Mad about the Media: The Media and Media Criticism Megathread

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Darth Walrus: Feb 13, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

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.

I guess there is also stuff like cult 'propaganda', which at least feels similar, so it might be worth talking about how that fits in.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 15:49

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 18:50

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

No, but I would say someone like trump is pretty solidly and definitively in a top spot on any box for formal and informal structures of power in the US and he seems to have very little control over the media. He seems to find them a huge thorn in his side who constantly (rightfully) ridicule him and who he has to constantly denounce as illegitimate. So media has some power to be subversive.

Like I know the response is going to be that there is some deeper deep state puppetmaster behind trump above simple billionaires and presidents and the press won't stand against THAT, and in fact they are attacking trump because he is a threat to that deep state, But that is Q theory stuff.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 15:56

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Darth Walrus posted:

I guess there is also stuff like cult 'propaganda', which at least feels similar, so it might be worth talking about how that fits in.

Yeah good point. I definitely don't endorse state operation as a necessary element, it's just a common one.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 16:01

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Exploration is ill-advised.

More like propaganda that runs the state.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 16:45

SurgicalOntologist: Jun 17, 2004

Discendo Vox posted:

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"?

OK, that makes sense to me, at least as far as a definition goes.

I'm still not convinced as to the import of this classification. By this definition RT is propaganda (at least in general... maybe the granularity of the classification is at issue). But say there is some activist I have been following, who has been blackballed from traditional media, who gets an interview with RT. Why should I not tune in? Why should I not promote the message? Maybe in doing so, I am just doing good propaganda. But is it relevant that my intentions in promoting the message are different from RT's? And if the reason to say I shouldn't is, because they might click another link and therefore get disrupted or whatever, I'm skeptical that that's a big enough risk to warrant not promoting the message.

Presumably, I believe that the message I agree with respects the autonomy of its audience, even if RT doesn't.

Discendo Vox posted:

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.

And if I share that goal? If I believe the civic discourse is problematic, not because of its lack of respect for autonomy, but for its self-imposed limits and scope, I should want to disrupt it. Maybe this is just a different sense of "disrupt" though. Although I could probably argue that an artificially limited discourse is already disrupted, and I am un-disrupting it.

Discendo Vox posted:

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?

Maybe this isn't what you're asking. But I have an ideology. Naturally, I believe the world would be a better place if more people shared my ideology. I believe it to be a matter of life and death. How could I not use ideology as a basis for message evaluation? It seems to be a moral imperative.

So, having written that, I understand how that makes me more susceptible to propaganda. Yeah, I don't want to be lied to, so I will still parse messages with scrutiny, and promote them selectively. It nevertheless seems to me that sources with a dangerous ideology, that are technically not propaganda, can be more dangerous than propaganda from a shared ideology.

I found your discussion of The Intercept earlier to be interesting and I'm generally curious about a couple things.

Discendo Vox posted:

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 [sic: I assume you meant Greenwald here] 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.

First of all, "a mediated outlet for propaganda by others". Surely this also applies to mainstream media. As far as appearing on RT (or Fox), I may disagree with his calculation but I don't see it as anything more than that. Plenty of people I respect more than Greenwald (e.g. Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff) have appeared on RT and I struggle to care.

But really I'm wondering about the Winner thing, and the WikiLeaks stuff. The Winner thing: they burned their source, seemingly due to carelessness, which obviously they shouldn't have done. But why does this push you toward seeing them as propaganda? And what's the wikileaks stuff? I thought WikiLeaks and the Intercept were at odds?

SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jan 7, 2019

# ? Jan 7, 2019 17:27

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Discendo Vox posted:

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.

If you haven't read Manufacturing Consent in 20 years then why would you open your contribution by making a bunch of highly specific and frankly spurious attacks on Manufacturing Consent? I'll tell you how this comes off: as a cheap appeal for authority on your part. You came in here and dropped a bunch of words that are coded as serious and professional sounding - falsifiable, cognitive etc. - and then used a frankly dishonest caricature of a popular work by a rival school of thought as a punching bag. You didn't present an honest or accurate portrayal of the work you are attacking and the purpose of your attack wasn't to inform your audience but rather to make yourself look credible by setting up and tearing down a straw man argument.

quote:

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.

When you say its a definition from your time "studying it" do you mean it is inspired by specific scholars or schools of thought or do you mean its just your personal intuition? I'd be curious to know specifically where your line of thinking derives from or what inspired it.

quote:

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".

You were asked to clarify what precisely it means to say that something "intentionally disrupts or limits the message cognitive process of the recipient" but you never really did. I think you need to because right now your definition of propaganda seems to just reduce down to "I know it when I see it". This all seems incredibly subjective and wishy washy and it still blows my mind that you entered this discussion by attacking someone else's theory for not being sufficiently rigorous or falsifiable.

At the end of the day your entire argument seems to reduce to this statement:

quote:

The method, the construction and the intention is what matters, not the subject, beliefs or funding stream.

I'm honestly not sure how you can cleanly separate the construction or method of news from the funding stream, or the intention of the news from the beliefs. Again, all of this would be added immensely by clearer definitions of the terms you're using and more citations of actual scholarship.

You seem to genuinely think that there's some clean and clear method of communication that we all know pretty much intuitively is a legitimate and good form of cognition enhancing meaning transmission and that we also know there are sinister modes of communication that specifically "disrupt" cognition (not sure precisely what this means but I'm echoing your use of the words) and that media analysis basically just reduces to analyzing individual acts of communication and determining whether the intention of the person behind the communication was to enhance or disrupt our cognitive processes.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 18:13

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

I'm still not convinced as to the import of this classification. By this definition RT is propaganda (at least in general... maybe the granularity of the classification is at issue). But say there is some activist I have been following, who has been blackballed from traditional media, who gets an interview with RT. Why should I not tune in? Why should I not promote the message? Maybe in doing so, I am just doing good propaganda. But is it relevant that my intentions in promoting the message are different from RT's? And if the reason to say I shouldn't is, because they might click another link and therefore get disrupted or whatever, I'm skeptical that that's a big enough risk to warrant not promoting the message.

Presumably, I believe that the message I agree with respects the autonomy of its audience, even if RT doesn't.

You can possibly disagree, but that is definitely the reason that RT likes having those people on- they are confident it legitimizes them as a source of information, that a sufficient portion of recipients will consume more from them and be driven to the fringes, and that they are ultimately getting what they want. Also, y'know, the interviewer and media source controls a lot more about the message than the interviewee. Medium is the message, etc. I think that the relative incompetence of Russian propaganda might be a decent counterargument here - they mostly succeed through volume and persistence. But I'd personally rather not test that proposition via message I can be confident was targeted at people like me.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

And if I share that goal? If I believe the civic discourse is problematic, not because of its lack of respect for autonomy, but for its self-imposed limits and scope, I should want to disrupt it. Maybe this is just a different sense of "disrupt" though. Although I could probably argue that an artificially limited discourse is already disrupted, and I am un-disrupting it.

Sorry, let me clarify that. Propaganda harms the public's capacity for civic discourse itself. Propaganda produces a society that is less free, and less capable of growth or self-correction. It's fraught. It does this by influencing beliefs or behaviors at a public scale in a manner that harms the autonomy of that public. That said, there is definitely an argument to be had here- you can imagine a ticking time bomb scenario, or argue that (like vivid warnings on cigarette packaging), the harm is massively outweighed by the good. This is generally the scale of the arguments among rhetoricians and comm scientists. The usual final argument is that if society is headed down a bad path, or even if it's subject to the crippling effects of propaganda, it's not a situation where it's counterbalanced with different propaganda. Rather, if you think the current form or scope of discourse is harmful, you should attempt persuasion by means that respects the autonomy of the message recipients.

