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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You said "most people just assume it's common sense to believe information they hear from mainstream authority figures, whether it's the government or large media " but unless you are flying around doing your own investigations at some point you are doing the same. Like it's good to be skeptical, but at some level if everyone is lying they can just as easily lie about the followup evidence then lie about the validity of the second lie out to infinity. and you can never really get out of "but what if everyone lied?" If the FBI can lie about it being the russians why can't the dutch lie about it being russians? As you said, many sources spoke in lockstep about the WMD. At some point the only way to function as a human is draw some line of "well, this level could still be a lie, but I'll treat it as tentatively reality" this is a terrible arguement. the arguments that saddam was building nuclear weapons in 2002-3 were patently absurd, even at the time. instead of actual evidence of WMD development, there were pictures of trailers in the desert, vials of powder of uncertain origins, and aluminum tubes. even more damning at the time was the way that most of the media implied that saddam was behind 9/11, something that contradicted everything they said in 2001. if they had had honest evidence, there would have been no need for any of this charade. living through those times, i didn't grasp that all of the us evidence was completely fabricated from reading us media, but it was very obvious that the government was pushing a completely false narrative, mostly because of the way that they tried to link al-quaeda and saddam. you claim that it is impossible to know the truth if everyone lies to you, but that wasn't the case then, at least for me or the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest the war.
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Dec 20, 2018 07:49
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Tab8715 posted:Essentially mob rule with pitchforks and torches? heaven forbid that the people whose lies killed half a million people lose their jobs. these people defended and even advocated for the extra-legal torture of the prisoners of an illegal war, and basically created the modern form of islamophobia in the us, but somehow calling for their firing is mob rule. why should anyone have confidence in the us media when the same people who lied so blatantly in 2003 are still around? if there is 0 accountability for such obvious mistakes, what's to stop them from doing it again?
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Dec 20, 2018 16:33
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Tab8715 posted:Don't get me wrong. I agree. I'm not religious but I sure as hope there's hell because there's a few folks who should visit eternally. selec is assuming that the editors are somehow in opposition to the opeds that are being printed. these op-ed writers were hired for their political beliefs, and they are doing their job when they publish those dreadful opeds. this also ignores the way that advertising works. to the nytimes, every click is a bit more advertising revenue. writing colossally awful takes in the oped section doesn't hurt them financially, it helps them, as they get more money from something that gets millions of hate views compared to a decently-written essay that doesn't get shared around. i'm not sure that having your opeds held up as examples of everything wrong with journalism is the best long term strategy, but it makes sense financially in the short term.
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Dec 20, 2018 17:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess, but like, people reading things in the op-ed page then going "did the editors not fact check this!?" are kinda missing the point of what page they are reading. It's like going to the comics page and being mad it's comics. You're missing the point. The purpose of the opeds isn't to let just anyone put garbage in the back of the nytimes, it is to have a space for opinions that cannot be backed with facts. Also, the oped writers take most of the blame for the opinions they put out. Like, nytimes would be forced to distort a ton of facts if they wanted to write a story about how climate change isn't real. They open themselves up to liability and public scorn. Instead, they hire bret Stephens, their liability disappears, and he gets most of the blame, and they rake in the hateclick advertising dollars.
