|
It's been suggested that discussions of the media, its history and current role in the English speaking world deserves its own thread in D&D, so here we go. This thread is a bit of a throwback to the D&D of years past so perhaps it will fall of the front page and fail to generate much discussion. But I'm curious to see if anyone is interested in a discussion of the media that doesn't (exclusively) involve arguing about daily events. The focus is implicitly going to be on America and to a lesser extent on other countries in the 'Anglosphere' but feel free to expand the discussion if you've got something to contribute. Don't feel like you have to read the giant wall of text below this. I provide it as a sort of starting point for potential discussions but ultimately this thread is just intended to be a catch-all place for issues related to the media and media criticism. In the post after this one I will also post a big list of resources ranging from articles to books and documentaries. Please feel free to contribute your own suggestions as well. Introduction The following post seeks to give a rough outline of some important debates about the media, differing theoretical and political attitudes toward freedom of speech, and some key points on the historical evolution of media institutions in the last few centuries. What follows covers a period from roughly the 17th until the late 20th century. I hope to add some comments on the rise of the internet, the concentration of ownership in traditional media and the role of the 24/7 media cycle in constructing public attitudes toward elections, wars and a variety of other important issues. However, I think it would be better to discuss these topics once the thread has actually gotten started. Modern vs Postmodern ideas about the media, meaning and Truth First, some comments on how our thinking about the role of the media has changed. Speaking for the liberal tradition was have John Stewart Mill who characterized the political right to free speech as a necessary mechanism for determining the strength of an assertion. In On Liberty he writes: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; […] there must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it” Like economic investment and production, the production of ideas has been characterized as a process that benefits from vigorous free competition. Chief Justice Olliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a 1919 decision that "when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." This classical position can be attacked from several angles. On the most straightforward level one can question how well this principle operates when the ability to transmit your opinions is so unevenly distributed – in a world where some people spend most of their waking lives toiling for a wage while a select few own newspapers and television stations how 'free' will the market in ideas be? Various thinkers including Karl Marx and some of his 20th century followers such as Gramsci and Althusser followed this line of thinking and argued that the dominant classes of society monopolized intellectual production and thereby 'produced' ideas and cultural norms favourable to their interests. This Cultural Hegemony came to be viewed as a crucial bulwark to capitalist society. Gramsci in particular advocated that the proletariat would need to develop its own culture and its own intellectuals to articulate a counter narrative to the dominant ideologies of capitalism. Gramsci argued that while military conflicts between the proletariat and bourgeoisie could be thought of as a 'war of manoeuvre' there was an equally important 'war of position' that occurred in peacetime, in which the battle of ideas between classes shaped the terrain upon which the class war was fought. Later in the 20th century a further set of post modern and post structuralist critiques appeared. The theorist Jean Baudrillard, for instance, goes beyond the vulgar political economic critique of media ownership and attacks the very idea that more information lends itself to deeper meaning, arguing instead that in the modern era new forms of media like television and the internet present a more compelling version of reality than anything that could possibly exist, thereby crowding out the 'real' in favour of a simulated or 'hyper-real' world (when Morpheus welcomes Neo to the 'desert of the real' in the Matrix he is hamfistedly quoting Baudrillard's description of contemporary media consumers fleeing the 'desert of the real' for the comforting narcotic power of the simulation): Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy “Jean Baudrillard' posted:Baudrillard, a “strong simulacrist,” claims that in the media and consumer society, people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external “reality,” to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to have any meaning. And the narcoticized and mesmerized (some of Baudrillard's metaphors) media-saturated consciousness is in such a state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept of meaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus) dissolves. In this alarming and novel postmodern situation, the referent, the behind and the outside, along with depth, essence, and reality all disappear, and with their disappearance, the possibility of all potential opposition vanishes as well. As simulations proliferate, they come to refer only to themselves: a carnival of mirrors reflecting images projected from other mirrors onto the omnipresent television and computer screen and the screen of consciousness, which in turn refers the image to its previous storehouse of images also produced by simulatory mirrors. Caught up in the universe of simulations, the “masses” are “bathed in a media massage” without messages or meaning, a mass age where classes disappear, and politics is dead, as are the grand dreams of disalienation, liberation, and revolution. Baudrillard has come somewhat back into fashion in some quarters since Trump's election because his writings on 'hyper reality' seemed to many to provide a clue to the American white working classes support for Donald Trump, among other reasons. But before we get into high fallutin' discussions about the nature of information, meaning and knowledge let's survey the modern history of the media. Framing the issue: Hume on the role of opinion vs. Force David Hume posted:NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion. As Hume notes, all governments are founded upon opinion. From the earliest periods of history we know government has sought to control and shape opinion to its own ends. Consider the importance of religion in legitimizing government power or the cliched role of 'the mob' in any popular history or fiction about the Roman Republic. But it was the emergence of modern media, beginning with printing, that upgraded the importance of public sentiment or later 'public opinion' to