hegemonic dominance of 'respectable' media any more in the minds of the people where the consent is supposed to be manufactured.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:17
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Killer robot posted:What I mean to say is that even given that advantage, it being so hard to test in real-world observations is enough of a flaw that even many string theory proponents describe it as a theory of last resort due to the failure of all alternatives. Even in the really esoteric mathematical wings of physics, a theory being non-falisifiable is a really big deal and limits how much weight people in the field of study are willing to hang on it, even after numerous alternatives have been tried and failed. Hrm, I think its more the difference between what is in practice falsiable and in theory unfalsiable. For String Theory if we came across a stable wormhole tomorrow that would be a fairly solid bit of evidence in favour of the existence of cosmic strings and string theory. Basically, with enough funding, advancements in material sciences, telescopes and sensors, our ability to test things should improve; and similarly the better our spaceships to the point of millions of years from now going out there to do experiments up close, would also help a lot. Then there's things like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem where there are things we know to be true but cannot be proven (within a consistent mathematical system); but since we know its true its also useful. We might not know when a turing machine will halt but at least we still have computers. My problem to bring this back around then with something like the PM and MC is that like many things from political science they use a lot of evidence to build a lens that's useful in understanding and viewing the world but it doesn't describe a unique solution; there's nothing about the PM from what I've seen here that cannot also be explained by a different lens, like say, Realism/Realpolitics in International Relations theory. To put in another way, "The Propaganda Model believes this news reports as an example of a pattern of XYZ but International Liberals reject XYZ and instead believe its a result of ABC" there doesn't seem to be anything credible that makes PM the only viable means of viewing the world compared to Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Hegemonic Stability Theory, the Copenhagen School or Neofunctionalism and so on. At the end of the day, we know for a fact what's happening in China, and every single individual I've seen advocating the Lens from the PM seems to suggest that the Emperor is wearing clothes when we can see with our own two eyes that he is not and I'm not sure why the PM should be taken as the most credible way of viewing international relations or geopolitical posturing when its sole use case online seems to be trying to poison the well of any information that is transgressing on the actions of pariah states.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:28
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I listed 4 examples in the post you quoted: The field of psychology, dark matter, dark energy, and String Theory. Those are actually all falsifiable (or more accurately contain falsifiable work). Falsifiability in the context of judging the scientific rigor of a theory is about whether the theory/model is intrinsically unfalsifiable. A concept being intrinsically unfalsifiable is not the same thing as there being no current means of falsifying it. edit: Because things like "do we have the sensors to see it" is an extrinsic factor.
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Jun 29, 2021 00:28
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I think Popper's concept of "falsifiability" is considered somewhat out-of-date in philosophy of science anyway. Perhaps what we should really be asking is "Is the Propaganda Model part of a degenerating research program?" (I honestly don't know the answer to this question.)
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Jun 29, 2021 01:15
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Slow News Day posted:MC does not identify specific actors. It only identifies advertisers (corporations) and state actors generally, and broadly. It glosses over or completely ignores the fact that different corporations have different, often competing and conflicting interests, and those interests may or may not fit the goals of the government and its own plethora of different groups and even individuals, not to mention those of thousands of NGOs. I seriously don't understand how you can read the Propaganda Model and come to the conclusion that "elites" as a category is not nebulously defined. Slow News Day posted:It's actually worse than that though. Not only is "elites" broadly and nebulously defined, conflict and disagreement between them is one of the boundary conditions of the model. If something does not fit the model, one possible explanation is that it's because there's conflict between the elites! Who are those elites? What is the exact nature of the conflict, and which elites are on which side? The model cannot say, and does not care. At some point, this discussion feels like we read entirely different books from each other. Sekhem fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 04:14
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Spoiler posted:To elaborate, here are my specific issues with PM: quote:2. I do not believe the relationship between media, government, and profit centers is unique to the West, and you can find ready examples of it in non-capitalist countries. This is a problem because the PM argues that one of the specific frames that drives how events are covered and consensus is reached is anti-communism (later "the War on Terror"). When asked where the PM is applicable, Chomsky has only spoken about countries in the West. quote:3. I believe that is an inherent tendency with the type of thinking promoted by the PM to question not only how an event is covered, but the facts of an event itself. I've posted about this previously, but it is not a coincidence that Herman and Chomsky have not only questioned the presentation of genocide in the media, but the facts of genocides themselves. As you're one of the posters who has continually pushed, baselessly, that a belief in Western propaganda inevitably leads to genocide denial, I wonder what response you have to my post earlier about the pervasive genocide denial engendered in our society with the assistance of the mass media. I imagine you would be concerned with trusting the US mass media as not being propaganda, because it seems to produce society wide denial of, for example, the US/Saudi genocide in Yemen?
