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If you want to talk about specific time periods and the nuances of the press then I am not going to stop you. But I'm not being entirely rhetorical when I ask what time and place people are suggesting that the press has been able to support the changes that I think most of the posters here, to one degree or another, would find necessary in the societies and the world we live in. I do not know of any such time or place, if you do then please share. I don't, though, think that historical trends are enormously significant to the criticism I'm making of the media in the here and now, though they may interest you personally of course. My specific criticism is that at this present moment in time, definitely in the UK and I would venture in the US and probably most of the rest of the western liberal democratic world, our respective national medias are an obstacle to necessary left wing reform, and an aid to right wing populism which I think most of us do not like. And that the reason for this is because of their structure as privately owned and state operated enterprises which structurally leads them to promote liberal and right wing positions and hinder left wing ones. And this, taken in an environment of increasing intranational and international inequality and with the looming danger that climate change and far right politics to escalate that trend of inequality, means it is important to examine the political utility of the press as an institution, in this day and age. I am arguing that this isn't a problem you can solve by saying we just need to get rid of specific publications, not least because that, as you correctly express concern at the prospect of, would have to be accomplished by simply increasing state control over the public discourse. I am personally quite skeptical of that being beneficial as well, in no small part because I don't like state broadcasters any more than private ones. But equally that what you might call the "bad" parts of the press emerge from the same structure as the supposed good parts of it. They're just selling a different thing to different people. The problem is surely that entire attitude to information dissemination? Not approaching that doesn't make any more sense to me than someone who dislikes worker exploitation but just wants to try and regulate it out of existence rather than approaching the idea that the exploitation is an inherent aspect of the employer/employee relationship and if you dislike it you might want to tackle that relationship rather than just hammering down all the bad outcomes that keep popping up. If you want more specific things then perhaps could you venture a different view on this? Do you think that it is possible to keep the general structure of media companies that we currently have but somehow improve them to not be an obstacle to left wing politics and also not prefer to promote right wing politics? Do you think that the hierarchical structure of press companies with well paid and centralized editorial control does not have an effect on the political bent of the publications making them generally if not fundamentally advocates for the moneyed classes and their political positions? Do you have good examples of attempts to change this, do you know what a cooperative media outlet might actually look like and whether it had any effect on the output? If you have like, specific disagreements with stuff like that then I'd be happy to hear them but thus far I can't get beyond "how dare you say the press is bad"
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Jan 6, 2019 01:32
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OwlFancier posted:And has it gotten us very far, do you think? Gibberish.
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Jan 6, 2019 01:41
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Herstory Begins Now posted:You're not even making any provable claims in either direction, you're just expounding your pet theory of how journalism works without grounding it in literally any examples of actual journalism, much less any of the actual discussion of this stuff that goes on inside of journalism as a field. Moreover you're neglecting that any leftist journalism exists whatsoever so you can make some (frankly absurd) point that 100% of journalism serves a far-right purpose. The LSE report was posted on the last page and you dismissed it as irrelevant. I live with this poo poo. You might as well ask me to prove the drat sky is blue but if you absolutely must have things quantified before you believe them then there's plenty in that report to look at.
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Jan 6, 2019 01:41
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Has it occurred to you that maybe the experience of the particular last few decades in the former center of empire and current running self-important running joke for the world community Knifecrime Island might not be representative of the entire landscape of media in the entire world?
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Jan 6, 2019 01:43
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Has it occurred to you that maybe the experience of the particular last few decades in the former center of empire and current running self-important running joke for the world community Knifecrime Island might not be representative of the entire landscape of media in the entire world? I can't speak about foreign language press but the poo poo that comes out of the US looks plenty familiar. If anyone wants to propose a difference in their own press that would be interesting though lacking context I couldn't obviously comment. Cynically though I would be surprised if there are not following trends in many places, the US in particular tends to push the rest of the world towards its own habits. I would posit the UK as perhaps an end state of the private press model, however, and a useful case study of the state press model with the BBC. If you like those, it might be a good idea to see how it works here, because you could have it to look forward to. If you want to compare and contrast trends in the US press specifically, being something I would very much identify as having similarities, then that would be interesting too. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 01:47
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Has it occurred to you that maybe the experience of the particular last few decades in the former center of empire and current running self-important running joke for the world community Knifecrime Island might not be representative of the entire landscape of media in the entire world? This is an excellent question and I'll be he doesn't have a good answer. OwlFancier posted:I can't speak about foreign language press but the poo poo that comes out of the US looks plenty familiar. If anyone wants to propose a difference in their own press that would be interesting though lacking context I couldn't obviously comment. Cynically though I would be surprised if there are not following trends in many places, the US in particular tends to push the rest of the world towards its own habits. Yup, I was right.
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Jan 6, 2019 01:51
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Mate if you want to go back to counting brexit in UKMT that'd be just dandy I can make myself look like a tit without your half arsed input.
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Jan 6, 2019 01:55
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Now for something completely different, and worth keeping in mind as you're equivocating: turns out that in order to train censors, you have to teach them, at least, the history you're trying to suppress. From the Lying New York Times: https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1081037556257443841
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Jan 6, 2019 01:57
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This is fantastic, because it's totalizing, unfalsifiable, cynically defensive, self-contradictory, and a pretty great example of the preferred endstate of the RT platform I was describing. They've given up on critical engagement with sources and are now just openly rationalizing whatever makes them feel good, with a patina of solipsism. Look at how absurdly circular it is: They're pointing to a media report that discusses the potential viability of the free press and comparing differing forms and practices, to demonstrate the futility of the free press, while asserting that there's no point in selecting or referring to media sources because OwlFancier posted:You can't escape that, nobody ever has, no society ever has, so why pretend that you can just pile up lots of facts and create an objective truth that everyone can believe in? Especially why do that in the face of overwhelming ideology everywhere you look?  Note that the entire subsequent rationale is framed in terms of the desired ideology, and doesn't interact with the practices or intentions or policies of information sources at all. It can't, because they've actively refused to engage. Things are true or not depending entirely on whether they agree with their prior political views. They've laced up a boot over their fist and are mashing it into their own face, forever. Absurd Alhazred posted:Now for something completely different, and worth keeping in mind as you're equivocating: turns out that in order to train censors, you have to teach them, at least, the history you're trying to suppress. From the Lying New York Times: Yeah when I mentioned the problems with sustaining a full-scale state propaganda apparatus, this was almost exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Give any comprehensive propaganda system a decade and you're basically turboscrewed its own institutional understanding. The next group of propagandists and censors can't sustain the practice. Even if your people start out knowing that they're lying, and why, and how, the performative act of lying means they very rapidly start drinking their own flavoraid. There's got to be an academic terminology for this set of issues, but I don't know of it. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 01:57
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I'm a bit unsure towards what conclusions your criticisms of western media are supposed to lead Owlfancier. You reject state media as a viable alternative, which leaves either private nonprofit publications or worker run pamphlets as the only traditional media alternatives I can think of. Or modern algorithm driven social media and moderated spaces like this forum, which are also subject to biases, censorship, and other problems. You've just observed that bias exist, but I don't see a suggestion for how to remove it or at least make it a bias towards something we like.