RT gets special mention and ire from me because its programmatic goal unto itself is routinely straight up harming the target public's civic discourse. That's much harder to defend or justify.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

Maybe this isn't what you're asking. But I have an ideology. Naturally, I believe the world would be a better place if more people shared my ideology. I believe it to be a matter of life and death. How could I not use ideology as a basis for message evaluation? It seems to be a moral imperative.

So, having written that, I understand how that makes me more susceptible to propaganda. Yeah, I don't want to be lied to, so I will still parse messages with scrutiny, and promote them selectively. It nevertheless seems to me that sources with a dangerous ideology, that are technically not propaganda, can be more dangerous than propaganda from a shared ideology.

The thing that distinguishes propaganda from other lies is that its effect includes messing with how a public is able to understand or discuss an issue. Non-autocratic societies (of pretty much any modern ideological stripe) depend on some form of civic discourse to function (even autocratic societies depend on a healthy information diet among whomever has power). There needs to be some consensual public good-faith discussion of information that permits the identification of problems and the creation of solutions- including the correction, revision, or rejection of ideologies. The idea, then, is that a dangerous ideology will be self-corrected for in a civil society that protects its good faith discourse. A terrible ideology communicated in good faith fails. A terrible ideology communicated by abusive means can succeed.

I want to be really clear here: this isn't a free market argument, it's a regulated market argument. The problem is that in the US, it's largely a self-regulated market - and that it's subject to epistemic fragmentation. The challenges of how to protect civic discourse without destroying it are infamous, and I'm hoping to learn how other countries approach them in this thread.

And again, it's not that you don't use ideology as an evaluation heuristic or framework (because that's impossible), but that it not be your primary method. Say, here's a different way to think about it: You think your ideology is so hot? Expose it to contrary views. Find the best, most good-faith argument for a terrible idea and acid-test your beliefs.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

First of all, "a mediated outlet for propaganda by others". Surely this also applies to mainstream media. As far as appearing on RT (or Fox), I may disagree with his calculation but I don't see it as anything more than that. Plenty of people I respect more than Greenwald (e.g. Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff) have appeared on RT and I struggle to care.

By going on RT, these folks are attempting to add their specific contributions to civic discourse through creating messages for a propaganda program that exists to damage public discourse. It's past "I'm going to appear on Fox News and totally shut Tucker Carlson down on the air" bad move, and closer to "performing at Gaddaffi's birthday party will give me a lot of exposure". This was significantly more understandable in the early years where it wasn't widely known what RT was, but it becomes harder to justify after 2012 or so. It's a propaganda entity operating on behalf of a state apparatus that kills dissidents and journalists. That's a, uh, really significant miscalculation.

One other reason to care is that if RT has a bunch of people on that you respect and find appealing, that means you are the person being targeted. RT is a bad faith actor. It tells truth only in service to lies, in the same way Charles Murray has some accurate claims in the Bell Curve. None of us are ever immune to an ideological appeal concealing a bad actor, and if we know that that's what is happening, and we're the target, then, well, that's a really strong reason to not engage with a message.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

But really I'm wondering about the Winner thing, and the WikiLeaks stuff. The Winner thing: they burned their source, seemingly due to carelessness, which obviously they shouldn't have done. But why does this push you toward seeing them as propaganda? And what's the wikileaks stuff? I thought WikiLeaks and the Intercept were at odds?

I could be misremembering, but my recollection was Greenwald stanned for wikileaks/assange before their relationship shifted (if I'm wrong about that, please let me know- it's been too long in the three thousand years since 2016 for me to keep track). I'm not accusing the intercept of being another wikileaks, I'm saying their record is spotty (and Greenwald continues to be his own worst enemy in that regard on social media). Independent media organizations that revolve around a single leadership figure (as opposed to a set of institutional policies) are usually way more permeable. As the Intercept has become less the Glenn Greenwald show, it's risen in my estimation as a source.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 19:23

GoluboiOgon: Aug 19, 2017; by Nyc_Tattoo

Discendo Vox posted:

Sorry, let me clarify that. Propaganda harms the public's capacity for civic discourse itself. Propaganda produces a society that is less free, and less capable of growth or self-correction. It's fraught. It does this by influencing beliefs or behaviors at a public scale in a manner that harms the autonomy of that public. That said, there is definitely an argument to be had here- you can imagine a ticking time bomb scenario, or argue that (like vivid warnings on cigarette packaging), the harm is massively outweighed by the good. This is generally the scale of the arguments among rhetoricians and comm scientists. The usual final argument is that if society is headed down a bad path, or even if it's subject to the crippling effects of propaganda, it's not a situation where it's counterbalanced with different propaganda. Rather, if you think the current form or scope of discourse is harmful, you should attempt persuasion by means that respects the autonomy of the message recipients.

what does "civic discourse" mean to you? i wouldn't describe the current us media environment as "discourse," discussions are two-way. whenever you turn on the news or read a story, you aren't having a discussion; you are consuming whatever the news source wants you to. like all robust consumer markets, you have a choice of brands, but you don't get to control what goes into a cnn episode, just as you have no control over what goes into a can of coca cola. you can always swap to another brand if they have a flavor you like more, but if you don't like the selection on sale, you have no alternatives.

if you look at it this way, rt isn't really changing the paradigm, they are just offering a different brand that includes flavors not found in the western media. some of these are good, such as interviews with people like richard wolff who rarely get to appear on mainstream media, and some are bad like their insistence that russia is innocent of all crimes, especially the ones that they committed. frankly, the way that you say "damage the public discourse" makes me think of "shifting the overton window." are they indeed similar in your mind, and does "damaging the public discourse" simply mean shifting the overton window to include views that weren't publicly acceptable before?

the internet is changing things slightly, as there is slightly more feedback with article discussion sections and twitter comments. it is worth noting that the immediate response of the nytimes to this has been to attempt to limit any reader control over content, by letting themselves choose the comments that appear first by default. their oped writers also complain bitterly on twitter whenever they write an especially bad oped and get trashed by tens of thousands of people online, simply because getting any kind of feedback from the general public is such a novel concept to high-level media people. the public still has no control over the actual content of the nytimes.

as far as i know, the intercept wasn't directly responsible for reality winner getting arrested: she was supposedly one of the only two people to print off the document she leaked at nsa headquarters, and streamed the intercept podcast from her work computer, so her poor security practices were the most likely culprit. i don't think glenn greenwald was involved at all with reality winner's story, other than inspiring her to leak with some extremely bad takes on his podcast.

# ? Jan 7, 2019 22:30

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Discendo Vox posted:

I think you need to clarify what you mean by "ideology" (along with a lot of other terms you use).

I'm also starting to wonder how your definition of propaganda can possibly provide a workable definition of good vs bad techniques of persuasion. For instance, there have been some fairly convincing arguments made that the very nature of television makes it entertainment rather than information and that it necessarily reduces complex and nuanced issues into simplistic narratives riddled with subconscious ideas, associations and ques that are built right into the procession of images and sounds themselves.