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Jun 29, 2021 10:42
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Red and Black posted:Such as? I've seen this a few times but you seem to think if someone doesn't follow PM they just blindly believe the US mass media?
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Jun 29, 2021 12:16
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socialsecurity posted:I've seen this a few times but you seem to think if someone doesn't follow PM they just blindly believe the US mass media? It's being argued that any model which proposes the media dichotomizes coverage based on whether an atrocity is committed by friend or an enemy, is invalid because it necessarily leads to genocide denial. Well, if that's invalid then it must be the case that the media doesn't dichotomize coverage in that way. But then how do we grapple with the deep-seated genocide denial in our society with respect to Yemen and the way our society's media coverage directly contributes to it? The only response I can think of is to say, there is no genocide happening in Yemen, and the media doesn't cover it because it's not newsworthy or relevant, whereas what's happening in Xinjiang is a real genocide deserving of many times the media attention as Yemen. But that would be tantamount to genocide denial. Or you could let go of the argument that believing in a model like the PM necessarily leads to genocide denial and recognize there is an imperialist bias in the media. But that would mean throwing out everything that's been asserted over the last few pages. I'm not saying you will make either argument, I just don't see what other argument can be made which will reconcile both the inconceivability of dichotomized coverage of atrocities and the reality that the US media has swept one genocide under the rug while heavily emphasizing another. So, how would you reconcile that? Red and Black fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 12:34
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Red and Black posted:It's being argued that any model which proposes the media dichotomizes coverage based on whether an atrocity is committed by friend or an enemy, is invalid because it necessarily leads to genocide denial. Well, if that's invalid then it must be the case that the media doesn't dichotomize coverage in that way. But then how do we grapple with the deep-seated genocide denial in our society with respect to Yemen and the way our society's media coverage directly contributes to it? The only response I can think of is to say, there is no genocide happening in Yemen, and the media doesn't cover it because it's not newsworthy or relevant, whereas what's happening in Xinjiang is a real genocide deserving of many times the media attention as Yemen. But that would be tantamount to genocide denial. I'm not saying you will make that argument, I just don't see what other argument can be made which will reconcile both the inconceivability of dichotomized coverage of atrocities and the reality that the US media has swept one genocide under the rug while heavily emphasizing another. So, how would you reconcile that? I've heard plenty about the genocide in Yemen from multiple media outlets, I guess the issue is that "the media" is not some monolithic entity especially in this day and age. Do you think everyone sits and watches the 6pm news and that's like it? I'm sure many media outlets ignore Yemen more due to us supporting the Saudi's which we 100% should stop having a blind eye with them, but Xinjiang's stuff does effect way more people 1.5 million is the estimate I've seen of the numbers of detained vs 233000 dead in Yemen, not that comparing numbers like that gets into the reality of either situation. You are also greatly mischaracterizing the arguments against the PM, I'm not going to rehash that for the 100th time as people have already outlined it better then me and you've ignored it.