the crucial role it seems to occupy today in the halls of government. Hume also here sounds a note of concern that elite theorists of democracy and the media will return to again and again: the dangers of irrational public behaviour and the need to manage how public discussion is conducted: Hume posted:[T]hough the people, collected in a body like the ROMAN tribes, be quite unfit for government, yet when dispersed in small bodies, they are more susceptible both of reason and order; the force of popular currents and tides is, in a great measure, broken; and the public interest may be pursued with some method and constancy. Classical liberalism can be understood, at least in part, as a precarious balancing act by an emerging merchant-aristocratic class that on the one hand wanted to tame the monarchy while on the other hand restraining (and in fact further oppressing) the freedom of the peasant and artisan commoners. This tension is reflected in the history of the British Civil War and French and American Revolutions, each of which were lead by property owning aristocrats but largely fought by commoners. In all three revolutions the prospect of a greater social revolution was raised but eventually suppressed. In all three revolutions the role of freedom of speech and opinion became a critical flashpoint. The eventual triumph of liberal theories of government lead to the establishment of 'free speech' as a core value of American society. But the exact meaning and utility of free speech, or the 'free trade in ideas', has always been contested. This tension in liberal thinking - the danger of the mob, the balancing act between having enough free speech to monitor the sovereign without sacrificing too much control of the views of the masses - has become a hallmark of democratic theorizing, though it rarely merits mention in popular discussions of democracy. ”The Fourth Branch of Government” Freedom of Letters and the Separation of Powers The first printed newspapers appeared in England in the second half of the 17th century and spread to North America in the following decades. Papers and pamphlets arguing for and against political and religious viewpoints created a vibrant but often violent culture of debate in the colonies. Local government in turn often sought to suppress contrary viewpoints through censorship. Pamphlets and newspapers played a crucial role in fomenting the American revolution against Britain and their significance was recognized in 1792 with the passage of the Postal Services Act: Wikipedia, “Postal Services Act” posted:Because news was considered crucial to an informed electorate, the 1792 law distributed newspapers to subscribers for 1 penny up to 100 miles and 1.5 cents over 100 miles; printers could send their newspapers to other newspaper publishers for free. Postage for letters, by contrast, cost between 6 and 25 cents depending on distance.[6] This subsidy amounted to roughly 0.2 percent of US Despite some early struggles over government censorship the principle of 'freedom of letters' became an established part of American identity, and a core principle of liberal philosophy. While issues such as flag burning, blasphemy and obscenity remained heavily debated topics into our own era a basic princple of 'free speech' had been embedded with the self consciousenss of the American republic. Beginning with Montaigne in the 17th century a common component of liberalism has been the so called 'separation of powers' between legislative, judicial and executive branches of the government. The free press would gradually come to be viewed as a 'fourth branch of government' (or 'fourth estate' in some European countries) – an informal and private but vitally necessary check on government action. This is still the vision of the press you'll get in a typical high school civics class. Nineteenth Century Media Newspaper circulation grew rapidly during the 19th century, with most papers adopting a nakedly partisan tone and editorial stance. Advances in printing and communications technologies shaped the evolution of the medium and lead to the emergence of an increasingly national media. After the Civil War newspapers became an enormous growth industry, with the significance of many towns measured by the number of local newspapers. The number of daily papers in the United States increased dramatically: Wikipedia, History of American Newspapers posted:The number of daily papers grew from 971 to 2226, 1880 to 1900. Weekly newspapers were published in smaller towns, especially county seats, or for German, Swedish and other immigrant subscribers. They grew from 9,000 to 14,000, and by 1900 the United States published more than half of the newspapers in the world, with two copies per capita. Out on the frontier, the first need for a boom town was a newspaper. The new states of North and South Dakota by 1900 had 25 daily papers, and 315 weeklies. Oklahoma was still not a state, but it could boast of nine dailies and nearly a hundred weeklies. In the largest cities the newspapers competed fiercely, for newsboys sold each copy and they did not rely on subscriptions. Financially, the major papers depended on advertising, which paid in proportion to the circulation base. By the 1890s in New York City, especially during the Spanish–American War, circulations reached 1 million a day for Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal.While smaller papers relied on loyal Republican or Democratic readers who appreciated the intense partisanship of the editorials, the big-city papers realized they would lose half their potential audience by excessive partisanship, so they took a more ambiguous position, except at election time Mass Society and Mass Media By the turn of the century Enlightenment era ideas about the 'public sentiments' of men gathered in coffee shops and taverns had been replaced by the updated concept of 'national opinion' shaped by mass circulation newspapers and tabloids. Local economies and cultures began to merge into a national market and a national culture that socail scientists began to refer to as “mass society”. As one dictionary of social science describes it, Mass Society was thought to entail an unprecedented degree of conformity and centralization: ”Mass Society”, Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, p. 255 posted:The concept of mass society is central to an influential social theory which holds that contemporary society has the following characteristics: most individuals are similar, undifferentiated and equal, showing no individuality; work is routine and alienating; religion has lost its influence and there are no deeply held and important moral values, although the masses are prone to ideological fanaticism; the relationships between individuals are weak and secondary and ties of kinship are not important; the masses are politically apathetic and open to manipulation by dictatorships and bureaucracies; culture — art, literature, philosophy and science has become a mass culture, that is, reduced to the lowest level of taste. Under-girding this new mass society was a national media market in which new communication technologies such as radio and later television dramatically increased the reach of the media and opened up new opportunities to utilize word and image. By most accounts 'Mass Society' was distinct from the older sense of a “public” that had emerged during the Enlightenment the following key ways: ”Mass Society”, Wikipedia posted:Sociologist C. Wright Mills made a distinction between a society of "masses" and "public". Propaganda, Public Relations and World War As the above descriptions already implies the emergence of mass society coincided with a new set of anxieties about the role of public opinion in politics. As the political upheavals of the 20th century gave way to wars, depressions, revolutions and the emergence of new extremist anti-liberal ideologies on the left and the right there was an immense degree of both excitement and fear at the prospect that an easily manipulated public would become consumed by irrationality and use its newfound democratic powers to destroy liberal society. While it has many antecedents the birth of state propaganda is typically traced to the liberal governments of Britain and American during the First World War. For the British a key role in Great War propaganda was to maintain the crucial sympathies of the American public to the British war effort. For the Americn government – whose President Woodrow Wilson ran on an anti-war platform – the key issue became mobilizing the public in support of the war. Following America's entry into the conflict in 1917 the US government set up its own special government agency, the Creel Commission, which propagandized heavily in favour of the war effort. Writing shortly after the war Walter Lippmann – sometimes called the “father of modern journalism” - reflected on what he viewed as the incredible successful of the Creel Commission in rousing the public to support the War, and concluded that developments in modern psychology and communication had lead to a revolution in public affairs. In his influential 1922 book 'Public Opinion' Lippmann summed up the new elite consensus: Walter Lippman, “Public Opinion” posted:That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . [a]s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.... Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach. In the following decades these emerging techniques of opinion management cross-pollinated with corporate advertising and the development of modern psychology. The manipulation of public opinion became a science in its own right no known as 'Public Relations'. Elite liberal opinion – once fixated on its fear of irrational popular sentiments in mass society – increasingly came around to the view that the emergence of mass society represented a fundamental change in the nature of government. The crowd must be managed carefully, presented with per-determined options and focused on specific topics of interests so as to maintain social order. Nevertheless, strong norms around anti-censorship and the deep liberal commitment to freedom of speech and thought were bolstered by the need to develop a counter-narrative against fascism and 'totalitarianism'. The rising spectre of fascism and communism meant that freedom of speech and thought became even more closely associated with the liberal creed and this created greater political space for agitation against government action and for deep investigations of corporate power, government corruption, and a myriad of other social phenomena. The Post War Era At the end of the World Wars the United States had grown into the dominant power of the new world order. Surveying the vast new military power of the American government, Dwight D. Eisenhower worried that the emergence of a massive arms industry on the one hand and of a permanent warfare state on the other meant that traditional American democracy was at risk. He famously put his faith in an 'informed and alert citizenry' as the only safeguard. I think this Eisenhower quote is worth remembering because it lays out the basic civis 101 vision of the role of the press in modern society: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address posted:This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. The decades after the Second World War were something of a golden age for American journalism: the press was influential, trusted and had a global reach. Politicians often relied on the media to reach their followers and make appeals to the public. The large corporations that now dominated the American economy also found themselves subject to unwelcome journalistic scrutiny that sometimes drew unwanted public attention. There's a tendency to take this postwar period and to romanticize it. Iconic stories from this era still shape the way we think about journalists and the media: the reporting on Vietnam, the revelations of Rachel Carson's “Silent Spring”, the release of the Pentagon Papers and of course, most famously, the Watergate break in that still defines our understanding of a political 'scandal' and which remains the ur-case for investigative journalism. Insofar as the media retains any respect today, it is mostly living on the inherited reputation of its mid-20th century heyday. Indeed must of our faith in the government and our skepticism toward conspiracy theories or outlandish sounding claims is predicated on the assumption that if such allegations were true they would be reported on in the media. This is also the era when the 'heroic journalist' trope began to feature prominently in films and on television. Our image of the reporter as a scrappy loner who defies the odds to get the best scoop are largely derived from this time period when newspapers were profitable, had a national or international reach and could afford to bankroll extensive investigations. Did the press in this era live up to Eisenhower's vision? The United States government still entered a murderous colonial war based on an invented incident. Political corruption remained rampant. Corporate power continued to grow despite an increase in government activism that included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Suffice it to say the record is mixed, but by the standards of the decades before and since the post war was a high water mark for the influence and power of traditional media. Elite and Popular Anxieties about the media By the end of the 1970s there was a growing sense of national malaise that many social elites were beginning to attribute to the press. Within the US establishment and military there was a sense that negative coverage of the Vietnam war had contributed to America's defeat. In the halls of corporate power there was rising anxiety about the way journalists had publicized highly unflattering stories about corporate