It's pretty clear a lot of the flashing image graphics and dramatic sound effects used by mainstream cable news programs are intended to grab people's attention and focus even in cases where the actual news being discussed wouldn't necessarily interest them. In fact it would seem hard to glance at any major news program on TV and not start to conclude that large parts of the program are more or less designed to "disrupt our cognition" in some way (again, you haven't defined this term so I'm not sure precisely how you're using it but to my mind flashing info-graphics, words like "NEWS ALERT" or "BREAKING" and loud attention grabbing noises all seem to obviously be techniques for gaining attention or agreement through a means other than the viewer higher order cognitive faculties.

I'm a bit surprised therefore to see you apparently endorsing the "medium is the message" argument because it seems to contrast somewhat with your emphasis on propaganda merely being a mode of communication that seeks to "disrupt" cognition. I'm not saying it's flat out contradictory but it at least seems like a tension in your thought between two not particularly compatible positions. If the medium is the message then how could television be anything other than propaganda by your accounting? You're not really going to try and argue that the main design of cable news is to give people the best information in the least prejudicial way possible are you?

To be clear I think I could make similar criticisms of your approach as it applies to print journalism but I'm focusing on television because the example is even more dramatic in that case. Can you name some major television news stations that don't fit the description of

quote:

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.

Where at bare minimum the institution-scale goals involve "maintaining an audience we can sell to advertisers"?

Nevermind the obvious political agenda of the people who own CNN, since you explicitly said you don't think ownership is relevant to even consider (I disagree but I'll momentarily leave such questions aside for the sake of the argument). We're left with an organization who sells a product - its viewer's scarce attention - to advertisers. Perhaps unsurprisingly we find cable news absolutely brimming with persuasive techniques and rhetorical appeals that only exist to bewilder and alarm the viewer and to compel them to check the news constantly even though they'd be just as well off (probably better off actually) if they only checked the news once a day. We even have studies demonstrating this: cable news does a piss poor job of informing people. But you know what it is really good at doing? Providing an audience to advertisers - and not just any audience, but an older and more economically comfortable one that advertisers love to target. And better yet these people are often scared and confused because of the terrible "news" programs they're watching.

Now unless I'm misunderstanding you this dynamic would make basically everything that is considered television news a more or less open form of propaganda. The aim isn't to inform people as efficiently as possible so they can reach their own decisions, instead the goal is to cut through the noise of all the competing channels and at least briefly seize somebody's attention - usually by scaring or titillating them - so that you can sell this flash of attention to an advertiser.

Helsing fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jan 7, 2019

# ? Jan 7, 2019 22:41

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Discendo Vox posted:

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.

I don't know what the academic terminology is, but the colloquial one is "inmates running the asylum".

And a convenient lie that's spread to serve the interests of the powerful becoming entrenched and then actually harming those interests as those in power start to believe and then act on the lies that were originally just a cynical way to manipulate others isn't uncommon.

The most prominent example I can think of is Germany's stab-in-the-black myth. Ludendorf and Heisenberg knew drat well that Germany was militarily defeated in the field, the Kaiser sued for peace because they sent him a message telling him the front could not hold another eight hours, but after the war in order to save the reputations of the military command and the aristocracy they created the lie that they were about to win when Jews and Democrats rose up from behind and gave it all away to the Entente. 20 years on, the German people and the new government actually believed that they were supermen who could conquer the world once their internal enemies were rounded up, and they proceeded to declare war on the entire industrial world, and forced the Western capitalists who originally supported the Nazis as an anticommunist power to forge a military alliance with the communists (), which of course led to Germany's utter defeat.

Or the modern Republican Party. Nixon's guys were all cynical political operators who knew drat well they were lying and as a result were very successful in ripping holes in the New Deal and crafting legislation that benefited the American people enough to placate them while secretly favoring capital. Fast forward 40 years and the people who grew up believing the lies are now getting elected, and they can't pass legislation even with full control of the government. They had a golden opportunity to fix some of the most obvious problems with the ACA while turning it into an even bigger money spigot for the rich while putting in traps to slowly strangle the poor over time and they couldn't manage it because the Suicide Caucus genuinely believed it was smart to immediately jack premiums and deny care and openly funnel the proceeds to the ultrarich, and they refused to vote for any other plan.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jan 7, 2019

# ? Jan 7, 2019 23:27

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

Discendo Vox posted:

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.

This reminds me of a video about propaganda I'd watched a while ago, and found illuminating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w

# ? Jan 8, 2019 03:19

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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?

This would be extremely interesting so please do tell us about the book when you have the chance.

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:05

GoluboiOgon: Aug 19, 2017; by Nyc_Tattoo

VitalSigns posted:

I don't know what the academic terminology is, but the colloquial one is "inmates running the asylum".

And a convenient lie that's spread to serve the interests of the powerful becoming entrenched and then actually harming those interests as those in power start to believe and then act on the lies that were originally just a cynical way to manipulate others isn't uncommon.

The most prominent example I can think of is Germany's stab-in-the-black myth. Ludendorf and Heisenberg knew drat well that Germany was militarily defeated in the field, the Kaiser sued for peace because they sent him a message telling him the front could not hold another eight hours, but after the war in order to save the reputations of the military command and the aristocracy they created the lie that they were about to win when Jews and Democrats rose up from behind and gave it all away to the Entente. 20 years on, the German people and the new government actually believed that they were supermen who could conquer the world once their internal enemies were rounded up, and they proceeded to declare war on the entire industrial world, and forced the Western capitalists who originally supported the Nazis as an anticommunist power to forge a military alliance with the communists (), which of course led to Germany's utter defeat.

not to derail the thread into nazi-chat, but this narrative greatly ignores the ties between big german business and the nazi party. Molotov-ribbentrop didn't hurt german industrialists (who had already been doing business with the soviets even before the nazis, as the soviets were willing to ignore versailles treaty restrictions on the arms trade), it gave them access to a large supply of raw materials, even after being blockaded by the allies, and stopped the 3rd international from agitating against german interests globally. large german corporations were able to make vast profits off of wwii, both from war profiteering on arms sold to the nazis and from the use of slave labor in occupied territories. the most infamous of these companies, ig farben, had it's own subcamp at auschwitz, where it employed slave labor to make the the zyklon b sold to death camps. after the war, all of the executives survived the nuremberg trials, and company was reformed into three new subsidiaries, partially to avoid paying reparations to their former victims. one of these subsidiaries is bayer, whose recent acquisition of monsanto has allowed the company to return to its roots making insecticides. the nazi party may have been defeated in wwii, but german big business made out like bandits from supporting the nazis and got to keep the blood money they earned, they weren't really a case of propagandists getting screwed by their own lies.

more on topic, i'm not sure that a full-scale propaganda apparatus necessarily will collapse of it's own accord within the timescale of ten years or so. north korea, for instance, hasn't significantly changed the way that they report news for 70 years, and they seem to be relatively stable, even after the collapse of the soviet union screwed their finances. counting the catholic church as a propaganda outlet might be a bit controversial, but they definitely believed what they were preaching, and had nearly complete monopoly on the written word and what thought was allowed in europe for almost a thousand years.

