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I'm not sure Russian media is significantly more supportive of socialism than American media, or at least not in a constructive way. They'll have socialist on but the scope of tolerated narratives is just as constrained as in private American media.
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Jan 5, 2019 23:28
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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 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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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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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? 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.
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Jan 11, 2019 04:17
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:46 |
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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.
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Jan 12, 2019 21:26
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