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Dec 20, 2018 18:42
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Badger of Basra posted:Glenn Greenwald keeps going on Tucker Carlson's show and it's really bad but people like to defend him for it because Glenn hates Democrats. the problem with Glenn Greenwald is that he is very class conscious, but for the coastal media class that he has been ejected from. despite living in self-imposed exile in brazil with a socialist husband, he still defends the likes of bari weiss and tucker carlson because he hasn't internalized that he isn't one of them anymore. this is why he insists on treating tucker carlson like a collegue, not a fascist. it is also why he defended (ostensible) leftist eve payser and her article with right wing columnist and isreali apartheid defender bari weiss in which they talked about how much they had in common. the media tends to close ranks around their own whenever they get criticized, a reflex that glenn greenwald still retains. if one of bolsonaro's hit squads executes him tomorrow, he won't be lauded as a fallen hero of journalism like kashoggi was. instead, the elite media class will dance on his grave for reporting honestly on the crimes of the us military complex that they are complicit in. glenn greenwald seems incapable of realizing this. personally, i like that glenn greenwald manages to piss off liberals, conservatives, socialists and fascists with his opeds (but usually not all at once). this project is great too: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/988187200490823680 GoluboiOgon fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 04:51
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Badger of Basra posted:To add something besides whatever this thread is so far, Der Spiegel posted an expose about how one of their own reporters made poo poo up constantly, for years. Here is one US journalist's perspective as it pertains to fact checking (fact checking here referring to confirming everything in a story, not the Bottomless Pinocchio!!! style trash from WaPo): it seems silly to laud the way that the us press nitpicks the stories that reporters write over the tiniest details, and yet pay so little attention to the quality of information that they get from sources. the us media routinely takes the words of government sources and reports them as fact, which is how so many objectively false stories got amplified during the buildup to the iraq war. back in 2017 there was a huge rash of reporting on events that went on in the white house that never happened; reince preibus was leaking contradictory information deliberately to the press in order to discredit them. the newspaper's don't really care, as long as you are accurately quoting a source you can print completely false things without fear of a libel suit. having your editors spending days verifying the number of lightbulbs on a sign in india is a waste when you are also not checking the veracity of what your sources are telling you.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:55
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i'm not going to make a huge post about all of the details, but western sources make up things wholesale just like russian media does. here is one example, the case of a north korean general who was executed for graft in feb. 2016. the telegraph even reported that he was burnt to death by flamethrower! there is just the minor problem that he is still alive, and has received promotions since his alleged execution. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/world/asia/north-korea-ri-yong-gil-reportedly-executed.html there was another even more widely circulated story about another general who was reportedly executed by an anti-aircraft gun. he may still be alive (but demoted) http://www.newser.com/story/206826/2-things-give-pause-about-the-north-korea-execution.html
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Jan 5, 2019 00:25
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Discendo Vox posted:Totalizing cynicism about all sources of information is one of the desired endstates that the Russian foreign-facing propaganda program specifically attempts to encourage. It makes the message viewer easier to manipulate, rather than less, because they begin selecting passively and ideologically. how does making people look into the origins of stories make them more passive? everyone in the us selected news sources ideologically since the foundation of the us, the idea of a "non-partisan" press is a very recent one. "you provide the pictures, and i'll provide the war" was over 100 years ago. van helsing covered this quite well in his op. i would argue that one of the goals of russian foreign propaganda isn't to make viewers passive, but to discredit the us media establishment, especially their incredibly close relations with the us foreign policy apparatus. their other main goal imo is the promotion of views favorable to russian foreign policy, which leads to a schizophrenic quality as one program contradicts what the previous one said. i tend to listen to sputnik in the car, as i still haven't found a decent music station. a month ago, they spent a good fifteen minutes talking about how bad the war in yemen was, and how wrong the us was to be partnering with the saudis and the uae. the next twenty minutes were a paen to the way that putin shook hands with mohammed bin salman, and how that handshake showed that russia was now "the diplomat of the middle east" by negotiating with saudi arabia. their black lives matter program is often directly followed by british pro-ukip pieces. some of their content seems to be translated pieces for internal consumption, like a travelogue for suzdal' (a town without an airport) or an invitation to invest in eastern siberian mines (sold with "all investments are risky. what do you have to lose?") there was a very inexplicable piece about how great the new all-cossak army divisions are. us media people seem to interpret this contradictory mass of information as some sort of poison pill that is carefully designed to erode the boundaries of truth, but i think there is a simpler explanation: russia just isn't putting much effort into their us propaganda efforts. coverage in europe is much more uniform, they have a single nationalist, anti-"globalist" message that they follow. all of the british content on sputnik is in this vein, and instead of presenting contradictory information they push a common narrative the same way as standard propaganda outlets like fox. if they truly had a devious method to destroy the meaning of facts with contradictory information, wouldn't they use this across europe as well? the complete disorganization of so much of the us content suggests to me that they aren't generating enough content to fill their airtime, and are just throwing random poo poo in to pad out time.