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Jun 29, 2021 12:46
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socialsecurity posted:I've heard plenty about the genocide in Yemen from multiple media outlets, I guess the issue is that "the media" is not some monolithic entity especially in this day and age. Do you think everyone sits and watches the 6pm news and that's like it? quote:I'm sure many media outlets ignore Yemen more due to us supporting the Saudi's which we 100% should stop having a blind eye with them, but Xinjiang's stuff does effect way more people 1.5 million is the estimate I've seen of the numbers of detained vs 233000 dead in Yemen, not that comparing numbers like that gets into the reality of either situation. But even if Yemen was far tamer. Say what was happening in Yemen was 1/10th the scale of Xinjiang. You'd expect at least 1/10th the coverage of the genocide to appear in the media. Does it? Not that I've seen. quote:You are also greatly mischaracterizing the arguments against the PM
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Jun 29, 2021 13:08
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Red and Black posted:It's being argued that any model which proposes the media dichotomizes coverage based on whether an atrocity is committed by friend or an enemy, is invalid because it necessarily leads to genocide denial. Well, if that's invalid then it must be the case that the media doesn't dichotomize coverage in that way. But then how do we grapple with the deep-seated genocide denial in our society with respect to Yemen and the way our society's media coverage directly contributes to it? The only response I can think of is to say, there is no genocide happening in Yemen, and the media doesn't cover it because it's not newsworthy or relevant, whereas what's happening in Xinjiang is a real genocide deserving of many times the media attention as Yemen. But that would be tantamount to genocide denial. Or you could let go of the argument that believing in a model like the PM necessarily leads to genocide denial and recognize there is an imperialist bias in the media. But that would mean throwing out everything that's been asserted over the last few pages. I'm not saying you will make either argument, I just don't see what other argument can be made which will reconcile both the inconceivability of dichotomized coverage of atrocities and the reality that the US media has swept one genocide under the rug while heavily emphasizing another. So, how would you reconcile that? American media coverage of yemen is specifically what broke the political willingness to continue supporting KSA's efforts there. It was a huge media push and the NYT even won a pulitzer over it and it culminated in one of the very few actually bipartisan bills getting passed out of the senate in years. Since 2019 media coverage of yemen has been almost universally anti-intervention and considerable investigative efforts have gone into making sure the us military is not actually backdooring some support to saudi arabia. This is significant because opposing Iranian influence in yemen via the houthis should be, on paper, one of the top geopolitical efforts of the us/ksa/israel etc alliance. It's significant too that while the votes against continuing involvement in yemen were bipartisan, they didn't reflect some total institutional rejection of the conflict: 90% of republican senators were still in favor of supporting saudi efforts.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:44
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Herstory Begins Now posted:American media coverage of yemen is specifically what broke the political willingness to continue supporting KSA's efforts there. It was a huge media push and the NYT even won a pulitzer over it and it culminated in one of the very few actually bipartisan bills getting passed out of the senate in years. Since 2019 media coverage of yemen has been almost universally anti-intervention and considerable investigative efforts have gone into making sure the us military is not actually backdooring some support to saudi arabia. I'm making a point about genocide denial in our society and the press's complicity in it. As you note, there is a split within elite society over whether or not to continue supporting the Saudi war in Yemen. You would expect that rift to appear in the press, and it does sometimes. But that doesn't change that there isn't a recognition in our media that what's happening in Yemen is a genocide. There are no front page news stories with headlines such as "US/Saudi Genocide in Yemen Threatens to Kill 400,000 Children". But there are headlines like that for Xinjiang. So why does this discrepancy exist? Since we agree that what's happening in Yemen is a genocide, the only plausible explanation I can see is that the press has a double standard. That is, they will emphasize the genocide committed by the official enemy, and minimize the genocide conducted by the US (i.e. genocide denial). Also the US doesn't need to "backdoor" support to the Saudi's they're still rendering aid directly, as they always have quote:The suspension does not cover sales of any other kinds of weapons to Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials said. Weapons used by helicopters would still be permitted, as well as ground-to-ground munitions and small arms. Electronics equipment, including jamming technology, would also be permitted. The Saudi military receives almost all its weapons from the United States.
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Jun 29, 2021 20:32
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The headlines have been exceptionally straight forward about what's happening in yemen and it doesn't seem like you've even followed reporting on yemen if that's the conclusion you come to. Also you should read the rest of that article before you say 'same as ever'
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Jun 29, 2021 20:47
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Herstory Begins Now posted:The headlines have been exceptionally straight forward about what's happening in yemen and it doesn't seem like you've even followed reporting on yemen if that's the conclusion you come to. Nice evasion! I see you don’t have a response to the clear double standard applied with respect covering genocide. If the press had been “straight forward” with respect to Yemen they would have called it what it is: a genocide. Also maybe don’t accuse someone of not following the news when you literally tried to claim the US isn’t selling arms to the Saudis Red and Black fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 20:55
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What on earth are you talking about?