malfeasance, corruption and environmental degradation. There was also a powerful sense of resentment emerging out of 'middle America' that saw the press as a hectoring pack of liberals trying to push alien values onto a naturally conservative and God fearing country. As racial desegregation, the aftermath of the Vietnam War and then the later emergence of the 'culture war' came to dominate American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century the 'liberal media' began a familiar boogyman and punching bag for conservatives. The emergence of new forms of communication – notably direct mail in the 1970s, and talk radio in the late 1980s and early 1990s – also created new media platforms for distributing a conservative anti-establishment message. The sense of a 'liberal media' elite engineering a radical change in social values became a common trope on the right, while leftist counter culture groups came to blame the postwar consumer society and the advertising and popular media that attended it as fetters on the public mind that held back the revolutionary potential of the masses. The conflicts over the sexual revolution, deseregation and the Vietnam war also drove a wedge between many working class groups – the backbone of the old labourist left – and the student and professional classes that opposed the war and supported more progressive social values. This split – too complicated to discuss here in depth but perhaps worth talking about below – had immense significance. Among other things it undermined the old New Deal era coalition that was so crucial to the econmic stability of the post War era and introduced a new kind of cultural acrimony between the left and the masses, one that has arguably never healed. It is arguably from this moment onward that American leftist begins its seemingly irreversible shift from a focus on workers to a focus on students. Whereas the left once celebrated the wisdom and humanity of the masses, growing trends in leftist thought will increasingly come to view the masses as reactionary, prejudiced and tawdry. Meanwhile, changes in government regulation and the evolution of market forces also lead to dramatic changes in ownership structure for most of the media. Concentration of Ownership This topic deserves a thread of its own but let's at least review a couple basic facts. First a helpful (albeit slightly outdated) infographic, courtesy of Business Insider. Business Insider posted:NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warnerdoesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.  I'll also grab some helpful numbers from this write-up at PBS on the increasing concentration of media ownership: PBS posted:The trend of media conglomeration has been steady. In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the American media, including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio and television. By 1992 that number had dropped by half. By 2000, six corporations had ownership of most media, and today five dominate the industry: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom. With markets branching rapidly into international territories, these few companies are increasingly responsible for deciding what information is shared around the world. Lets talk about the media: what it is, how its changed, what it reports on, how it interacts with other areas of society such as policing, war and partisan politics. Feel free to bring in related topics such as the rise of think tanks, the internet or the 24/7 media cycle have influenced society. I also encourage people to go deeper and discuss how things like social media addiction, parasocial relationships with celebrities and politicians or our voyeuristic attachment to images of catastrophe and degradation are all tied up in the development of the media.
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2018 20:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:39 |
|
|
As always, exercise critical thinking and seek out alternative viewpoints wherever possible. This is intended to be a list of viewpoints worth hearing out not an endorsement of everything contained within. If you have your own suggestions of interesting or relevant (even if you don't fully agree with them) viewpoints please share them and I'll try to add them to this list. Podcasts Radio War Nerd While it's normally paywalled, Radio War Nerd offers a lot of insightful and interesting media criticism, mostly focused on war and international conflict. This free episode is an interview with the late Robert Parry, a veteran mainstream journalist who broke some of the most important stories of the 1980s and 1990s before going independent and founding his own news organization (Consortium News, linked below). Very important and well worth a listen, provides some important insights into the sea change in journalistic attitudes that occurred in the 1980s. Citations Needed - quote:The show covers issues both foreign and domestic - from decades of relentless government propaganda about "disobedient" nations like North Korea and Iran to the tortured language employed relentlessly by the press to protect police and other institutions of power - and features interviews with journalists, analysts, activists, academics, and artists. Unauthorized Disclosure – quote:Journalists Rania Khalek & Kevin Gosztola question social and political norms that too often go unchallenged and cover subjects that rarely receive complete attention in the U.S. Media Canadaland – Canada has the most concentrated media ownership of any country in the G8 and its most influential business paper is owned by a literal baron. If you can get over the host hawking mattresses every two minutes then this podcast is a good introduction to many aspects of Canadian media. On The Media quote:While maintaining the civility and fairness that are the hallmarks of public radio, OTM tackles sticky issues with a frankness and transparency that has built trust with over one million weekly radio and podcast listeners. OTM can be heard weekly on more than 400 stations and has a biweekly podcast. It has won the Edward R. Murrow Awards for feature reporting and investigative reporting, the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, it is the only back-to-back winner of the Bart Richards award for media criticism, it is the winner of several Mirror Awards, and it has a Peabody Award for its body of work. Blogs Naked Capitalism quote:Naked Capitalism is an American financial news and analysis blog that "chronicles the large scale, concerted campaign to reduce the bargaining power and pay of ordinary workers relative to investors and elite technocrats".[1] The Daily Howler quote:The Daily Howler is an American political blog written by Bob Somerby.