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Jan 5, 2019 06:07
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Discendo Vox posted:Additionally, while it is true that delegitimizing other sources of information is a part of that process, it is a means to the broader end of causing the recipient to disengage from reflective or comparative analysis, and ultimately from civic participation. how does pointing out alternative narratives encourage disengagement from reflective analysis? the other option for when i'm driving is right-wing talk radio, but i prefer not to listen to them, mostly because they have ads. i bring this up because i heard the most extra-ordinary sales pitch (in the radio show, not a paid advertisement) for "build the wall" trump legos. it was a monologue that went something like this: quote:alexandria ocasio-cortez is a socialist! causing the recipient to disengage from reflective or comparative analysis, and buy cheap knockoff legos, seems to be the exact purpose of this kind of programming. there is no need for competing narratives; it is just a mantra that connects spiting the other with buying lovely toys. i think us right wing media is far better at turning people's minds off than russian propaganda. simple narratives repeated ad nauseum in the echo chamber of right-wing media are quite effective.
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Jan 5, 2019 09:26
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Volkerball posted:They do use it across Europe, to include inside Russia itself, and this isn't something we need to speculate and theorize about. Vladislav Surkov was the architect of the current breed of Russian propaganda, and there's a bunch of detailed profiles on him explaining where his head was at as he was building it. the heart of the atlantic article (which contains many basic errors, but i don't want to nitpick) seems to be: quote:When I asked how they married their professional and personal lives, they looked at me as if I were a fool and answered: “Over the last 20 years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” the author of this article wants to cast this attitude as some sort of vestigal remnant of the soviet era, but this is wrong. "everything is PR" is a very apt description of contemporary western society. young children are told to "create their own personal brand" in order to craft a resume that will get them a good job. companies chase "social media influencers," in order to get them to wear their products and turn them into living advertisements. advertising campaigns supersede actual events, like the way that the superbowl has become more about the ads than about the football game, and viral marketing strategies create fake events that are actually advertisements. this extends to the news as well. politicians have fully adapted to marketing methods of using focus groups to adjust their messaging to specific target audiences, and spend prodigious amounts of money on advertising. they also craft events that have no measurable purpose other than pr (think of trump's missile attacks on syrian airbases, which had no military purpose but generated a huge amount of positive press). the media is just as obsessed with marketing, and will devote entire pages of newsprint to making themselves look good. after all, their profits come mostly from advertising money, and anything that hurts their branding will hurt their profits. unlike people in the west, who are born into this environment and slowly absorb it, russians of that generation were thrust into the western world of marketing suddenly, and have a much better grasp of what it actually entails than the author of that piece. the author seems to think that surkov is the first person to write this down, but his book seems to be very strongly linked to victor pelevin's book "generation P", which was heavily influenced by marshall mcluhan (and buddhism).
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Jan 5, 2019 20:30
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Discendo Vox posted:
Do you count advertising as propaganda? it definitely satisfies 1-3, and very likely satisfies 4 depending on your definition of what an institution is. i bring this up because all of the major domestic papers and news networks that you refer to as the gold standard are filled with advertising. if you look at any given edition of the nytimes, there will usually be full page ads, often trying to camouflage themselves as news stories. around 1/3 of tv news airtime is advertising. so if RT or al jazeera is 100% propaganda, 25-30% of western corporate media is propaganda just by including advertisements. it isn't just the presence of inline newspaper ads or tv advertisements on major news providers that is the issue. the vast majority of revenue for newspapers and tv stations comes from advertisements, which creates a system of perverse incentives that bias the news. running a news source isn't about providing high quality journalism to viewers; it as about making as much money as possible from advertisements. part of this is maintaining a high reputation so that they get more viewers/readers, as reflected by the constant obsession with nielsen ratings among tv execs. however, in the end, it is all about the bottom line, and selling as many ads as possible at the best price they can get. the problem isn't just that corporate media is run as a business. if there comes an opportunity when they have to choose between reporting the truth and offending an advertiser, there are strong financial incentives to not offend the advertiser, as the offended advertiser may pull their advertising revenue and hurt the finances of the news source. when someone buys an ad on a news source, they aren't just buying a little square of newsprint or 30 seconds of time; they are buying a little bit of security from bad coverage. and if a newspaper is owned by a company, there is even more incentive for the parent company to exert control over what is and isn't covered. it's interesting that you brought up the washington post. the post was recently acquired by amazon. there are absolutely precedents for amazon's demands influencing coverage. in may, wapo ran an article about a shortage of truck drivers that talked about how there were many spots available for well paid trucking jobs that only required a few weeks of training.