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Jun 29, 2021 21:06
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Herstory Begins Now posted:What on earth are you talking about? If the press is impartial and doesn’t have differing standards for atrocities committed by “friendly” (Saudi Arabia) and “enemy” (China) states, why do they apply the term “genocide” to Xinjiang but not Yemen? Why is Yemen’s status as a genocide concealed in the press?
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Jun 29, 2021 21:21
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Red and Black posted:Nice evasion! I see you don’t have a response to the clear double standard applied with respect covering genocide. If the press had been “straight forward” with respect to Yemen they would have called it what it is: a genocide. there's two problems with your argument: first, as herstory begins now points out, the yemen reporting standing alone disproves the claims of the propaganda model (to the extent it's making claims that are disprovable, instead of using weasel concepts to always shift the explanation around the facts) second, you keep blindly asserting (with apparent disregard for what the yemen reporting actually was) that yemen and Xinjiang are covered in ways that are different enough to evade that the propaganda model has been falsified. given that the media coverage of yemen has been so great to effect political change, clearly it's not non-existent, so your claim must be that similar media organizations are covering them differently. so: are you able to point to some articles from the same source that you feel covers yemen and xinjiang differently in this way? because to date, you have simply blindly asserted it is so (while misrepresenting what has been reported on yemen) perhaps from the new york times or the washington post, the pre-eminent "mainstream media" newspapers in the united states
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Jun 29, 2021 21:52
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I will say "ok, maybe the media reported on yemen so extensively it forced a change in American policy, to the detriment of american imperialism, but that doesn't count and doesn't falsify the propaganda model because it was phrased slightly differently than the reporting on Xinjiang" is precisely the sort of thing that we are discussing by "the propaganda model is not falsifiable" where its predictions were badly wrong, there is significant wiggle room to always retract the lens to find some middling difference at some level of review and say that, that proves it; instead of "whoops, looks like it was wrong in major respects and, at a minimum, needs significant rework" it could be that it's just being misapplied in those cases and a fair review would show it had been falsified (qualified scientists talking about incontrovertibly falsifiable theories do, on occasion, get caught out doing that sort of thing) - but it is pretty much designed with all of these escape hatches where "oh, well, when the prediction was false that's just because of [non-useful excuse/weasel terminology]"
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Jun 29, 2021 22:04
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Why do you keep evading the question? You are being incredibly dishonest. I want to focus on the disparity in language because it refers to something simple and observable. Don’t agree that the disparity exists? Show that the media labeled Yemen a genocide. Your narrative of a watchdog press which forced the government into submission is much more difficult to prove or disprove. And even if it were proven, the question would still remain: why is Xinjiang a genocide when Yemen is not?
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Jun 29, 2021 22:26
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Are Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang even being referred to as genocide in straight news stories, though? (Again, I honestly don't know the answer to this question.)