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:06

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

GoluboiOgon posted:

not to derail the thread into nazi-chat, but this narrative greatly ignores the ties between big german business and the nazi party. Molotov-ribbentrop didn't hurt german industrialists (who had already been doing business with the soviets even before the nazis, as the soviets were willing to ignore versailles treaty restrictions on the arms trade), it gave them access to a large supply of raw materials, even after being blockaded by the allies, and stopped the 3rd international from agitating against german interests globally. large german corporations were able to make vast profits off of wwii, both from war profiteering on arms sold to the nazis and from the use of slave labor in occupied territories. the most infamous of these companies, ig farben, had it's own subcamp at auschwitz, where it employed slave labor to make the the zyklon b sold to death camps. after the war, all of the executives survived the nuremberg trials, and company was reformed into three new subsidiaries, partially to avoid paying reparations to their former victims. one of these subsidiaries is bayer, whose recent acquisition of monsanto has allowed the company to return to its roots making insecticides. the nazi party may have been defeated in wwii, but german big business made out like bandits from supporting the nazis and got to keep the blood money they earned, they weren't really a case of propagandists getting screwed by their own lies.

Yeah great point, obviously the Nazi state itself was (disastrously) less effective than it could have been because the government actually believed the lies created 15+ years ago by the aristocracy and the military, and declared war on everyone, but that doesn't mean that every single Nazi did badly.

And yeah the capitalists did fine since they were conquered by mostly other capitalists who had in interest in excusing their own class from the atrocities of the war and preserving their profits (unlike what happened in the Soviet section).

GoluboiOgon posted:

more on topic, i'm not sure that a full-scale propaganda apparatus necessarily will collapse of it's own accord within the timescale of ten years or so. north korea, for instance, hasn't significantly changed the way that they report news for 70 years, and they seem to be relatively stable, even after the collapse of the soviet union screwed their finances. counting the catholic church as a propaganda outlet might be a bit controversial, but they definitely believed what they were preaching, and had nearly complete monopoly on the written word and what thought was allowed in europe for almost a thousand years.

Sure every situation isn't the same. The PRC has been around for half a century and while the success of its censorship program has resulted in censors who have to be taught real history before they can censor it, it doesn't seem likely to collapse the state. The Nazis collapsing in less than 15 years was impressively incompetent.

The Catholic Church isn't really the same I think, because while yes they persecuted heretical thought they really didn't (usually) try to censor it so completely that no one even knew about it anymore such that they had to teach two versions of history. In fact the opposite, in many cases the original writings of the heretics have been lost and the only reason we even know about those heresies is from Catholic scholars quoting those works in their rebuttals, which were preserved by the church. They also didn't have direct political control over Catholic Europe so even if they did ban a book you could always get it especially after the Reformation

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:18

selec: Sep 6, 2003

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

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.

This is blather. He would melt down no matter what, because the right wing strategy since before I started paying attention in the 90s has always been to work the refs by accusing them of bias.

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:21

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Putin attacks the press all the time in Russia, that's how you know the Russian press is so trustworthy and reliable, because Putin attacks them

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:44

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

VitalSigns posted:

Putin attacks the press all the time in Russia, that's how you know the Russian press is so trustworthy and reliable, because Putin attacks them

I imagine the ones he attacks are the more reliable ones than the stuff he doesn't

# ? Jan 8, 2019 05:56

selec: Sep 6, 2003

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I imagine the ones he attacks are the more reliable ones than the stuff he doesn't

you probably have to imagine a lot of poo poo to explain the world to yourself

# ? Jan 8, 2019 06:20

eviltastic: Feb 8, 2004; Fan of Britches

Seems like the thread for this: Max Boot has an article out comparing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin. It reads about like you'd expect a Max Boot column comparing AOC to Sarah Palin to read, and isn't that interesting except as another example of a nevertrumper tut-tutting about leftists in America. I mention it here because the tone of many comments on the article differ pretty jarringly from the social media reaction. Basically, it looks to me like Boot is getting absolutely dragged on Twitter, but getting plenty of supportive chin scratching hrmery on the actual WaPo page. I wouldn't necessarily have expected that.

I could muse about why, but first I'm wondering if this is just my bias latching on to comments I disagree with or if there is actually an overall trend here. Is this difference in engagement something that anyone's dived into in more detail?

article
tweet: https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1082596717445419010

# ? Jan 8, 2019 19:39

awesmoe: Nov 30, 2005; Pillbug

eviltastic posted:

Seems like the thread for this: Max Boot has an article out comparing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin. It reads about like you'd expect a Max Boot column comparing AOC to Sarah Palin to read, and isn't that interesting except as another example of a nevertrumper tut-tutting about leftists in America. I mention it here because the tone of many comments on the article differ pretty jarringly from the social media reaction. Basically, it looks to me like Boot is getting absolutely dragged on Twitter, but getting plenty of supportive chin scratching hrmery on the actual WaPo page. I wouldn't necessarily have expected that.

I could muse about why, but first I'm wondering if this is just my bias latching on to comments I disagree with or if there is actually an overall trend here. Is this difference in engagement something that anyone's dived into in more detail?

article
tweet: https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1082596717445419010

You're asking if twitter is more radical than washington post commenters?
e: I'm not super with it today so I'm just not sure what you're asking

awesmoe fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jan 8, 2019

# ? Jan 8, 2019 19:46

eviltastic: Feb 8, 2004; Fan of Britches

awesmoe posted:

You're asking if twitter is more radical than washington post commenters?
e: I'm not super with it today so I'm just not sure what you're asking

I'm getting at the ideological bent of the social media commentary on a WaPo piece as opposed to the comments on the actual page, so sort of yes, sort of no? I'd expect more radical commentary of all stripes on Twitter, given the nature of the platform. What I was seeing was in comparison a hefty tilt away from the conservative side of things, both in terms of the usual sniping and in actual engagement with the piece.

(As an aside, rereading some of the comments, Tom Nichols getting really huffy about the Iraq war being an albatross and trying to claim Palin's flaws weren't obvious from the start was very cathartic)

eviltastic fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jan 8, 2019

# ? Jan 8, 2019 20:28

GoluboiOgon: Aug 19, 2017; by Nyc_Tattoo

eviltastic posted:

I'm getting at the ideological bent of the social media commentary on a WaPo piece as opposed to the comments on the actual page, so sort of yes, sort of no? I'd expect more radical commentary of all stripes on Twitter, given the nature of the platform. What I was seeing was in comparison a hefty tilt away from the conservative side of things, both in terms of the usual sniping and in actual engagement with the piece.

(As an aside, rereading some of the comments, Tom Nichols getting really huffy about the Iraq war being an albatross and trying to claim Palin's flaws weren't obvious from the start was very cathartic)

there are 10x as many twitter replies as wapo comments. partially, i think that this is because the tweet is much worse than the headline; there is no mention of sarah palin in the headline of the article, it's just boring: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shouldn�t approach her facts the way Trump does." you have to get into the text to get the full dose of stupidity (the best bit is where he calls himself incompetent accidentally: "Ocasio-Cortez has been gifted with enemies of singular ineptitude").

i suspect that the majority of twitter comments come not from regular wapo readers, but from people who have been hatelinked this tweet, or who saw aoc's response to it. people who comment online on wapo articles, especially opeds by neocons like max boot, are going to be mostly wapo subscribers. this group is older and highly enriched in beltway never-trumpers and cia dems, who will happily hate on both millenials and anyone to the left of reagan. different platforms will have a different userbases.

# ? Jan 8, 2019 21:16

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

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.