(see below link) there was a series of articles about the need for drivers, including a follow up piece a month later: "America has a massive truck driver shortage. Here’s why few want an $80,000 job." turns out that from the article text, the main reason they don't want a $80k/year a job is because it pays to $47k/year median, and usually demands 60 days straight of 14 hour shifts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ything-to-rise/ now, was this sponsored content or not? it wasn't marked as such, but it quite openly promoted jobs that wapo's parent company needed filled asap, and did so by greatly inflating the salary in every headline involving trucking. if you just skim the headlines, you get the impression that being a trucker was a great career choice in 2018, just when amazon was looking to hire more truckers. before xmas, wapo ran an article comparing the amazon alexa with it's competitors. the byline was that alexa was the best all around choice, the google one had the best speech recognition, and the apple one was too concerned with security. while the conflict of interest with wapo and amazon was stated in the text of the article, framing the byline in this way makes the statement that you can somehow have too much security when it comes to a speaker that reports everything that occurs in your house to a central database. it also works as product placement, creating demand for a speaker that only exists to promote amazon products to people with too much money. these are cases where the financial interests of the parent organization of a newspaper have most likely compromised coverage of the nominally independent newspaper. advertisers have just as much clout. if you remember the way in which bill o'reilley was fired, first advertisers pulled their ads, then as he became a financial liability to fox he was fired. at the time this was presented as a good thing, but i think it really underscores the actual power relations: advertisers effectively have veto power over the news. while this is an extreme case, it demonstrates that the media cannot offend their advertisers. i believe that this usually takes the form of self-censorship. if a news network gets 30% of advertising airtime from drug companies and medical insurance companies, they have a very strong incentive not to aggravate their sponsors by accurately reporting their advertiser's role in the current crisis of medical care in the us. basically, i think that the people who pay for the news, whether through direct funding like rt, or indirectly through large ad buys, exert a large amount of control over the tone and content of the media. i kind of think that the second method is the more deceptive one, as the large number of people paying news via advertisement muddies the waters. i have a pretty decent idea of what the self-interest of the russian government is, as well as what amazon wants. i have no idea who all of the major advertisers are for news networks, let alone what stories are important to each of them to influence. it becomes much harder for someone reading the news to determine what is a conflict of interest in such an environment. i'm not channeling manufacturing consent (which i've never read), but rather upton sinclair's book, the brass check from 100 years ago. some stuff has changed for the better (the ap no longer has monopoly control over news distribution, for instance) but many of the criticisms are still very relevant, and i found it quite enlightening. it has much better examples of advertisers influencing news coverage than i have at my fingertips. there is a pdf link to the (400 page) text in the wikipedia article, if anyone wants to read it (it is too old to be covered by copyright). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
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Jan 7, 2019 04:21
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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.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:30
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VitalSigns posted:I don't know what the academic terminology is, but the colloquial one is "inmates running the asylum". 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.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:06
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), which of course led to Germany's utter defeat.
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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. 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.
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Jan 8, 2019 21:16
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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. 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
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Jan 12, 2019 20:54
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Labour does have an anti-semitism problem, though. A couple of MP's split over it and a bunch of Corbynites are calling anyone mentioning antisemitism zionists, even Jewdas. It's not some kind of media invention. Here, from the IoSM thread: but are any of these people actually high up in labor, or are they just facebook randos who happen to support labor? the only result i found for katie nikiforou is the quote below. devon nola's only mention is appearing on a list of self-hating jews, where he is listed without any affiliations. asa winstanley is a freelance reporter. as far as i can tell, none of these people are involved in the labor party apparatus. quote:"No, as I have a poster against swine flu in my front window and have mental illness history, does that mean I will be sectioned again? And worse still forced to get vaccinated. Freedom it appears is the main casualty of what would appear to be a flu even milder than normal flu! I think they should give up there are so many people who know swine flu scaremongering is a hoax and so many are suspicious of the vaccine, we should hold a demo against it!" – Katie Nikiforou, Buckinghamshire
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Mar 13, 2019 00:52
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