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Jun 29, 2021 22:40
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Silver2195 posted:Are Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang even being referred to as genocide in straight news stories, though? (Again, I honestly don't know the answer to this question.) Actually I tend to see it only referred to as genocide in like blogs or in hedging language like "could be considered"; example BBC: "Who are the Uyghurs and why is China being accused of genocide?" quote:China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the wider standard outside of blogs/op-eds.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:46
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Red and Black posted:Why do you keep evading the question? You are being incredibly dishonest. I want to focus on the disparity in language because it refers to something simple and observable. Don’t agree that the disparity exists? Show that the media labeled Yemen a genocide. I do not believe that there is a real difference that you have identified between the reporting and do not plan on playing “I was thinking of something else” for ages. You were the one who brought up Yemen and claimed a big difference: point to what you are talking about clearly.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:56
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Red and Black posted:Why do you keep evading the question? You are being incredibly dishonest. I want to focus on the disparity in language because it refers to something simple and observable. Don’t agree that the disparity exists? Show that the media labeled Yemen a genocide. pulitzer winning reporting: AP https://apnews.com/article/37485a888de646918dfd4e7b8de3df73 You'll notice this first one is completely unambiguous about identifying the UAE as (then) US partners in the conflict. Another one about how the US is literally working with al-qaeda https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-united-states-ap-top-news-middle-east-international-news-f38788a561d74ca78c77cb43612d50da WaPo pulitzer prize for photojournalism for highlighting the toll of the saudi war in yemen. disclaimer very  child famine pictureshttps://www.pulitzer.org/winners/lorenzo-tugnoli-washington-post NYT also https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/26/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-war-yemen.html This stuff was really publicized in the worst possible way and explicitly at odds with the hawkish efforts of the trump administration (who vetoed the first senate resolution condemning american involvement and support of the saudis). Frankly I've seen nothing in american media reporting on what's happening to the Uighurs that is comparable in directness and raw horror as the yemen reporting.
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Jun 29, 2021 23:23
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I think wherever you stand on PM, one can agree that it certainly was not in a position to predict the effects of curation through algorithm. I'm realizing that 'Herstory Begins Now' and 'Red and Black' and myself, and anybody else probably actually see wildly different media through the sources, their social group, and any factors fed into their algorithm including IP location, web history, etc. There's always been more than one core narrative, but now there's so many that I feel that any statements about common language, popular narratives, or even the 'mass media' might need some sort of quantifiable framework to avoid what we're seeing here. Is anyone familiar with any tools that could help with this? I just did some searching and found some articles on quantitative media analysis I'll take a look at later. Edit: Without an appropriate background to know how accurately they described the technique in progress, Columbia's School of Public Health has a page about content analysis which describes two related methodologies: conceptual analysis and relational analysis. Both appear to function by developing a set of 'translation rules' and mapping media to chunks of code based on applying those rules. Errors in coding are anticipated and it looks to me like any study should also be designed to collect appropriate data to parameterize its coding. This process's value seems to be as a method to provide both quantitative and qualitative data regarding the reviewed content. From the Page posted:Advantages of Content Analysis piL fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 00:16
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Yeah quant content analysis in comm sci is almost universally atheoretical bullshit. There are a number of researchers pushing primitive “sentiment” analytics that can be used to generate data for tea leaves reading exercises.
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Jun 30, 2021 03:15
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Discendo Vox posted:Yeah quant content analysis in comm sci is almost universally atheoretical bullshit. There are a number of researchers pushing primitive “sentiment” analytics that can be used to generate data for tea leaves reading exercises. Hm. I'll strike that one off the list. It definitely looks like something that could be heavily manipulated into making the researcher's desired claim if done historically. I'd be curious to see someone continuously applying a strategy continuously to see if it predictive power in relation to things like conflicts or markets. I'm sure someone's written that paper. Seems super labor intensive unless it's an AI job--then it's basically piL fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 04:07
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Red and Black posted:Nice evasion! I see you don’t have a response to the clear double standard applied with respect covering genocide. If the press had been “straight forward” with respect to Yemen they would have called it what it is: a genocide. I feel like I'm having a flashback to the whole "why won't Obama say radical Islamic terror" episode.
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Jun 30, 2021 14:05
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Red and Black posted:Why do you keep evading the question? You are being incredibly dishonest. I want to focus on the disparity in language because it refers to something simple and observable. Don’t agree that the disparity exists? Show that the media labeled Yemen a genocide. Why do you keep making baseless claims, then presented with evidence otherwise then calling everyone dishonest. Why do you claims not require evidence to present but require evidence to dispute? Considering how you keep posting elsewhere about how you are owning the libs here Im pretty sure you are just trolling and not actually reading any responses to your posts.