This is actually a pretty common observation among many media critics: that American propaganda is vastly more sophisticated and effective than most of the clumsy totalitarian state propaganda regimes of the 20th century because instead of criminalizing ideas it mostly operates by setting largely invisible but powerful boundaries on reasonable debate. The fact that within the limited scope of the media establishment you get an arena in which different elite factions or individuals can have limited conflict and disagreement actually functions to make the system much more effective and durable, much in the way that a tree that can sway in the hurricane can survive a storm better than the tree that doesn't bend and thus ends up snapping in half.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I imagine the ones he attacks are the more reliable ones than the stuff he doesn't

Putin is notorious for funding critics of the government and then releasing information about this funding to the public just to create additional confusion within the media environment.

"People criticize the media" is a really weak proxy for evaluating how good or bad or subversive the media is.

# ? Jan 9, 2019 22:47

Ytlaya: Nov 13, 2005

I'm not exactly opposed to limiting the specific term "propaganda" to what Discendo Vox described (even if it's relatively arbitrary), though I would still end up returning to my earlier point of "why is this fundamentally worse in practice?" I mean, it's certainly distinct, though I'm not seeing any reason to think that distinction is actually meaningful. I am not seeing why the actual outcomes of that sort of intentional (which, as Helsing mentioned, is something often unfalsifiable) propaganda are inherently worse than the outcomes resulting from institutions internalizing harmful ideology to the extent that they believe their own form of bias to be "objective."

To be honest, it seems like the only real difference between media he describes as propaganda and media he doesn't is that, in the case of the latter, the institutions are actually "true believers." If the motivating ideology is just as bad/harmful...isn't that even worse? Like, if calling the latter propaganda makes someone uncomfortable, okay, fine; we can call it something else. But I'm not seeing how the actual outcome of a bunch of people earnestly enforcing harmful ideology is somehow superior to people making a concerted effort to manipulate and deceive. In both cases, the actual primary source of harm is the ideology itself. Openly malicious propaganda in favor of foreign policy that kills 1000 people isn't worse than earnest reporting in support of foreign policy that kills 10000. If anything, the latter is far more concerning.

I also feel like it can be very hard to draw the line between someone "genuinely believing" a message/ideology and someone spreading it because they personally benefit in some way. Like, I have no doubt that many rich people genuinely believe that, for example, low taxes (or whatever) are good, because they have personal incentives to hold this view. So when they spread that view, it's not clear where the line between "wanting to inform people based on their genuine understanding of the world" and "wanting to perpetuate a status quo they benefit from" lies.

To attempt to sum up, I won't deny that there are distinctions between the different types of media being discussed in this thread, but I strongly question the relevance of those distinctions (particularly in our current world where the biggest superpower - that has committed the same sort of atrocities as many of the more "authoritarian" nations referenced - doesn't frequently use the type of propaganda being spoken of most negatively). I can't help but feel like many of these opinions are basically retroactively trying to justify a perception that certain media is uniquely bad; one side is talking about actual real-world outcomes, while the other is talking about abstract ethics.

Helsing posted:

This is actually a pretty common observation among many media critics: that American propaganda is vastly more sophisticated and effective than most of the clumsy totalitarian state propaganda regimes of the 20th century because instead of criminalizing ideas it mostly operates by setting largely invisible but powerful boundaries on reasonable debate. The fact that within the limited scope of the media establishment you get an arena in which different elite factions or individuals can have limited conflict and disagreement actually functions to make the system much more effective and durable, much in the way that a tree that can sway in the hurricane can survive a storm better than the tree that doesn't bend and thus ends up snapping in half.

Yeah; the sort of propaganda described by Discendo Vox and others simply isn't necessary in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, contemporary media is just viewed as a logical evolution of the more hamfisted propaganda of authoritarian states. It also helps that, in the case of the US, it's ultimately "the wealthy" who have the power, rather than government leaders specifically. And the wealthy can have genuine disagreements, which are then reflected in media, even if none of their opinions will involve actually threatening their wealth or power.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 08:26

avshalemon: Jun 28, 2018

communism cannot and will not work

# ? Jan 10, 2019 11:24

Wistful of Dollars: Aug 25, 2009

There seem to be useful idiots aplenty around these days.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 15:36

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

Helsing posted:

This is actually a pretty common observation among many media critics: that American propaganda is vastly more sophisticated and effective than most of the clumsy totalitarian state propaganda regimes of the 20th century because instead of criminalizing ideas it mostly operates by setting largely invisible but powerful boundaries on reasonable debate. The fact that within the limited scope of the media establishment you get an arena in which different elite factions or individuals can have limited conflict and disagreement actually functions to make the system much more effective and durable, much in the way that a tree that can sway in the hurricane can survive a storm better than the tree that doesn't bend and thus ends up snapping in half.

It would seem like to qualify as propaganda someone needs to be in charge of it. Is there someone somewhere that is setting this policy for the 'american media" in a holistic way with a set end goal and this is somehow distributed so the actors know this, or are we onto some sort of metal gear style thing where all the systems themselves can be treated as a living thing with it's own self perpetuating goals and you are saying the stand alone complex from ghost in the shell produces propaganda outside of any specific person?

Propaganda would be if someone somewhere decide to increase dog ownership and started releasing a bunch of media trying to promote dog ownership, either directly or in some sort of sneaky way. I don't think anyone would call it propaganda if just, every media outlet everywhere independently ran more "dogs are good" stories than "dogs are bad" stories with no one telling them to do that because a lot of people independently happened to currently like dogs. That is just what culture existing is.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 16:56

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

You don't think someone tells CNN what stories to run?

Do you know how companies work?

# ? Jan 10, 2019 23:04

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

VitalSigns posted:

You don't think someone tells CNN what stories to run?

Like, not some guy that is also telling FOX what stories to run in some organized system.

# ? Jan 10, 2019 23:40

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

It would seem like to qualify as propaganda someone needs to be in charge of it. Is there someone somewhere that is setting this policy for the 'american media" in a holistic way with a set end goal and this is somehow distributed so the actors know this, or are we onto some sort of metal gear style thing where all the systems themselves can be treated as a living thing with it's own self perpetuating goals and you are saying the stand alone complex from ghost in the shell produces propaganda outside of any specific person?

Propaganda would be if someone somewhere decide to increase dog ownership and started releasing a bunch of media trying to promote dog ownership, either directly or in some sort of sneaky way. I don't think anyone would call it propaganda if just, every media outlet everywhere independently ran more "dogs are good" stories than "dogs are bad" stories with no one telling them to do that because a lot of people independently happened to currently like dogs. That is just what culture existing is.

I don't have an opinion on what is or isn't propaganda, so I won't weigh in on that question. However when we look at the media in the United States it pays to ask what sort of systematic forces may be present that can bias coverage.

I doubt Jeff Bezos personally interferes in the Washington Post's editorial decisions. However in scientific publishing there is a well know phenomena of sponsorship bias. While funders do in some cases do directly interfere with research, simply being aware of where the money comes from is known to effect results. Editors and journalists, even if subconsciously, are likely to seek to please the capitalists who own their publications.

We should also consider the relationship of American media to institutions which are clearly devoted to producing propaganda. The clearest example are think tanks, which spend billions of dollars a year. Think tanks are fairly varied in their missions, but a very large proportion are explicit producers and marketers of propaganda. Heritage is the best example but there are many others typically devoted to the pet cause of some millionaire or billionaire.