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Jan 6, 2019 02:03
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OwlFancier posted:I can't speak about foreign language press but the poo poo that comes out of the US looks plenty familiar. If anyone wants to propose a difference in their own press that would be interesting though lacking context I couldn't obviously comment. Cynically though I would be surprised if there are not following trends in many places, the US in particular tends to push the rest of the world towards its own habits. As someone who has consumed news in 4 languages (5 really, but I forgot most of my Arabic and that was more to be able to consume primary source material), I can assure you that you're looking through a pinhole and thinking you're seeing everything. The 2 primary take aways are, 1) journalism is absolutely instrumental to basically every subversive movement ever (and if you disagree, please explain why repressive governments kill so drat many journalists) and 2) pretty much every country is wildly skeptical of news sources and the political bias of every publication is absolutely public knowledge. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 02:10
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I wanna hear more about this public journalism funding setup in Germany.
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Jan 6, 2019 02:20
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Squalid posted:I'm a bit unsure towards what conclusions your criticisms of western media are supposed to lead Owlfancier. You reject state media as a viable alternative, which leaves either private nonprofit publications or worker run pamphlets as the only traditional media alternatives I can think of. Or modern algorithm driven social media and moderated spaces like this forum, which are also subject to biases, censorship, and other problems. You've just observed that bias exist, but I don't see a suggestion for how to remove it or at least make it a bias towards something we like. As I said collective ownership might work but it would, I think, have to be wildly different from what we have. I don't know. Genuinely if there are examples of that I would like to see them to see if they do work and have the desired effect. But even then I'm not sure how they could compete with an environment where any rich rear end in a top hat or country so inclined can pay as many people as they want to drown the world in garbage information. That's broadly why the one thing I would advocate for is cynicism. Essentially I don't see a way to really win this. There might be one but it's diffcult to see how the progression of technology in this instance doesn't work against us, assuming "us" in this instance is the people who would be well represented by left wing politics. You're right in that algorithmic or moderated social media are not the solution I think, or at least that the moderation either automated or otherwise, cannot be trusted to provide a "good" set of information or even necessarily a good environment. Because as we've seen there are already people ahead of the game in that department and working to flood those platforms with the same noise, and those companies being privately owned means they will happily sell any information people pay them to, as was the case with the recent facebook stuff and cambridge analyitica. Nationalizing them might be a good step but you're talking about doing that in the US which, uh, good luck? And would you be happier with them under the control of the US government? We do have press rules for elections in the UK but how does that translate to international news sources now that the internet is global and more and more people use it as their source for news? The laws aren't enforcable internationally. Perhaps they could be with effort but I'm skeptical that it would get that far. Nonprofits and poo poo yeah, they can exist but I imagine we both think that they couldn't really be competitive. So what else is left but general cynicism? You have to trivially dismiss a massive amount of information you might come across and this seems only likely to increase as the traditional media moves more online and online becomes a bigger part of all our lives, and more people get in on the idea that just spreading massive amounts of information works. Or hell, what I want doesn't even signify, it's difficult to imagine how this doesn't inevitably lead to cynicism and a checkout from the media by necessity as it simply becomes completely oversaturated. This is a technological thing, really. Information dissemination is becoming monumentally easier so you can no longer rely on "rich enough to own a newspaper" as the filter. Any idiot can put anything out they want and I think it's a bit... pointless to object to this or hope to oppose it, any more than it would be to demand we all move back to using 3.5in floppy disks. You couldn't fix it by nuking russia because the US will start doing it too. Everywhere will. It's a technological cat and it's out of the bag. I agree with DV that this is the end state though I disagree that it's unique to RT or that it's something you can really oppose. So the question then becomes what comes next? How do we live in the post-facts post-papers-of-record world? I don't have an answer for you but I do think it's a very good and very pertinent question. It's possible, perhaps, that this might just kill most of the online world as a meaningful information platform, sort of like the online advertising crash. You just automatically (sometimes literally) filter it all out and it gets lower and lower returns on investment. With people instead withdrawing more to... oh there's a proper word for it, like review sites and stuff or when people combine social media and consumerism? You don't listen to random ads you see but you instead go to a place that you trust to give you information on what to buy and that has much more weight? Which then of course becomes quite a lot more like the traditional press, but it opens an interesting possibility for democratization as these curation sites tend to rely a lot on user input. That itself is obviously open to abuse, but it could be almost... collectivist? In an ideal world perhaps. I think it's interesting to consider that wikipedia works as well as it does in the field of information provision. Far from perfect but a mile better than I would have expected. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 02:25
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OwlFancier posted:
I guess I'm just thinking about the issue differently. I might call what you refer to as cynicism pragmatism. If all media is inescapably biased, and there is no avoiding the issue, pointing this out ceases to be criticism, at least in a constructive sense. You have simply described the system as it exists. I wouldn't criticize an earthquake for destroying houses, even as I characterize its destructive effects. If bias is inescapable fact of nature then it follows we must simply learn to accommodate it. For me media criticism is defined in terms of use value. All media is biased and bad, but some of it is more useful and less biased in certain contexts. If I want to learn about the war in Yemen for example I can find articles published by sources associated with the Yemen government or the Houthis. However these are uniformly comical propaganda with only the weakest association with reality. If you took the claims of how many enemies both sides claim to have killed at face value they must have eliminated one another ten times over by now. You can still glean a bit of information, like who's currently friends/enemies, battle locations, and the status of negotiations. Alternatively you can turn to a more reliable source like al Jazeera. When they publish figures on casualties or food imports I can generally expect them to be accurate enough, although they may seek to curate content to make Saudi Arabia look even worse than they are. The trade-off is they publish less frequently and provide less detail, but life is all about trade-offs. Even if bias exists in both local sources and al Jazeera, the former plainly have less accurate information. We may not be able to truly distinguish between what is and isn't propaganda, but there are clearly differences in the degree to which we could assess the accuracy of their reporting. RT might not be radically different from top tier American sources. However it is clearly less useful to me when I want to make sense of things, because the quality of information available is much worse. To me personally it has less value. Of course as I said in the USNews thread, if you're objective is not to make yourself better informed, but instead want to discredit and delegitimize the US government, spreading and reposting RT and Sputnik will be quite useful to you because that is what they are designed to do. The other use case I can think of is determining what Russian propaganda lines are so you can recognize them in other contexts. Squalid fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 03:34