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Jun 30, 2021 15:07
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Red and Black... oh boy. Where do I start. Well, okay, let's start here:Red and Black posted:We all agree that genocide denial is bad. But not all genocide denial is the same. Oh, word? 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. Genocide denial does indeed permeate our society! For example: Red and Black posted:No, they're re-education camps like those that have appeared elsewhere in modern Chinese history Solaris 2.0 posted:Ah yes re-education camps, well known throughout history for not being horrific centers of mass abuse up to an including forced labor and torture. Red and Black posted:Yeah, they're bad. Still not Auschwitz quote:A whole lot of posts itt minimizing genocide. User loses posting privileges for 2 weeks. I apologize for digging through your posting history and airing your dirty laundry like this, but I think the above posts are both sufficiently recent and on-topic, and should raise a few eyebrows: you were the one who originally brought up Manufacturing Consent as a "seminal" work in media analysis, and you have been its main proponent. This brings up an important question, presented in two parts: 1. Should we take your defenses of the Propaganda Model seriously and assume they're made in good faith, when you seem to frequently engage in genocide denial and whataboutism ("what about Yemen??") via that very model? Hell, forget PM — how can we take you seriously at all, when you haven't provided evidence for anything you've been claiming with regards to either Xinjiang or Yemen? You have merely put the burden on others to prove their objections to your claims ("I'd appreciate some links then"). When nobody took the bait, you angrily accused people of evading your demands. Then you went to some other forum on this site and smugly announced that "libs in D&D" have been "struggling" to respond to your arguments. Yeah, okay.  2. If using the model to deny genocide (either directly or in an implied fashion via whataboutism) is a misapplication of it and has no bearing on its validity, as it has been argued in previous pages, then how can we trust anything you have to say about it, since the fact that you are misapplying it means you don't actually understand it? In relation to the second point, for example, elsewhere in the conversation above you have crudely applied one of the model's premises (i.e. Western media has an imperialist bias) to minimize/deny genocide, by outright discrediting and dismissing certain claims regarding Xinjiang solely on the basis that they have been reported by RFA, a US government-funded media outlet: Red and Black posted:Ok, that article more or less aligns with what I’ve thought the camps to be. A ruthless attempt to re-educate suspected separatists. Obviously what happened to her was terrible. Aside: why the gently caress would you put 'Uyghur names' in quotes in that context? Very weird. To be clear, we should all be very skeptical of reporting by any state-sponsored media! The issue here is that, in the above conversation at least, you don't seem to have done any actual analysis to determine the veracity of the claims that are reported. It's not as if they are extraordinary claims. In fact, they are right in line with other cultural restrictions China has imposed on Uyghurs and has punished even their public officials for not obeying, such as significant limits on traditional marriage ceremonies and bans on wearing veils in public places, which have been reported in "mainstream" outlets and corroborated by Uyghur refugees. You, though, simply described them as "salacious" and dismissed them. For someone with strong and confident opinions regarding how "liberals" evaluate information, this is ironic, to say the least. It also illustrates, very clearly and I hope conclusively, one of the foremost problems with the Propaganda Model: it is not a media analysis tool, but rather a tool to attribute simplistic motivations to all media coverage under the guise of profound insight, and a set of excuses for outright rejecting information that doesn't fit the one's own worldview. You in fact did that again in your argument with Herstory Begins Now and evilweasel here yesterday, by saying that the reason Western mainstream media does not cover the events in Yemen as frequently or prominently as those in Xinjiang and call them genocide is because Saudi Arabia is a US ally and China is a rival, and it is this friend vs. enemy narrative that informs and explains the discrepancy of coverage in US media. As if there are no other possible explanations, such as the fact that China is orders of magnitude larger and more influential than Yemen, and therefore occupies a much larger mindshare in world affairs across a very broad spectrum of topics, has tens of millions of its people living in other countries, and as a result of all those factors, receives a lot more media coverage. From this perspective, one could argue that Yemen has in fact received a disproportionately large amount of media coverage (to the point where it has resulted in rare bipartisan consensus in the US to limit and withdraw support from Saudi Arabia). I didn't just make up that argument about proportionality either. It was you who suggested that if what is happening in Yemen was 1/10th the scale of Xinjiang, you'd expect at least 1/10th the coverage of the genocide to appear in the media. However, at least as a cursory glance, there have been 773 NYT articles and 849 Wapo articles about Yemen in the past year, and 535 NYT articles and 954 WaPo