Because research and content are expensive, many media organizations republish propaganda produced by think tanks in the form of opinion pieces and summaries of their studies. Think tank propagandists often appear on television, with their position as a propagandist used as a credential and mark of expertise. Unlike academics from universities, they will always have time for an appearance as a panelist on tv or radio. When they do research they can bury results that don't fit their political agenda, and have the savvy and connections to get their studies covered. If NPR covers a Heritage junk study about how great the Trump tax cuts are, they are spreading that narrative even if they try to refute it.

You seem to be arguing that because this is not the result of a centralized process with a definite single end goal, it is not a problem. I would disagree. The result is a consistent bias in coverage, information, and narratives that is the result of explicit and frequently willfully dishonest efforts. It results in disproportionate coverage of certain issues that are important to the wealthiest Americans, and systematic neglect of problems for ordinary people. While its true of course that there are think tanks on both sides of the American two party system, and therefore the bias cancels out. However I can think of no explicitly pro socialist think tanks, and I have to believe this is because there are few billionaires interested in promoting socialism.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 04:17

Volkerball: Oct 15, 2009; by FactsAreUseless

Squalid posted:

You seem to be arguing that because this is not the result of a centralized process with a definite single end goal, it is not a problem. I would disagree. The result is a consistent bias in coverage, information, and narratives that is the result of explicit and frequently willfully dishonest efforts. It results in disproportionate coverage of certain issues that are important to the wealthiest Americans, and systematic neglect of problems for ordinary people. While its true of course that there are think tanks on both sides of the American two party system, and therefore the bias cancels out. However I can think of no explicitly pro socialist think tanks, and I have to believe this is because there are few billionaires interested in promoting socialism.

The Economic Policy Institute has done a bunch of stuff on income inequality. Unions are also big funders for certain think tanks, not just private billionaires.

Volkerball fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jan 11, 2019

# ? Jan 11, 2019 19:26

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like, not some guy that is also telling FOX what stories to run in some organized system.

So if one independent media company exists then there's no propaganda anywhere in the country, even if that one guy agrees with all the propaganda coincidentally?

CNN and Fox are both corporate propaganda, even if they're not in a personal union and even if they disagree on some things.

Adam Smith posted:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy
against the public...We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination

Adam Smith was talking about capitalists who even nominally in competition with each other, nevertheless act in concert to advance their class interests. The idea that media corporations are somehow exempt from this observation is so silly that a dead dude called it out as ridiculously ignorant centuries ago.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jan 11, 2019

# ? Jan 11, 2019 20:02

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Ytlaya posted:

I'm not exactly opposed to limiting the specific term "propaganda" to what Discendo Vox described (even if it's relatively arbitrary), though I would still end up returning to my earlier point of "why is this fundamentally worse in practice?" I mean, it's certainly distinct, though I'm not seeing any reason to think that distinction is actually meaningful. I am not seeing why the actual outcomes of that sort of intentional (which, as Helsing mentioned, is something often unfalsifiable) propaganda are inherently worse than the outcomes resulting from institutions internalizing harmful ideology to the extent that they believe their own form of bias to be "objective."

I've been holding off on further comments because I was hoping Discendo Vox would come back and defend his arguments himself, but I'm starting to think that won't happen. So just to be clear, my objection to what he said isn't that his definition is arbitrary but that it is literally incoherent.

Go back and read his proposed definition and try to imagine actually applying that to an actual piece of media. Strip away the scientific connotation of the word "cognitive" and actually ask yourself how you would measure someone's intention to "disrupt" your "cognition". Ask yourself how you'd actually make that determination in practice. At what point do infographics, musical ques, beautiful images, selectively edited soundbites, etc. go from being legitimate information to attempts at cognitive disruption?

I'm honestly not sure how useful it is to try and identify 'propaganda' on such a grainular level when communication inevitable occurs in a much larger context. I'm not sure how you can take a single discrete piece of communication and analyze it without exploring the cultural framework in which that communication is embedded. When you see a phrase like 'Support Our Troops', for instance, you can't just analyze it as a sentence, you necessarily are forced to think about how from the time they are born an American is getting bombarded with a specific set of messages about the 'Troops' and what they represent and what it would mean to support them.

quote:

Yeah; the sort of propaganda described by Discendo Vox and others simply isn't necessary in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, contemporary media is just viewed as a logical evolution of the more hamfisted propaganda of authoritarian states. It also helps that, in the case of the US, it's ultimately "the wealthy" who have the power, rather than government leaders specifically. And the wealthy can have genuine disagreements, which are then reflected in media, even if none of their opinions will involve actually threatening their wealth or power.

A few points.

1) At bare minimum you could seemingly apply Discendo Vox's model of propaganda to every television program every made and probably any piece of persuasive writing that isn't just a literal point by point list of data (and even then studies demonstrate you can seriously influence somebody's opinions just by changing the order in which you list factual information, so really we'd still have to be asking whether the order of the list isn't a stealthy attempt at disrupting our cognition).

2) As an interesting historical aside, it was liberal societies that developed the first modern propaganda techniques since they were the government's that relied the most on persuasion rather than force. An early example of this would be the British government's campaigns during World War I to sway American public opinion against Germany and in favour of joining the war. After the Americans entered the war there was also a move by the government to set up advertisers and psychologists in a special committee (the 'Creel Committee'). Hitler's obsession with propaganda was in part a reflection of his (accurate) perception that the Triple Entente (the British-French-Russian and later American alliance) had outperformed the Central Powers (Germany, Austria), giving them a decisive edge. So as counter intuitive as it might sound it was the more democratic countries that first developed sophisticated modern propaganda techniques and the more authoritarian states that played catch-up.

3) While Americans (and other westerners) are exposed to much more sophisticated kinds of persuasion I would not discount the amount of crude and blatant propaganda that even a western democratic citizen is exposed to. School curriculums are typically filled with nationalist mythologizing and apologism for past crimes, news outlets pretty consistently misrepresent certain issues in outright deceptive fashions, popular television and film often has a blatantly nationalist and pro-military tilt. If you've ever watched daytime programming on TLC or the History Channel you'll find a lot of blatantly propagandistic programming about military hardware or recent conflicts. Same thing watching film and television.

So while it's true that there are much more sophisticated forms of persuasion going on here (for instance, agenda setting vs. outright lying) let's not discount the extent to which good old fashioned unambiguous old school propaganda still happens even in democratic countries. It exists alongside other forms of targeted persuasive appeals but it's not like the average westerner isn't bombarded with very traditional propaganda techniques on a daily basis.

I doubt there's a single state in the world today that doesn't spend at least some of its resources on this kind of communication. It's not some either/or situation where authoritarian governments communicate to their citizens one way and democratic governments communicate in a totally distinct way. It's a lot more muddled in practice.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

It would seem like to qualify as propaganda someone needs to be in charge of it. Is there someone somewhere that is setting this policy for the 'american media" in a holistic way with a set end goal and this is somehow distributed so the actors know this, or are we onto some sort of metal gear style thing where all the systems themselves can be treated as a living thing with it's own self perpetuating goals and you are saying the stand alone complex from ghost in the shell produces propaganda outside of any specific person?

Propaganda would be if someone somewhere decide to increase dog ownership and started releasing a bunch of media trying to promote dog ownership, either directly or in some sort of sneaky way. I don't think anyone would call it propaganda if just, every media outlet everywhere independently ran more "dogs are good" stories than "dogs are bad" stories with no one telling them to do that because a lot of people independently happened to currently like dogs. That is just what culture existing is.