[1] It was perhaps the first major political blog,[2] started in 1998. The style is by turns earnest and sarcastic. Somerby criticizes what he considers the media's frequently biased or lazy coverage. In his view, the media frequently latch on to a generally agreed "script" with little regard for facts that contradict the script. For instance, in the runup to the U.S. 2000 election it was frequently said or assumed that Al Gore was untruthful, but Somerby shows that much of what supposedly underlay that script was in fact untrue, misrepresented or greatly exaggerated.[3] He also argues that the media frequently ignore substantive issues and concentrate on trivial ones instead (in the 2000 presidential election, for example, professing bewilderment in response to the candidates' budget proposals while writing repeatedly and at length about irrelevant issues such as Gore's choice of clothes, or in 2006 writing articles about Barack Obama's middle name.) Despite being left of center in his politics, Somerby also critiques liberals in the U.S. mainstream media who he feels do poor journalism, such as Rachel Maddow[4] and Keith Olbermann,[5] both of MSNBC. Beat The Press quote:Beat the Press is Dean Baker's commentary on economic reporting. He is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Talking Points Memo - One of the larger mainstream liberal establishment blogs covering federal American politics. Functions as a reasonably good roundup of news on whatever liberal pundits are currently focused on for those times when you don't feel like killing your soul scrolling through Politico. Alternative Media Sources Propublica quote:ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account. Consortium News quote:From the Late Founder and Editor Robert Parry: When we founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995 – as the first investigative news magazine based on the Internet – there was already a crisis building in the U.S. news media. The mainstream media was falling into a pattern of groupthink on issue after issue, often ignoring important factual information because it didn’t fit with what all the Important People knew to be true. Counter Punch quote:CounterPunch began as a newsletter, established in 1994 by the Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporter Ken Silverstein.[6] He was soon joined by Alexander Cockburn and then Jeffrey St. Clair, who became the publication's editors in 1996 when Silverstein left.[7][8] In 2007, Cockburn and St. Clair wrote that in founding CounterPunch they had "wanted it to be the best muckraking newsletter in the country", and cited as inspiration such pamphleteers as Edward Abbey, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy, as well as the socialist/populist newspaper Appeal to Reason (1895–1922).[9] When Alexander Cockburn died in 2012 at the age of 71, environmental journalist Joshua Frank became managing editor and Jeffrey St. Clair became editor-in-chief of CounterPunch.[10][11] Real News Network quote:The Real News Network (TRNN) produces independent, verifiable, fact-based journalism that engages ordinary people in solving the critical problems of our times. As legendary journalist Ida B. Wells said, “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” The Canary – quote:The Canary is a left-wing news website based in the United Kingdom, which editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza says is "here to disrupt the status quo of the UK and international journalism, by creating content that compels audiences to view the world differently".[2] While it focuses on UK political affairs, it also has a "Global" section, a satire section ("Off the Perch"), and "Science", "Environment", and "Health" sections.[3] Articles The Long Con By Rick Perlstein. A very important and luridly fascinating dissection of how conservative media outlets (starting with direct mail and television and then graduating to the internet) is organically linked with all manner of scram operations such as people selling gold, promising anti-aging miracles and otherwise preying on people's credulousness. A fascinating examination of the intersection between conservative politics and marketing. Another Side of C.Wright Mills: The Theory of Mass Society by James E. Freeman Offers further discussion of Mill's writings on Mass Society and the specific role of the press. Watch this man (a review of 'Civilisation: The West and the Rest' by Niall Ferguson) by Pankaj Mishra. An effective and wide ranging takedown of Niall Fergusson's writings on empire that conveniently doubles as a survey of various pro-imperial apologists who began to appear in the media following September 11th, 2001. Books (these are full pdfs) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (crappy scan of an important book) An early critic of what we now think of as infotainment (though for Postman all TV is infotainment). I'll quote wikipedia here to summarize his book: quote:Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end". Liberalism - A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo. While not focused specifically on media censorship this book offers important historical context to the development of liberal ideas and governments, emphasizing the linkage between liberal thinkers, white supremacy and inequality. An important antidote to the overly glowing and triumphalist mainstream account of liberalism. On Liberty by John Stewart Mill. The iconic 19th century statement of liberal support for, among other things, freedom of speech. Helsing fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Dec 17, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2018 20:59
|
|
|
[Reserved Space]
Helsing fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Dec 8, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2018 21:00
|
|
|
sitchensis posted:
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think in practice its hard to separate what precisely constitutes a "reflection of a fundamental humanity" and what is just "an artificial implant" and that precisely this tension has been at the heart of a lot of critiques of the media, especially those going back to the 1930s (i.e. the writings of the Frankfurt school) through to the 70s (when you get guys like Herbert Marcuse). A lot of people have hoped, following the general line of thinking that goes back to Rousseau ("man is born free but everywhere he is in chains") that underneath all the layers of social conditioning there was a true and authentic core humanity that naturally desired freedom, love, companionship, meaning, truth, etc. A lot of 60s era instructions to "find yourself" were premised on something like that belief. A lot of people thought that if you could just strip away the layers of conditioning imposed by the state, the church, the patriarchal family and the workplace then everyone would naturally and spontaneously become free and self actualized. In Adam Curtis' "Century of the Self" documentaries he talks about this at some length, describing the great hope that a more pure and authentic humanity could be produced by simply scrubbing away the social programming of the old society. In practice it hasn't always worked out: strip away all the social conditioning and you don't necessarily find an authentic humanity underneath, just a whirling chaos of desires, fears and ambitions. Or at least, that's what the counter narrative has argued. And then of course there's a collection of liberal and right-wing discourses that emphasizes the extent to which human nature requires something like capitalism to have a functional society. So these debates about what is authentically human and what kind of society caters to the authentically human are very pertinent. (If you're interested in reading more on how different strands of leftism reckon with the question of human nature I'd recommend the Foucault-Chomsky debates (full pdf here) in which you get a pretty good rendition of the classical Enlightenment leftism of Chomsky clashing with the Nietzschean-derived post structuralist ideas of Michel Foucault.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2018 18:42