articles about Uyghurs. Now, none of us can realistically be expected to count the number of paragraphs and weigh the placement of and analyze the language in each and every single one of these articles, but on the surface, the plight of Houthi rebels seems to have received at least as much coverage if not more, using extremely graphic pictures and language and deep investigative reporting that have won authors Pulitzers, despite Yemen occupying a much smaller mindshare among the general public. Does US mainstream media refer to events in Yemen as genocide in that reporting? Again, at a cursory glance, it doesn't appear that way. Does this mean mainstream media is biased? Not necessarily, but it isn't really disputed that media outlets are biased, and Western outlets can reasonably be expected to have a Western bias. Does that bias exist due to influence of corporations and government, though? That's what PM would claim, but no, that cannot be proven. Does the existence of that bias mean that the events in Xinjiang are not genocide? No, it absolutely does not, and if one ever finds themselves viewing media coverage of those events via that lens, that means it's time to pause and reflect on one's own biases. Your analysis is also flawed in another important way: you have agreed that there is a split within elites over whether to continue supporting the Saudis: Red and Black posted:As you note, there is a split within elite society over whether or not to continue supporting the Saudi war in Yemen. You would expect that rift to appear in the press, and it does sometimes. Great! But why would you not expect (and observe) a similar, if not much larger, split with regards to China? After all, China's economy is deeply integrated with that of the US. We know for a fact that there are extremely powerful and influential "elites" in America (both wealthy individuals and large corporations) who cannot trivially decouple themselves from China and would therefore not want their business and financial interests risked by harsher attitudes towards and open hostilities with the country. And yet — and yet — mainstream media coverage of Xinjiang has been extremely consistent. Why? How does the Propaganda Model explain that? And how can we test that explanation to see if it's correct and holds up in any other similar scenario? Anyway, look, maybe I'm being unfair here by accusing you of using PM to deny the Uyghur genocide. Maybe you deny the Uyghur genocide independently of PM, and PM is simply a convenient and well-known tool you reach for when you need to window-dress your alternative facts as legitimate and your concerns about lack of media impartiality as a good faith effort for accuracy and fairness. Then again, one wonders if the distinction is really that important.
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Jul 1, 2021 00:53
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Yeah Red and Black I think you need to drop this angle.
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Jul 1, 2021 02:59
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suFzznCHjko Thought some of you might enjoy this video, pretty funny how obviously stupid Andrew Marr comes off
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Jul 1, 2021 09:06
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fart_man_69 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suFzznCHjko Could you expand a bit on what the video is and why it's good?
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Jul 1, 2021 22:43
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Could you expand a bit on what the video is and why it's good? It's an interview about the Propaganda Model where Chomsky clowns on Andrew Marr for half an hour. Marr starts the interview from the position that Chomsky is wrong, that his case is exaggerated, and gets demolished on every single point he brings up. It's very satisfying to watch. Chomsky's intellect is impressive, if you're in his corner.
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Jul 2, 2021 00:07
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fart_man_69 posted:It's an interview about the Propaganda Model where Chomsky clowns on Andrew Marr for half an hour. Fair enough on the video being posted, I suppose. People who disagree with elements of eg the Propaganda Model should not imo be required to spend thirty minutes watching a video.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:20
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Transcript of it here if anyone cares: https://citystrolls.com/articles/the-necessary-illusion/ I read Marr's later (2017) response recently. Didn't think it was that great quote:I remember this interview very well. I was – quite rightly – nervous of Chomsky, who is a formidable intellect. When he suggested that "if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting", I immediately realised that this was not so much brilliant, as unanswerable. He comes quite close to the position that the propaganda model means "everybody who disagrees with me". And the conversation was taking place in the context of me expressing disbelief, in his view, that all mainstream journalists were essentially the same - I had said that it seemed to me the Guardian and the Telegraph posed very different world views. And that journalists varied hugely in their own politics and temperament. He is brilliant, but he is a brilliant conspiracist, so therefore no, it wasn't a matter of the proverbial penny dropping, still less an epiphany.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:43
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