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Discendo Vox posted:What definition of propaganda are you working with, because it appears to be so broad as to encompass all information passed through human hands. The actual definition of propaganda can be applied to almost any media, yes. Which is why it's not useful to think in terms of thinks either "being propaganda" or "not being propaganda," but instead in terms of "what the form of bias is" and "whether specific information is supported." There is never any situation where you should just believe un-sourced information from any media source, so I'm really struggling to see where the substantive difference in how people should approach different media is. I'm not denying that differences technically exist between the different forms of propaganda we're discussing. But the US is an existing example of why, even with a degree of free speech, it's possible to manufacture consent for policy no less harmful than that pursued by countries with more "direct" propaganda. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the bad things that RT or whatever does, but there is definitely something wrong when someone focuses almost exclusively on this almost entirely irrelevant media while completely ignoring the more subtle (but no less harmful) ways that domestic media influences public opinion. The only legitimate reason to "sort" media in this way is that there's limited time in the day and you can't just read everything. I would generally agree that mainstream US media like WaPo or whatever is mostly okay for getting the basics of "events that took place," but anything with significant political ramifications should be taken with a huge grain of salt and researched elsewhere (ideally from media with a different ideological and/or national source). It's also important to keep in mind that "what facts you're consuming and the emphasis/priority they're given" also has an impact on the way a person perceives the world/issues, and I think most people are completely blind to the fact that you can get a heavily misleading/biased impression from a bunch of 100% technically correct information (heck, reporting on Russian election meddling is a great example of this; many articles are full of nothing but technically true things, while strongly implying the far less likely to be true conclusion of "and thus this had a significant impact"). Squalid posted:I guess I'm just thinking about the issue differently. I might call what you refer to as cynicism pragmatism. If all media is inescapably biased, and there is no avoiding the issue, pointing this out ceases to be criticism, at least in a constructive sense. You have simply described the system as it exists. I wouldn't criticize an earthquake for destroying houses, even as I characterize its destructive effects. If bias is inescapable fact of nature then it follows we must simply learn to accommodate it. I mean, you basically just said it in this post. There's value to acknowledging that bias is inescapable, and you should take into account the bias of all the media you consume (though I'd add that you should also never blindly trust anything unsourced, but I imagine you just left that unstated). The point in this case would be that there's not much value to sorting media into "propaganda" and "not propaganda" columns, and I would also argue that current national discourse on the American left (referring to all Democrats) doesn't give nearly the focus it should to the issues with domestic non-right-wing media (while the issues of comparatively negligible foreign media, like RT, receive a lot of focus).
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Jan 6, 2019 05:30
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Yeah that's an overly broad definition of propaganda (comically so, it's synonymous with "message") and an understatement of its effects.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 05:50
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Discendo Vox posted:Yeah that's an overly broad definition of propaganda (comically so, it's synonymous with "message") and an understatement of its effects. Maybe you should share your objective definition of propaganda with the rest of the class then? Because there are actually some very interesting discussions going on in this thread, and right now you're not really engaging in any of it.
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Jan 6, 2019 13:01
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vyelkin fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Sep 4, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2019 17:41
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OK, fine, I'll get into this a bit. I'd initially not wanted to engage with the thread because its framing makes recovery difficult, but I may as well lay my underlying issues out there. Obviously this isn't a perfect or objective definition, as it's responding in part specifically to the issues I'm now witnessing. I appreciate that a lot of you find Manufacturing Consent appealing, and that its particular emphasis and gloss on media studies has generally framed discussion. However its definition framework and use of terminology is at odds with other fields, scientific and humanistic, that actually look at the effects of these subjects at a more applied, grounded level. These are the fields that actually address and define the content and creation of messages at the scale you are interested in. They're also the practical ones. Like, one of the people viewed as the founding figure of comm sci was a psychologist who came back from WW2 and developed separate theories to describe propaganda practices. Rhetoricians are hired on political campaigns. The state department sends representatives to conferences and quietly recruit people, who sometimes ghost for several years while a new system for determining drone attack targets or interrogation policies gets made. 70% of the rest of the researchers hate those researchers' guts. Communications and media studies scholarship from an external, abstracted level that focuses on and reacts to current political issues doesn't have the same sort of ground-level framework or history (or the incredible angst and internal ethics debates either). One common trend in any of those fields is a scope creep problem with definitions of message types. "Rhetoric" and "propaganda" get thrown around to describe all persuasive messaging, or all persuasive messaging techniques, or all media. Manufacturing Consent's big mindblower that mass media serves a "propaganda purpose" wasn't...particularly new or inventive to people from those fields, because they'd been studying, or doing, it for decades at that point. But it also creates a serious problem for the analysis and response to different forms of messaging, because it broadens and renders largely unfalsifiable the general gloss on all media. Talking about propaganda in terms of its purposes, and speaking largely to the institutional scale, neglects the content and practices of actual propagandists, and as a result, how media is actually constructed, at both a granular and programmatic level. (and yeah, the internet has further diluted the institutional elements of the mass media argument.) This makes fixation on "mainstream" versus "alternative" media especially problematic, because alternative media ecosystems are actually much, much easier to gently caress with for propaganda purposes. Thinking that all media, or all mass media, or all mainstream media, serves a propaganda purpose is a fantastic way to turn yourself into a mark who very cannily discerns and consumes only the messages most directly targeting you. I promise you, it is much easier to manipulate a struggling, fiercely principled independent news source than an apathetic, profit-oriented newswire. Herstory Begins Now has an excellent post giving an example of this in the news thread: Herstory Begins Now posted:Back during the contra revolution the cia recruited director of comms/pr for the contras quit because he was disillusioned with all of the atrocities. In the process he wrote and talked a bunch about how he'd been trained to influence reporting on various pertinent subjects and it's entirely relevant to this conversation. emphasis mine. Propaganda functions best as a term used to describe messages, but it is a definition that is best grounded in the motives and practices of the people making the message, because this influences message composition practices, and their effects. Propaganda is an 1) institutional, programmatic effort composed of messages that are 2) intentionally designed to influence target