Corporations and governments do coordinated advertising campaigns like the one you're describing all the time. If a bunch of different media outlets all simultaneously did start running stories on dog ownership it would be plausible to speculate that a company or industry pressure group was actually pushing these stories into the media. Just look at housing and real estate and how often newspapers are basically just a platform for developers. Or look at the way every magazine and newspaper in the English speaker world spent the 6 months building up to the release of the Force Awakens coincidentally running stories drumming up nostalgia in the old Star Wars trilogy. There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry that exists pretty much exclusively to coordinate the kinds of media campaigns you're describing.

I'm using examples from the commercial world but the same is true of government. We can revisit this in more depth later but there are a lot of examples of people's careers being ruined because they took the wrong position on something. It's not like having a centralized ministry of propaganda but actually there are plenty of cases where the shared incentive structure of the corporate media produces what is more or less a party line, or at least a set of powerful taboos that reporters won't violate.

As a final consideration, keep in mind that really effective propaganda often relies on real information. In fact there's an extent to which the effectiveness of propaganda can hinge on a media outlet also being a source of genuinely useful information at times.

Let's use the New York Times as an example. The Times has substantial credibility with its readership because they fund actual investigations and sometimes genuinely upset powerful people. This maintains a base of readers (and specifically readers from demographics that are attractive to advertisers). However, this sense that the times is a diligent and objective record of 'All the News That's Fit to Print' means that stories that don't make it into the times or which are only mentioned in passing end up seeming genuinely insignificant. When the Times does extensive and hard hitting reporting on Iraq but doesn't even mention Yemen the result is a readership who think they are more informed and worldly than they really are.

This is a point worth repeating: often times it is emphasis that is most important in modern media. Crucial stories will get brought up in passing by major outlets but then forgotten whereas comparatively minor stories will get reported on again and again until they seem really significant.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 20:08

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Dick Cheney asked the New York Times to print something he made up as attributable to anonymous sources as a great personal favor to him, then he went on the next media outlet and cited the New York Times, and all of the American media circularly pushed that same story, but the NYT is not literally the property of the US Government so this wasn't propaganda it was just independent fact-based reporting that all happened to say the same thing exactly how the government wanted them to say it.

No need to be concerned there, it was just everyone's personal opinion.

# ? Jan 11, 2019 20:14

glowing-fish: Feb 18, 2013; Keep grinding,
I hope you level up!

Here is a question that I haven't heard addressed in here, and which I think is an important question to ask.

"The media is the message" as the (now cliche) phrase goes, so in all of this discussion of media, there doesn't seem to be a focus on the media of the media, so to speak.

I don't live in the United States, and I don't watch television. I get all of my news on the internet, mostly by clicking around Google News. Even when I lived in the United States, I didn't watch television in my own home, and never regularly watched news programs, either cable or broadcast. I only saw the news if I was at someone's house, or waiting in a public place. The entire concept is a little weird to me, in fact.

Televised news can be a really bad thing, even if we can imagine some ideal, impartial news, because it doesn't give you time to separate and analyze. This is especially the case if it uses visceral imagery. You get kind of wrapped up in it. Someone else could probably write about this at greater length, but obviously there is some type of psychological resonance with having a voice telling you things, showing you pictures, that makes it hard to separate and think critically. Obviously, this doesn't mean that text media is "safe", but I think that reading automatically gives more room for critical appraisal than viewing.

What is really weird for me, not ever watching the news, is that when I read the USPol thread, and other threads on here, people talk about media personalities as...well, personalities. Like they are tapped into emotional relationships to these people that just don't make sense to me. Reading people talk about Megyn Kelly, or Glenn Greenwald, or Clint Cilliaza, to me, is like reading people constantly interjecting references to seaQuest DSV episodes. Like, I really don't understand the entire emotional tenor that people discuss media personalities with. Like, Clint Cilliaza is a good example. I have read some of his print stories, and think they are mediocre summaries of the news. Like, not good, but nothing I feel personally offended by. But lots of people on here talk about him as if he is terrible, and I am assuming those are the people who see him live?

What is the relationship between how we consume the news (visual vs text vs audio, etc) and how we feel about it?

# ? Jan 12, 2019 18:35

GoluboiOgon: Aug 19, 2017; by Nyc_Tattoo

glowing-fish posted:

Here is a question that I haven't heard addressed in here, and which I think is an important question to ask.

"The media is the message" as the (now cliche) phrase goes, so in all of this discussion of media, there doesn't seem to be a focus on the media of the media, so to speak.

I don't live in the United States, and I don't watch television. I get all of my news on the internet, mostly by clicking around Google News. Even when I lived in the United States, I didn't watch television in my own home, and never regularly watched news programs, either cable or broadcast. I only saw the news if I was at someone's house, or waiting in a public place. The entire concept is a little weird to me, in fact.

Televised news can be a really bad thing, even if we can imagine some ideal, impartial news, because it doesn't give you time to separate and analyze. This is especially the case if it uses visceral imagery. You get kind of wrapped up in it. Someone else could probably write about this at greater length, but obviously there is some type of psychological resonance with having a voice telling you things, showing you pictures, that makes it hard to separate and think critically. Obviously, this doesn't mean that text media is "safe", but I think that reading automatically gives more room for critical appraisal than viewing.

What is really weird for me, not ever watching the news, is that when I read the USPol thread, and other threads on here, people talk about media personalities as...well, personalities. Like they are tapped into emotional relationships to these people that just don't make sense to me. Reading people talk about Megyn Kelly, or Glenn Greenwald, or Clint Cilliaza, to me, is like reading people constantly interjecting references to seaQuest DSV episodes. Like, I really don't understand the entire emotional tenor that people discuss media personalities with. Like, Clint Cilliaza is a good example. I have read some of his print stories, and think they are mediocre summaries of the news. Like, not good, but nothing I feel personally offended by. But lots of people on here talk about him as if he is terrible, and I am assuming those are the people who see him live?

What is the relationship between how we consume the news (visual vs text vs audio, etc) and how we feel about it?

personaly, i think that "the medium is the message" is slightly overstated. you're right that there are a huge number of visual queues on television news that are absent in print or online media, but plenty of people form emotional relationships with media figures on non-television media. i wouldn't call glenn greenwald a tv personality, for instance: he appears sometimes on the news but people mostly know about him from his constant twitter activity and his intercept podcast. rush limbaugh has managed to create a cult of personality based almost entirely on talk radio (and in the shoes of father coughlin, who dominated us talk radio in the 1930s before tv was invented). even before the creation of radio, there were print media journalists who evoked intense feelings in their audiences (thomas paine and upton sinclair come to mind, although the idea of personality is a very 20th century invention and probably shouldn't be used in this context).

chris cilliaza has this quote in his twitter bio

quote:

"One of the dumber and least respected of the political pundits." -- Donald Trump

he doesn't seem to realize that this was one of those times when trump accidentally told the truth. he persistently posts the worst takes on twitter, which is where his fame comes from on this forum.

# ? Jan 12, 2019 20:54

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

glowing-fish posted:

What is really weird for me, not ever watching the news, is that when I read the USPol thread, and other threads on here, people talk about media personalities as...well, personalities. Like they are tapped into emotional relationships to these people that just don't make sense to me. Reading people talk about Megyn Kelly, or Glenn Greenwald, or Clint Cilliaza, to me, is like reading people constantly interjecting references to seaQuest DSV episodes. Like, I really don't understand the entire emotional tenor that people discuss media personalities with. Like, Clint Cilliaza is a good example. I have read some of his print stories, and think they are mediocre summaries of the news. Like, not good, but nothing I feel personally offended by. But lots of people on here talk about him as if he is terrible, and I am assuming those are the people who see him live?