|
|
|
Fallen Hamprince posted:The Canary's editor in chief went on David Icke's youtube channel to redpill people on the globalist elites, anyone who works for them belongs in a Gulag. Those links aren't endorsements and honestly you taking a giant poo poo all over a bunch of lefty alternative news sources probably has a better chance of attracting attention to this thread than another of my prolix posts on the density of 19th century newspaper coverage and the differences between Gramsci and Baudrillard so by all means if you have a link for that please post it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2018 19:38
|
|
|
To be honest appearing with David Icke and telling people to vote seems less harmful than stanning for the Iraq War or being a propaganda outlet for the Tories but this wouldn't be the first time a lot of liberals cared more about who looks stupid rather than who objectively does the most harm.Fallen Hamprince posted:I don't want to end up on that particular watchlist so I'm not taking any screenshots but here's a link Sadly the youtube video seems to have been taken down.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2018 19:59
|
|
|
i say swears online posted:On The Media is pretty much the only show on NPR worth listening to, but hoo boy it's good Thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to the list of podcasts.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2018 00:40
|
|
|
Fallen Hamprince posted:I think collaborating with neo-nazis is at least as bad as supporting the Iraq War, but I guess I can see how someone with different sympathies might disagree. Last time I heard anything about David Icke the general consensus was that he earnestly believes in lizard people and they're not any kind of code word for Jews. Did he reinvent himself as an alt-right grifter or is this just your usual routine?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2018 03:47
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:You really need to ask yourself where you are when you're starting to defend anyone associating themselves with David "Lizard People" Icke. Don't cancel out the hard work you put into the OP of this thread by engaging in skirmishes like this. That's wasn't a rhetorical question, the reason I asked is because I haven't heard much about Icke in years and he totally seems like the kind of person who might have reinvented themselves as an alt-right or Qannon guy.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2018 22:20
|
|
|
Lightning Knight posted:I think if you’re unironically quoting the Protocols even if you sincerely believe in actual lizard people, you’re still spreading propaganda of fascists and should be considered as such. I actually think we could take this a step further and say that the popularization of conspiracy theories and vast anti-government narratives fertilizes the soil out of which various authoritarian and fascist movements have arisen. The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous essay on this back in the 60s "The Paranoid Style in American Politics which illustrates just how old and yet weirdly repetitive a lot of the tropes of conspiracy theories are: R. Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", p. 4 posted:When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity. as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one's own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. [b]But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy,' he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation. So you're not going to get any disagreement from me that the man advocating the theory about reptilian space overlords is doing the work of fascists and authoritarians or at least is implicitly pushing society toward a condition that is more receptive to them.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 19:33
|
|
|
Volkerball posted:So in comes this new legion of self-appointed experts and pundits, who have two major differences from ~mainstream media~. For one, they have 0 obligation to get anything factually right, as they are generally pedaling ideology rather than news, and two, they don't need to have an education, or much of any idea what they are talking about at all. They have a vested interest in discrediting journalism from traditional sources, as the anger towards traditional sources is the only thing giving them any legitimacy. As bad as the current state of American journalism is right now, it's the wild west when it comes to alternative sources, both on the left and the right. It's why people are becoming dumber and less informed, often intentionally. Can you define what you mean by "mainstream" and "alternative" in this context and maybe clarify how your statement that: "[alternative media pundit] have 0 obligation to get anything factually right, as they are generally pedaling ideology rather than news". Because first of all that statement is obviously factually inaccurate in many specific cases where experts have blogs or do interviews in the alternative press, and because two you seem to be suggesting that none of the things you described are problems for mainstream punditry. quote:I do think there needs to be a radical shift in how news is presented by corporate media, and there's major fundamental flaws in how they operate that should be pointed out and fixed. But this current level of hostility and anger towards the mainstream media I see going nowhere good, because it's simply feeding into conspiratorial thinking. No matter who you are, there's now some outlet somewhere who will try to make their money by telling you you are right about everything. And people find comfort and safety in that, so they buy into it. The results have been not good, as you see lefties and fascists finding a lot of common ground as they both have an interest in discrediting the establishment, and as a result, leftist