beliefs or behaviors in a manner or means that 3) intentionally disrupts or limits the message cognitive process of the recipient, either immediately or in the future, in service of the program's 4) institution-scale goals. Mass media is not innately propaganda. Persuasive media is not innately propaganda. Commercial media is not innately propaganda, nor is media that operates within the constraints of a capitalist funding structure. Yes, I know capital is a means of power, and power is the measure of politics. No, that's not sufficient, or every book ever sold is propaganda. Institutional, programmatic deception is different, in content, scale, method and effect, than commercials or scams. There are meaningful distinctions to be made within the propaganda category, but there's a reason why my field is in an endless roiling boil over using most of our methods for even benign campaigns. Systematic manipulation is erosive to civic discourse and democratic republican values, and look, I get that some formulations of these values are viewed as a feature of liberalism, but they're also folded into the necessary flourishing of socialist and communist systems, and they're the site at which attempts at these systems frequently collapse. It's a profound moral hazard, unlike any other. I focus on state propaganda systems because they are the overwhelming source of propaganda, which is resource-intensive to maintain (you will not find a post from me saying AJ is "one of the good ones"). I go especially hard on RT because although, yes, they're not all that sophisticated, they go harder, further, and with worse intentions and methods, than other states do. Here's an OK rule of thumb on this. At some point in message creation, either at a very high level or on the part of the direct message content development, was someone actively designing a message apparatus to gently caress with the recipient in order to do something other than make money? Concrete examples, which this thread could really use more of, help here. Is a fluoridation health messaging campaign that is built around fear appeals propaganda? On most accounts, yes, though it's not of particular interest to our discussion here- we're generally interested in political propaganda. Is a fluoridation health messaging campaign that is built around the inoculation theory of persuasion resistance propaganda? That's debated among communication scientists, because inoculation messages can fully engage active evaluation, but they can also be constructed as misleading. Is FOX News propaganda? That's more complicated, because the motives are simultaneously :tenbucks: and the misleading of intentional misleading of their audience, both for commercial and political reasons. I think it's safe to say on balance, though, from the looks we've had inside the organization, that at the highest institutional level, the motives of FOX News do go beyond money. Is the Washington Post propaganda? Not necessarily. The Post may be a mass media outlet, but it is not generally or categorically propaganda. The Recipes section was not designed to lull you into a false sense of security. Joementum is not layering his trailer updates with carefully designed bait. It is possible that, as Manufacturing describes, the consensus and capital models may cause columnists to become biased or accept poor information or, worse, become a transcriber of propaganda. But this is going to apply to specific cases, authors or articles. It's not programmatic at the Post itself! It's also not intentional on the part of the author- the message is mediated. It's also subject to correction both in the instance or over time. That matters. Is the Washington Post's editorial section propaganda? It varies, but yes, at least some opinion/editorial columnists are propagandists. Editorial is the setting where, overwhelmingly, Chomsky and that other guy's arguments still routinely hold. Media company policies on the separation of editorial sections thus deserve particular scrutiny. Is goop propaganda? No, it's a scam. There's not a larger goal. Is a Trumpscam radio ad for wall lego that uses a fear appeal is not propaganda, unless the people running the ad's goals are actually to manipulate perception of the wall issue and that's why they ran the ads. Is Rense Radio propaganda? That's complicated because although there's programmatic manipulation, conspiracy theorists personality cultists like Rense tend to simultaneously scam their audiences, and believe their own lies. I'd argue that these still don't qualify because they aren't institutional in scale. Is Infowars propaganda? Well, the name suggests it is, but the real answer is that to make a categorical judgement we'd need to know more about the intentions and policies of Jones. He and Infowars have absolutely served as propaganda by serving as a mediated outlet for propaganda by others. The fact that Jones has appeared on RT means that at a minimum, he is comfortable with becoming a part of the message for the very worst sort of people. Is the Intercept propaganda? Well, the name suggests it is, but the real answer is that to make a categorical judgement we'd need to know more about the intentions and policies of Greenwald. He and the Intercept have absolutely served as propaganda by serving as a mediated outlet for propaganda by others. The fact that Jones has appeared on RT means that at a minimum, he is comfortable with becoming a part of message development for the very worst sort of people. Do you think it's unfair to equate Alex Jones and Greenwald like this? They're different in a lot of ways! But both have, following incentives and processes very similar to Manufacturing, served the same system control and perception management purposes as "mainstream" sources. Defenses of Greenwald should not be couched in ideology, but methods, practices, actions, message construction, and things we can use as cues of intent. The fact that they have public editorial policies and appear to tolerate internal dissent is a good sign. The, Winner thing...not so much. Nor the wikileaks stuff, which yeesh. idk, jury's still out, but I read the intercept with a block of salt now. It is vital to resist the temptation to totalize all media, because at that point you begin interpreting sources ideologically, instead of in terms of their practices or content. Take a look at how the OP's link list of sources are described, or (much worse) describe themselves- not in terms of concrete message practices, but in terms of subject or ideology. That's...not great if you want to actually study media! How liberal someone is is not as important as the way they communicate their messages. The method, the construction and the intention is what matters, not the subject, beliefs or funding stream. "independent, verifiable, fact-based journalism" doesn't actually tell you any more about whether a source is trustworthy than "the most honored brand in cable news". You can only get that by looking at the details. This is why I disagree so strongly with making a media thread that is isolated from actual messages for analysis. We're effectively blocking off critical discussion of specific message content in the news channel, and rather than duplicate all the messages here, we're speaking in abstractions or histories. Saying "oh ofc you should scrutinize all sources and be aware of bias" doesn't...actually do anything, aside from reaffirm your blind spots. If we want to be more effective consumers of media, we have to talk about the news. So let's talk about the news. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 18:13
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Ok, my first comment here is that you wrote a lot without addressing anything to anyone in specific. You've also written in a way where you basically just move from one assertion to the next without really arguing positively in favour of your positions and without really targeting your ideas very well. For instance, if you want to do a big critique of Manufacturing Consent and you're going to put this much effort into it anyway then it would be helpful for you to actually summarize what you think the Propaganda Model laid out by Chomsky and Herman is. The way you write here is so vague that I really don't get much more out of your post than if you'd just said "I disagree with Chomsky's model". I also have to comment that despite you saying you think the thread is terribly framed I can't help but think you didn't read the OP at all since you write as though this thread is leaning heavily on the work of Chomsky when he barely comes up at all. Discendo Vox posted:
I have two comments here. 1) If you're going to write this much specifically criticizing Manufacturing Consent then I really think you should be citing Manufacturing Consent or at least giving a decent summary of what you understand its arguments to be. You wrote a giant text brick of a post there which tries to make a lot of specific criticisms and basically none of it was actually in dialogue with any outsider sources (except another goon's post). It's generally a best practice that if you're going to make a formal criticism of a theory then you start by demonstrating to your audience some actual familiarity with the theory. Right now it's hard to tell if you've read Manufacturing Consent or if you're just attacking what you perceive its arguments to be based on someone else's summary. 2) I find it funny that you attack the Propaganda Model as being unfalsifiable given what you later suggest as a better way of thinking about propaganda seems utterly unfalsfiable since it literally relies on interpreting other people's motivations. quote:Propaganda functions best as a term used to describe messages, but it is a definition that is best grounded in the motives and practices of the people making the message, because this influences message composition practices, and their effects. Propaganda is an 1) institutional, programmatic effort composed of messages that are 2) intentionally designed to influence target beliefs or behaviors in a manner or means that 3) intentionally disrupts or limits the message cognitive process of the recipient, either immediately or in the future, in service of the program's 4) institution-scale goals. What are you basing this one? This is what I was talking about above. Are we to understand this is the summary you personally determined is best based on personal experience? Are you getting this from some theorist? Instead of just declaring "Hey guy's here's how we'll define propaganda now" it would be nice if you explained where this idea comes from. Also, how do you think this definition you're providing actually differs from the one being used by posters in this thread, or by Chomsky and Herman? quote:Here's an OK rule of thumb on this. At some point in message creation, either at a very high level or on the part of the direct message content development, was someone actively designing a message apparatus to gently caress with the recipient in order to do something other than make money? How would someone falsify this? Anyway I find it remarkable you'd type that many words up without ever actually engaging with the ideas written in the OP or the ideas written in the full length book you purport to be dismantling. No references to the idea of news consumers as the real product being sold, no discussion of the five filters, no critique of the actual attempts Chomsky and Herman make to apply their ideas to test cases. Why bother putting as much effort as you did into that post when it makes no effort to actually engage anything else? Here's a general rule of thumb for you: when somebody offers a big criticism of a book that appears to have been written by somebody who never actually read that book, be suspicious of that person.
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Jan 6, 2019 19:13
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I'd just like to say this is some very high level arguing and I am very much enjoying it as a tool to learn more!
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Jan 6, 2019 19:24
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idk I found that post fairly straight forward and it accords with how propaganda is understood in political fields. What is your background Helsing? Btw this convo got relegated here by mods because apparently discussing whether or not state-sponsored propaganda is propaganda doesn't belong in hte news thread. That's why it doesn't really engage with whatever was being talked about previously.
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Jan 6, 2019 20:16
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Herstory Begins Now posted:idk I found that post fairly straight forward and it accords with how propaganda is understood in political fields. What is your background Helsing? He wrote a post that is supposedly criticizing the propaganda model outlined by Chomsky and Herman and yet he demonstrates no familiarity with the text itself. He doesn't quote or summarize any of its arguments and honestly seems like he might genuinely not know what they are except in the vaguest summarized form. Then he offers an alternative model that is so vague that it's not entirely clear how he sees it as distinct from the propaganda model he's criticizing. Then his final "rule of thumb" for propaganda is incredibly vague, depends on words that don't have clear definitions (what does "gently caress with" mean in this context?) and focuses on discerning the internal psychological motivations of the propagandist. This is ironic since prior to offering this definition he specifically attacks Herman and Chomsky for not offering a sufficiently falsifiable theory.
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Jan 6, 2019 20:46
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Sorry, I should've been clearer in all of that. fwiw, bear in mind the prior conversation I just came out of. My critique is not of Manufacturing, but of the general use of broad assessment of media in terms of its cultural or ideological place, here, in this thread. It's also a critique of shunting media criticism away from news discussion - so a critique of Lightning Knight's decision to do so. I used Manufacturing as a shorthand for that because it was a major source of this general frame. I've not read the book in like 20 years, I admit - but the orientation the thread provides is more in line with it than with any of the people I studied or worked with who were actually involved in studying or developing these areas. It's explicitly a definition of propaganda I'm proposing from my time studying it. I'm open to critiques of it (the institutional component is probably its weakest part). Certainly, individual assessments of whether or not something is propaganda is often not going to be proveable! Most propaganda depends on this! That doesn't mean it's indeterminate, or not worth considering, any more than identifying bias is. Sometimes we do know someone was sitting around a meeting table planning to gently caress people up with a propaganda campaign. We know that RT is a propaganda agency. We also know that At the Movies is not, even if was ad-supported and on broadcast TV. We can use message content, message design, comparison with other sources, and context cues to attempt to identify motives, intent, and ethos. We can make an educated, informed, discussed guess about whether or not that meeting, whether or not that process of designed deception occurred. This, in turn, can inform discussion of how, and whether, we should engage with different sources of information. We can also render ourselves more resistant (though never immune) to rhetorics and propagandas targeting us. The act of doing this, and in particular, of doing this with others, and doing it with respect to specific messages, is more productive than isolating it to a thread kept separate from the things we're doing it to. Interrogation of the method of message composition, the message contents, and the material context of specific messages and sources, is more productive in forming heuristics for message evaluation than talking about "the media". Look, here's an example. This article, by Elizabeth Goiten, appears to be having a significant influence in public and press discussions over what Trump might do if he declares a state of emergency. We dismissed it as fanfiction here in the news thread, because, yeah, it goes off in a bizzare direction compared with the current political context, but it's also the headliner in the Atlantic, and was written by a big figure at the Brennan Center who used to work for Feingold. It also appears to have been in advance of the current situation, and released in anticipation of it. We can read this article, and research its origins, and debate and discuss it together, to gain a better understanding of its author, its design, its manufacturing, release and promotion process, and, in particular, evaluate messages that pass through Brennan or the Atlantic. It doesn't have to be that article - I just want us to start actually critiquing media. Though for a number of reasons I'd highlight here that the Atlantic is an absolutely perfect subject for detailed analysis of its content - it's a clearinghouse for ideas marketed by and to the powerful, with a really just incredible range of skill and methods. It's also specifically an influential tastemaker in other journalists...I'm astounded how many times VoA got directly published there. They're not normally allowed to do that. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 21:01
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I thought VOA was barred by statute from publishing within the United States? Or are they merely barred from broadcast journalism?