I've also noticed this and hate it. It's not something specific to media personalities though, people do it constantly with modern and historical people. I don't know why anyone would ever ask a question like "Was President James Polk good or bad?" These kinds of questions seem entirely nonsensical and unanswerable to me, but they are obviously very important to a lot of people. It's usually framed as some kind of moral thing, probably something to do with christian conceptions of morality which are largely alien to me so I just accept I cannot understand it. I chalk the obsession with judging people and crafting emotional relationships with public figures up to some essential flaw in human nature or our culture and assume it is an unavoidable problem we just have to work around.

# ? Jan 12, 2019 21:26

Lil Mama Im Sorry: Oct 14, 2012; I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS

*camera slowly zooms on my face as my eyes widen* THIS WHOLE THREAD IS PROPAGANDA

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Jan 12, 2019 22:00

glowing-fish: Feb 18, 2013; Keep grinding,
I hope you level up!

GoluboiOgon posted:

personaly, i think that "the medium is the message" is slightly overstated. you're right that there are a huge number of visual queues on television news that are absent in print or online media, but plenty of people form emotional relationships with media figures on non-television media. i wouldn't call glenn greenwald a tv personality, for instance: he appears sometimes on the news but people mostly know about him from his constant twitter activity and his intercept podcast. rush limbaugh has managed to create a cult of personality based almost entirely on talk radio (and in the shoes of father coughlin, who dominated us talk radio in the 1930s before tv was invented). even before the creation of radio, there were print media journalists who evoked intense feelings in their audiences (thomas paine and upton sinclair come to mind, although the idea of personality is a very 20th century invention and probably shouldn't be used in this context).

I am also a little bit confused by Twitter. I tried Twitter, then discontinued my account when I realized I didn't like it for either posting or reading information. I will still read some Twitter feeds, and I am not such a grumpy old man that I can't appreciate some of the funnier things on Twitter, and I like Seanbaby's tweeting. But I kind of can't understand the entire concept of Twitter itself being news: of people reading three sentences of polemics on their phone, and then getting emotionally invested in the back and forth and sick burns. I also don't listen to the radio or listen to podcasts for news or commentary. And its not like I am too aloof to enjoy watching things, I literally spend three hours a day watching people play video games on YouTube. But I don't really get into using either Twitter or Podcast or Vlogging or whatever as this emotional attachment tool to people's views on the news.

Squalid posted:

I've also noticed this and hate it. It's not something specific to media personalities though, people do it constantly with modern and historical people. I don't know why anyone would ever ask a question like "Was President James Polk good or bad?" These kinds of questions seem entirely nonsensical and unanswerable to me, but they are obviously very important to a lot of people. It's usually framed as some kind of moral thing, probably something to do with christian conceptions of morality which are largely alien to me so I just accept I cannot understand it. I chalk the obsession with judging people and crafting emotional relationships with public figures up to some essential flaw in human nature or our culture and assume it is an unavoidable problem we just have to work around.

I compartmentalize a lot. It is a way to stay sane, both in my personal life and in the political world. I think questions of morality are important. But I also think that there are ways to look at things as the objective result of historical processes. And the longer ago something happened, the easier it is to look at in historical terms. For example, I think of slavery in the ancient world as a much different thing than I think of slavery in the United States of America. The second is close enough to me that I still think of it as a moral evil, I can't compartmentalize it the way I would think of slavery in ancient Babylon.

In terms of consuming media, and this gets back to the question of the type of media, I can read newspapers and compartmentalize the information, and think about it critically from different viewpoints. If I read that the GDP of India has gone up 2.2% last year, I can kind of compartmentalize that as a standard measure of economic health that may or may not reflect the actual welfare of most people in India, but that (at least from a standard viewpoint) is probably good news for a lot of people in India. But hopefully what I can also do is keep that information in perspective that no, GDP doesn't measure welfare, just "economic production". So I should be able to read that information and put it into different perspectives, be able to still have moral views of economic justice but understand that a metric is a metric. And that is easier, with written sources, but I am probably not as good at critical thinking as I think I am.

# ? Jan 12, 2019 22:24

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 18:50

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

glowing-fish posted:

Here is a question that I haven't heard addressed in here, and which I think is an important question to ask.

"The media is the message" as the (now cliche) phrase goes, so in all of this discussion of media, there doesn't seem to be a focus on the media of the media, so to speak.

I don't live in the United States, and I don't watch television. I get all of my news on the internet, mostly by clicking around Google News. Even when I lived in the United States, I didn't watch television in my own home, and never regularly watched news programs, either cable or broadcast. I only saw the news if I was at someone's house, or waiting in a public place. The entire concept is a little weird to me, in fact.

Televised news can be a really bad thing, even if we can imagine some ideal, impartial news, because it doesn't give you time to separate and analyze. This is especially the case if it uses visceral imagery. You get kind of wrapped up in it. Someone else could probably write about this at greater length, but obviously there is some type of psychological resonance with having a voice telling you things, showing you pictures, that makes it hard to separate and think critically. Obviously, this doesn't mean that text media is "safe", but I think that reading automatically gives more room for critical appraisal than viewing.

What is really weird for me, not ever watching the news, is that when I read the USPol thread, and other threads on here, people talk about media personalities as...well, personalities. Like they are tapped into emotional relationships to these people that just don't make sense to me. Reading people talk about Megyn Kelly, or Glenn Greenwald, or Clint Cilliaza, to me, is like reading people constantly interjecting references to seaQuest DSV episodes. Like, I really don't understand the entire emotional tenor that people discuss media personalities with. Like, Clint Cilliaza is a good example. I have read some of his print stories, and think they are mediocre summaries of the news. Like, not good, but nothing I feel personally offended by. But lots of people on here talk about him as if he is terrible, and I am assuming those are the people who see him live?

What is the relationship between how we consume the news (visual vs text vs audio, etc) and how we feel about it?

My memory of the book is a little rusty but some of the questions you are raising are discussed in Neil Postman's book on television "Amusing Ourselves To Death" (a crappy but serviceable pdf copy of the book can be found here). The first chapter in particular lays out Postman's theory on the media (which in turn draws on Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Plato).

It's not just the immediacy of television but as you note here also the use of imagery (and almost equally crucially, sound) that means television is a fundamentally emotional rather than intellectual medium and that all television is necessarily focused on entertainment. Postman argues that the central importance of television media represents a dramatic shift from an older and more literary culture that was focused around the written word. For Postman the transition from a culture of literature to a culture of images was undermining the basis of democracy and representative government.

Perhaps then it is unsurprising that part of this transition would be the increasing prominence of parasocial relationships between various forms of media consumers and the consumers of that media. Alienation and isolation are quite rampant in the west right now, America in particular is facing a loneliness epidemic with serious public health implications. Given the illusions of intimacy that television can generate - the better than real close ups, the snappy visuals, the compelling sounds, the way in which many programs will effectively tell you what to feel and when to feel it via musical and visual ques, etc. - I think it all combines to create a world where many people have a closer psychological connection to their media or political idols than they do with their co-workers or neighbors or even family.

# ? Feb 6, 2019 21:09

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Mad about the Media: The Media and Media Criticism Megathread

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