discourse in tatters. The center and the right wing are also falling apart as this nationwide hatred for CNN and journalists has given everyone the justification they need to believe in Facebook pages reporting on fake nonsense that confirms their prejudices. And in the process, they are given more reason to hate the mainstream media because those reporters and pages have an interest in fostering that hate by discrediting traditional sources, ironically enough, often through shoddy reporting and fake stories. It's a dangerous little cycle we've entered and I'm not sure at this point there's much anyone can do about it. I honestly find it fascinating that your entire post is written as though the only things that matter are changes in the media structure. This is all written as though hatred for CNN spontaneously bubbled up out of the ether and irrationally turned everyone against CNN and other major news sources for no particular reason. Volkerball posted:I couldn't tell you where it started, but when I first noticed it was during the course of the uprising in Syria, and I do tend to think it rose to a pretty high level throughout it. There's been a number of pieces out since then that outline what has since been dubbed red-brown convergence, but I'll illustrate it this way. If I speak to someone who tells me that Bashar al-Assad is fighting terrorism, and that we need to support him and Russia because the alternate is people like Hillary Clinton and the American center/liberals who would risk or want to start world war 3 regime changing him. That the only Syrians worth mentioning are terrorists, and that ISIS is backed by US democrats who are in the pockets of the 9/11 committing Saudi royal jihadists. That reports of Assad's human rights abuses are overblown or flat out lies perpetrated by the mainstream media and the American establishment that has lied to us before, and by Syrian jihadist networks that fabricate evidence and stories to try to get support for an American invasion. I would have no loving clue what ideology that person subscribed to, I would just know that it starts with "far." People curious about why this is have done the dirty work finding some of the common sources that central players in each ideologies pundits rely on. This really just sounds like your bad faith conflation of 'the left' with a handful of people you argue with on these forums and twitter. quote:SPLC had a really good piece on it that was taken down after Max Blumenthal threatened legal action. I think it still gets passed around via web archive but I don't have time to find it. You mean the report that they full out retracted because it was so indefensible? Not even a correction like "oops we went overboard in a few places" but a full on "this was such a bad hit piece we're completely pulling it from our site and posting an apology".
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 19:59
|
|
|
Tab8715 posted:It's not about "Never Trumpers" it's about respect and dignity. People don't want to read column how yet another Republican thinks that #metoo is a false flag or other garbage nor does the NY Times want give them a platform. The issue is that the Never Trump Republicans are by and large a bunch of prominent architects of neoconservative foreign policy who have been revealed to speak for a constituency of approximately twelve rich people in a country club somewhere. Their ideas did incredible damage and many of them are actual war criminals who in a just world should be serving life long prison sentences for their actions. They used their power and influence to advocate for some of the worst things the US government has done in the last few decades and never paid a price for it - in fact they were generously rewarded. The fact that big parts of the liberal establishment keep trying to prop these figures up even after it's become clear that 1) these people are monsters and 2) they're not even representative of the type of monstrous Republican ideology we need to reckon with, it sort of raises the question why does the liberal establishment keep propping them up and giving them a platform like this?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 20:07
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:It's impossible to take you seriously when you say stuff like this. There's no such thing as "non-ideological news." Even if all the facts are technically correct, there will always be an ideological slant simply by virtue of what an organization chooses to report on, how frequently they choose to cover certain subjects, the tone they use when discussing them, etc. I also find it remarkable how so many of the anxieties I heard expressed in the early 2000s about Fox News and its then unprecedented levels of open partisanship have seemingly all turned into to anxieties about the internet, facebook, fake news and the decline of trust in "mainstream" sources. So far as I can tell nobody really disputes that Fox counts as "mainstream" news now so I'm not really sure how people sustain the idea that the internet has made some uniquely malign contribution to our media culture. It feels like there's been a willful forgetting of how bad stuff was already getting before social media came along as a convenient scapegoat.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 21:28
|
|
|
awesmoe posted:There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you here but I think for a reasonable discussion to actually proceed we need to talk about how we're defining what it means to be "reporting based in fact" vs "reporting not based in fact". I also think we need to try and recognize that there's a difference between what gets the most attention and what is actually driving the narrative. You hear a lot about the role of "fake news" and pizzagate but most analysts would agree that television news from mainstream sources was vastly more important to the election. Journalists have generally focused more on stories about outright fake news stories like "The Pope endorses Donald Trump" getting play on facebook, but I think that objectively speaking what mattered a lot more was that because he was a ratings bonanza the mainstream stations gave Trump a level of coverage that no other candidate could dream of receiving, and this made Trump's unique style of giving long inflammatory speeches much more effective. When I read reports on or discussions of the 2016 election that focus heavily on the social media and fake news side of things I can't help but think they are deeply misreprenting the much more significant role of television coverage in creating Trump. And I think the same thing can be said about most of Trump's ideological positions: Trumpism went mainstream in the Republican party thanks to Fox, not thanks to facebook. That doesn't mean the internet isn't significant or that facebook, youtube and twitter aren't playing a role in radicalizing the population and pushing