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Jan 6, 2019 21:13
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Squalid posted:I thought VOA was barred by statute from publishing within the United States? Or are they merely barred from broadcast journalism? I have no clue as to the how, but there was crossover into the Atlantic (about Russia and Crimea, ofc) during the 2016 runup. I'll see if I can track down some examples. edit: lol, can't find it, found this instead Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 21:18
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I finally broke the 1000-page mark on The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, meaning I'm getting close to finishing it, and while there is a lot going on in that book, one aspect of it has to do with why a lot of the atrocities Robert Moses committed against the people of New York were unreported and/or misreported, and what happened to change his coverage from almost universally favorable (papers were often commissioning him to write articles about his efforts) to hostile, which I think might be relevant to this thread. I am going to need a break from that book after I'm done with it, but would there be an interest in a summary from a layman such as myself about what I got out of that book sometime in the future?
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Jan 6, 2019 23:14
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Discendo Vox posted:Propaganda functions best as a term used to describe messages, but it is a definition that is best grounded in the motives and practices of the people making the message, because this influences message composition practices, and their effects. Propaganda is an 1) institutional, programmatic effort composed of messages that are 2) intentionally designed to influence target beliefs or behaviors in a manner or means that 3) intentionally disrupts or limits the message cognitive process of the recipient, either immediately or in the future, in service of the program's 4) institution-scale goals. So it seems that (3) is doing all the work here. Because 1,2, and 4 are totalizing, right? Or are there media institutions without institution-scale goals that shape their messages to influence reader's beliefs? That sounds like something all media organizations do, and is only nefarious if you find the specific goals to be nefarious. So, what is the "message cognitive process" and what does it mean to disrupt it? To get specific, what about something like Rewire News (formerly RH Reality Check if you've heard of it). They clearly have goals that shape their messages. Maybe it is propaganda, but if so should I care? I mean, beyond taking their perspective into account when reading it, which is something we should always do, right? If I believe that reproductive health is under attack and stories relating to it are under-covered or ignored entirely, maybe I should welcome the propaganda and support it? I'm not an expert in this field, clearly, but I'm skeptical of the possibility of judging media without reference to ideology. Why should I care more about my message cognitive process than the ideology of the media I consume?
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Jan 7, 2019 00:07
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SurgicalOntologist posted:So it seems that (3) is doing all the work here. Because 1,2, and 4 are totalizing, right? Or are there media institutions without institution-scale goals that shape their messages to influence reader's beliefs? That sounds like something all media organizations do, and is only nefarious if you find the specific goals to be nefarious. This definition is intended to apply to specific messages as a part of larger programs, not just entire outlets. I'm staking out the claim that all four elements are necessary ones. 3 is...difficult, because there's not an academic consensus in the field of rhetoric, and there are libraries worth of literature on the debate. It's also the only thing the evaluator always has access to, because it can be directly evaluated from message content (aside from ephemeral messages, but that's an edge case). You can use it to identify issues and gaps in reasoning, both in yourself and in the information source, and infer places that require scrutiny or context. The social sciences and humanities have concepts, theories and practices for persuasion (I can give you some book citations, but it will take time as it's all in boxes). Some of these methods are intended to make messages clearer or more impactful, and others are intended to influence beliefs in a matter that specifically prevents the reader from realizing how they are being persuaded. The ethics of this is approached from a lot of different angles, but a common framing is to say that messages whose mechanism of persuasion favors or intentional, conscious processing of the persuasive message content, are more likely to be ethical, in that they engage with and respect the autonomy of the recipient. Basically, if I design a message to persuade you, the things that should do the work of persuading you should be the things you are aware of and pay attention to. They should also be true and not misleading (I should have been clear that I was including "lie to you" in element 3-my bad). This stands in contrast to methods of persuasion and message composition practices that intentionally disrupt or bypass that conscious processing. The example that was burning up the field when I was getting my degree was fear appeals. That may sound ridiculously facile, but bear in mind this was millions of dollars of research going into things like public health campaigns- and also getting hoovered up by political consultancies and defense departments. The details mattered. Was it ethical to use vivid fear appeals to, for example, get people to stop smoking? What if we knew, in advance, that it caused message recipients to misunderstand what the risks were in a way that we could've corrected, but it ? What if we knew (as turned out to be the case) that fear appeals in that context had a substantial marginal boomerang effect that caused some recipients to double down? If fear appeals worked perfectly every time, could we use them to get people to vote the "right way"? The details and permutations of this become complex very fast; there are degrees of autonomy, measurement is complex, it's difficult to escape lousy dual process model assumptions from the 60s, and there are extenuating circumstance arguments, etc. There are two reasons, though, that evaluating the methods of composition is important that are relatively straightforward. First, it communicates the intentions and practices of the message creator. For example I immediately hated reading Conor Feidersdorf's writing as soon as I was first exposed to it. It's not that he's a libertarian- when I first read him he was writing on stuff that I tended to agree with. It was that, reading the text, he was trying to sell me a used car in the process. I could tell, from his merger of objective citation and narrative and strong...I think it was filth metaphors specifically, that he was seeking to appeal to his targets with layered ideological parity and pseudoobjectivity. A journalist referring to...well, let's pull from his recent work on "campus censorship" as a "rot" at the core of American democracy. This combination of elements this told me I needed to engage more critically with his coverage scope specifically, and look at his background generally. It's what led me to finding out about the various interests backing FIRE, and his tendency to uncritically promote their positions, and his penchant for selective citation, which was enough to no longer waste time reading him. The second reason why doing this close reading and analysis is important is that close attendance is also an important practice. Critical reading and critical thought require maintenance, and ideology is an incredibly, incredibly powerful blind spot. The terrifying Dan Kahan at Stanford has a great research program going on this, the "Cultural Cognition of Risk in Science Communication". And, of course, message producers know this- it's something they lean on a lot. Understanding how messages are written to target others, and to target ourselves, makes us resistant (though never immune) to the methods of rhetorical abuse. Greater literacy and attention to these methods makes you a better consumer of information, and a better discourse participant. The reason the other elements are important are probably clearer in that context, and why I think the propaganda distinction matters. Anyone can sell you a car, or sell you news. Someone programmatically, intentionally disrupting people's ability to process messages on an institutional scale, with institutional goals, is disrupting the res publica. My earlier posts single out RT because unlike other, merely persuasive propoaganda systems, the disruption of civic discourse is the institutional goal. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we can somehow free ourselves of ideology and see the world objectively, just that message/messenger ideology is a poor signifier of quality, and a poor heuristic for trust evaluation. It's not as if I don't agree with the ideas behind the messages I like. But try to come to like the messages in order to be able to like the ideas. If someone comes along with a different view, and their message and argument are better constructed, that's a reason to prefer their view. The alternative seems like epistemic closure. let me toss this back to you. What makes either a) message ideology or b) source ideology a good basis for message evaluation? And how do you identify message or source ideology? edit: did you add the rewire news example, or did I just miss it while writing way too many words? ugh, anyway, rewire news. I would want to spend way more time looking at it , but I would not immediately classify rewire news as propaganda. It's accurate that they fit 1, 2 and 4, but their actual material is remarkably free of abusive taint, element 3. Their motives and goals are stated and expressed in terms of information transfer, their funding sources appear pristine, they have good association links, they aren't using metaphorical language or leading statements, there's no sign of order effects, their citations are excellent oh wait this is an analysis article they also have editorials. I'd need a lot more time to evaluate everything at Rewire News and come to an opinion-and we don't have to agree on it. It appears there's some sort of staff passthrough or farm process going on at Rewire, given the merger with what seems to be an unrelated outlet, overlap with Dem campaign staff, and cyclic, relatively low-circulation opinion material. That aside, it seems like a great source. But here's the thing; because I find the ideology promoted appealing, I'm applying much, much more scrutiny, because it means I'm more susceptible to abuse where it occurs. If you select for ideology first, then apply content scrutiny, you're both narrowing your sources and you're We can also learn way more about media construction, even from agreeable, well-made, non-propaganda sources, by closer scrutiny on their methods. Additionally, it's a decent rule of thumb to pay greater ongoing attention to smaller outlets, because their policies and approach can be less stable. I mentioned it before: they're usually much easier to flip because they have fewer resources. I can go into a bit of what that process entails if people are interested, but I only know the details of those methods in regulatory lobbying. fake second edit: They seem to have started as a US-facing UN Foundation outlet? I don't know the lay of the land in that particular maze well enough to tell what was going on there, or what their larger goal is now. Absurd Alhazred posted:I finally broke the 1000-page mark on The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, meaning I'm getting close to finishing it, and while there is a lot going on in that book, one aspect of it has to do with why a lot of the atrocities Robert Moses committed against the people of New York were unreported and/or misreported, and what happened to change his coverage from almost universally favorable (papers were often commissioning him to write articles about his efforts) to hostile, which I think might be relevant to this thread. I am going to need a break from that book after I'm done with it, but would there be an interest in a summary from a layman such as myself about what I got out of that book sometime in the future? Holy poo poo, yes please. I've got two volumes of the lyndon johnson bio sitting somewhere unread because I want to read it all at once. Also how thick is it, wikipedia says 1300 pages edit 3: also I'm going to dial it down from here on, I apologize for these massive textblocks. I was teaching undergraduates communication theory and research (including source evaluation) during the 2016 election, the election occurred just before the final day of class, and it's clearly messed with me. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 01:23
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Jan 7, 2019 01:43
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Discendo Vox posted:Holy poo poo, yes please. I've got two volumes of the lyndon johnson bio sitting somewhere unread because I want to read it all at once. Also how thick is it, wikipedia says 1300 pages It is two inches thick. Not for the faint of heart or weak of wrist.
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Jan 7, 2019 02:14
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I’m phone posting so I won’t join in on the 1000 word post crew yet but this is incredibly lol, a powerful self-own on Assange’s part.
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Jan 7, 2019 02:19
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Discendo Vox posted:
Do you count advertising as propaganda? it definitely satisfies 1-3, and very likely satisfies 4 depending on your definition of what an institution is. i bring this up because all of the major domestic papers and news networks that you refer to as the gold standard are filled with advertising. if you look at any given edition of the nytimes, there will usually be full page ads, often trying to camouflage themselves as news stories. around 1/3 of tv news airtime is advertising. so if RT or al jazeera is 100% propaganda, 25-30% of western corporate media is propaganda just by including advertisements. it isn't just the presence of inline newspaper ads or tv advertisements on major news providers that is the issue. the vast majority of revenue for newspapers and tv stations comes from advertisements, which creates a system of perverse incentives that bias the news. running a news source isn't about providing high quality journalism to viewers; it as about making as much money as possible from advertisements. part of this is maintaining a high reputation so that they get more viewers/readers, as reflected by the constant obsession with nielsen ratings among tv execs. however, in the end, it is all about the bottom line, and selling as many ads as possible at the best price they can get. the problem isn't just that corporate media is run as a business. if there comes an opportunity when they have to choose between reporting the truth and offending an advertiser, there are strong financial incentives to not offend the advertiser, as the offended advertiser may pull their advertising revenue and hurt the finances of the news source. when someone buys an ad on a news source, they aren't just buying a little square of newsprint or 30 seconds of time; they are buying a little bit of security from bad coverage. and if a newspaper is owned by a company, there is even more incentive for the parent company to exert control over what is and isn't covered. it's interesting that you brought up the washington post. the post was recently acquired by amazon. there are absolutely precedents for amazon's demands influencing coverage. in may, wapo ran an article about a shortage of truck drivers that talked about how there were many spots available for well paid trucking jobs that only required a few weeks of training.(see below link) there was a series of articles about the need for drivers, including a follow up piece a month later: "America has a massive truck driver shortage. Here’s why few want an $80,000 job." turns out that from the article text, the main reason they don't want a $80k/year a job is because it pays to $47k/year median, and usually demands 60 days straight of 14 hour shifts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ything-to-rise/ now, was this sponsored content or not? it wasn't marked as such, but it quite openly promoted jobs that wapo's parent company needed filled asap, and did so by greatly inflating the salary in every headline involving trucking. if you just skim the headlines, you get the impression that being a trucker was a great career choice in 2018, just when amazon was looking to hire more truckers. before xmas, wapo ran an article comparing the amazon alexa with it's competitors. the byline was that alexa was the best all around choice, the google one had the best speech recognition, and the apple one was too concerned with security. while the conflict of interest with wapo and amazon was stated in the text of the article, framing the byline in this way makes the statement that you can somehow have too much security when it comes to a speaker that reports everything that occurs in your house to a central database. it also works as product placement, creating demand for a speaker that only exists to promote amazon products to people with too much money. these are cases where the financial interests of the parent organization of a newspaper have most likely compromised coverage of the nominally independent newspaper. advertisers have just as much clout. if you remember the way in which bill o'reilley was fired, first advertisers pulled their ads, then as he became a financial liability to fox he was fired. at the time this was presented as a good thing, but i think it really underscores the actual power relations: advertisers effectively have veto power over the news. while this is an extreme case, it demonstrates that the media cannot offend their advertisers. i believe that this usually takes the form of self-censorship. if a news network gets 30% of advertising airtime from drug companies and medical insurance companies, they have a very strong incentive not to aggravate their sponsors by accurately reporting their advertiser's role in the current crisis of medical care in the us. basically, i think that the people who pay for the news, whether through direct funding like rt, or indirectly through large ad buys, exert a large amount of control over the tone and content of the media. i kind of think that the second method is the more deceptive one, as the large number of people paying news via advertisement muddies the waters. i have a pretty decent idea of what the self-interest of the russian government is, as well as what amazon wants. i have no idea who all of the major advertisers are for news networks, let alone what stories are important to each of them to influence. it becomes much harder for someone reading the news to determine what is a conflict of interest in such an environment. i'm not channeling manufacturing consent (which i've never read), but rather upton sinclair's book, the brass check from 100 years ago. some stuff has changed for the better (the ap no longer has monopoly control over news distribution, for instance) but many of the criticisms are still very relevant, and i found it quite enlightening. it has much better examples of advertisers influencing news coverage than i have at my fingertips. there is a pdf link to the (400 page) text in the wikipedia article, if anyone wants to read it (it is too old to be covered by copyright). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
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Jan 7, 2019 04:21
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Herstory Begins Now posted:As someone who has consumed news in 4 languages (5 really, but I forgot most of my Arabic and that was more to be able to consume primary source material), I can assure you that you're looking through a pinhole and thinking you're seeing everything. What would you say counts as subversive journalism in the US right now? Because I can’t think of much having any impact outside of infowars, which lol. What subversive movements exist in the US, and what media supports them? The right in the US has media at every part of their spectrum outside of naked white nationalism represented on the national stage. And even then, they still stray into barely-concealed white nationalism. The left does not have nearly the range of views represented on nearly as large of platforms, and it tends to be vehemently opposed by everyone from the right to liberals. What exactly do you see as subversive journalism that has any positive effect in the US right now? selec fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 05:01
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That's a good response, and it's the institutional weakness I'd mentioned with my definition. I'm going to try to be briefer with my responses from now on, so apologies if I miss stuff. I don't think this response is fully satisfactory, but I do think it reflects a meaningful difference. First, please note that I don't refer to those outlets as gold standard. Those outlets are gold standard in the eyes of the communications person Herstory Begins Now cites, based on that speaker's evaluation of a scale of reader perception of credibility (and most appealing targets), which doesn't mean they are necessarily the best outlets from my perspective. I generally don't find those to be the best outlets, because there are other groups (Propublica's the typical example) that are able to evade the capital conundrum you identify. I think it's important to distinguish between outlets that are directly advancing the institutional goals of leadership as their purpose (the Hearst or Murdoch scenario), which I would classify as propaganda, and those who are partially beholden to a source of funding or advertisement. Their goal is to sell ads, not promote a specific agenda. I do not think advertisements are inherently propaganda. Ads can be disingenuous, ofc, and (depending on form, design, backing, and platform), can be propaganda (see: the full pagers the Post ran years ago for CND), but are not categorically propaganda. Their goal is more limited in scope. [fake edit: I'm not satisfied by this either. Aha- institution refers to the intentions of the propagandist, not the propagandist themselves- it shouldn't be in element 1, I left it there while drafting. I need to think about how I can clarify what I mean when I distinguish the direct goal of money from the indirect goal of means, qua the scope of deception, and its moral threat. This will mean revising point 4, or adding another element. Perhaps something citing theory of publics to clarify that the goals of the propagandist target a public. I think that will resolve this set of issues- the notion of an intentional threat to the agency of publics.] Similarly, their economic influence on the message creator is indirect. The perverse incentive of this situation can and does produce bad reporting, and it should be scrutinized and criticized as such, and it belongs in this thread, but even then the form and outcomes are different because the people designing the messages doing so for the programmatic, deceptive institutional purpose. Because it lacks that coherence (indeed, because the waters are muddied, because the intent and form is mediated), it does not directly pose the same discursive threat. The messaging of commercial media is not categorically programmatic in its attempt to deceive or manipulate- at worst the pressure of capital is a potential route to propagandistic control. Regarding the Post story, a small correction: Bezos owns the Post, Amazon does not (which doesn't make things better, of course). I'm not seeing a strong case for any sort of organized persuasive effort toward an institutional end here, versus conflict of interest- the Post runs stories critical of Amazon pretty often. My opinion might change depending on the earlier, breathless truck job opening stories, if you could find links to them. I'm certainly open to the idea that the Post has slipped into that state of affairs (sole ownership is a bad situation), but I'm just not seeing evidence of it from the content of their articles or policy shifts (though the departure of the ombud is not a healthy move long-term). The Post continues to have a good reputation among journalists and watchdogs for its internal practices; my read is Bezos thinks he has more to gain by establishing the Post as genuinely independent, at least for the time being. But you can absolutely disagree about whether or not it counts- the point is it's not the commercial aspect that does it. Now, if a lobbying group that's a proxy for industry starts a messaging campaign, is that propaganda? I believe so. And I think a great target for scrutiny is Bloomberg, specifically, who does all kinds of messaging stuff through a range of proxies. But that's because he's starting groups that run campaigns specifically to influence public behavior, as well as directly owning the media reporting on them. And even then, while his public health nonprofits have definitely used propaganda, I'd need to study the content and form of messaging from his media holdings, separately. I've heard of Brass Check, but never read it. I'll do so asap. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 05:10
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Well Discendo do you know about the Bloomberg terminals?
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Jan 7, 2019 07:00
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BrandorKP posted:Well Discendo do you know about the Bloomberg terminals? yyyes?
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Jan 7, 2019 07:30
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selec posted:What would you say counts as subversive journalism in the US right now? Subversive of what? The President of the United states right this moment is calling the press the enemy of the people and regularly goes on rants about them publishing information that harms him. Like I have no illusion that the response is the president doesn't run the country and the press doesn't attack the "them" deep state who runs the president. Or that trump is a victim of being the hero that dared to speak up against that deep state or whatever. But the fact the president of the US is constantly melting down about the press is pretty good evidence that US media is significantly different to state run propaganda.
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Jan 7, 2019 15:08
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Is all propaganda state run though?
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Jan 7, 2019 15:10
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Josef bugman posted:Is all propaganda state run though? Some definitions say yes, but it gets hard to tell what counts as "state run" at times. Fox News feels like propaganda, but it's controlling Trump rather than vice versa. The thing about propaganda is it takes a lot of resources to sustain-a building full of trolls working shifts, etc. States are more likely to have the resources and the drive/goals that make propaganda seem worthwhile.
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Jan 7, 2019 15:43
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