people into epistemic bubbles. But most of the actual reporting on fake news seems to really misrepresent the actual problem as well as the events of the 2016 election. Willie Tomg posted:Granting that there is definitely a normalizing effect in play, I feel like its within the realm of reason to say there has been a degenerative trend when the reality TV stars of those very early 2000s--themselves notoriously favoring of fox news in particular--are the presidents of 2020. It was that bad before, its worse now, and seems fit to degrade further into the future. That's fair but I my concern here would be that because we're talking about this online and are all extremely online people we probably see a disproportionate amount of evidence for fake news and the youtube-extremeism-pipeline in action but wouldn't necessarily have seen equally bad or worse media trends in the past. If we were having this discussion in the 70s we might be talking about the rise of direct mail under figures like Richard Viguerie - as unrepentant a peddler of fake news as you'll ever find - and if this were happening in the early 1990s we'd probably be talking about right-wing talk radio. But given the age and interests of this forum most of us didn't really witness those phenomena in the same way and can't remember the political era before those things emerged. If we had been alive and able to watch those trends as closely as we're watching the explosion of fake news on youtube then I wonder how that might change our perspective. My pointing being that while each new form of technology or media is going to have game-changing effects I think we need to be cautious that we don't just assume that something we saw for the first time in 2016 is actually unprecedented. Often a lot of stuff that seems scary and new turns out to have some precedence we didn't know about. I wonder if that could be happening with 'fake news', because like I said, it seems like a lot of anxieties people used to have about partisan mainstream news were unconsciously transferred to internet news starting around 2015. This is why it's important to try and define the terms we use so we don't slip into overly broad or vague language.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 21:54
|
|
|
Also just wanted to quote this because it raises a very important point:Willie Tomg posted:I do not understand how you can be Online enough to be on these forums, basic enough in the brain to be scandalized by highly advanced Russian Active Measures (aka. interferentsiya) across *gasp* EVERY social media network like
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2018 21:55
|
|
|
Volkerball posted:Assad is bae tankies like Rania Khalek, who took a reporting trip to Syria supported by the Syrian regime, and has written countless pieces attempting to absolve the regime of responsibility for its war crimes? Who's work was recommended in the OP of this thread? Where was the mocking, I must have missed it. Khalek's work slandering first responders in Syria to make them unsympathetic to western audiences so closely resembles actual fascist Vanessa Beeley's work, that Vanessa claimed it was coordinated, and gently caress if anyone could tell the difference either way. I'm going to ask you again to actually define the terms you're using. What counts as "mainstream" and what counts as "alternative" and is alternative the same or different from "fringe", what is "the FOX model" and what are the "similar tactics" being used by "alternative sources"? I'm confused because so much of your post is actually an attack on what would be considered mainstream sources, i.e. Fox News, Seymour Hersh, Tucker Carlson, etc. You seem just as unhappy with these figures as you are with the alternative media. And in some cases you actually side with the amateur (Brown Moses) against the expert (Postal) so I don't see how any of this is at all compatible with your previously stated position that the mainstream media is distinct from the alternative media specifically because it is held to a higher standard and is much more factually accurate.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2018 20:35
|
|
liberals in the US. Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald have both appeared multiple times on Tucker Carlson's show to express their hatred for liberals with each other. Of course, there's no need to address Tucker's "views" in such segments, because there's bigger fish to fry than Tuckers brand of right wing populism surging into popularity worldwide.
|
Discendo Vox posted:Helsing it is difficult to underscore how bad a way it is to start off the thread by defending this particular set of sources, on these particular issues. Pointing out that somebody made two seemingly incompatible statements and asking them to clarify what they mean - often by asking them to define the terms they're using - is how you have a debate.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2018 20:41
|
|
|
Volkerball posted:That's an interesting argument to make in defense of a guy who goes on white nationalists shows to bitch about the dems. If you make a big post and somebody responds to that post and asks you follow up questions then I sincerely ask that you either reply in good faith or you stop posting in the thread. Just ignoring posts you don't want to address and then coming back a few pages later to drop off more of the same hot takes you were being challenged on is one of the reason arguments in D&D have an endless and circular quality that makes them incredibly boring. If you find the idea of a long form debate like that unappealing then feel free to take your argument to the middle east thread, Russiagate thread, right-wing media thread, USpol thread, the current events thread, or any of the numerous other threads that cover the same set of topics.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2018 19:52
|
|
|
GoluboiOgon posted: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. On the one hand I agree with your sentiment that getting minor details accurate isn't that impressive when the press is so easy for powerful people to game. A particularly egregious example would be when Dick Cheney leaked information to friendly journalists to publish then went on the talk news circuit and cited those government leaks (that actually came from him) as justification for the war. He was effectively laundering his talking points, passing them through additional anonymous hands in order to create the perception of a widespread government consensus regarding WMDs. That having been said, I have some experience with fact checking and I'm reading through the Der Spiegel piece now and reached this rather baffling part: quote:Last Thursday, Relotius said that "At Home in Hell," the story of a terrible reform school in which children were tortured for many years, was a reported story, a clean work of journalism based on interviews with the victims and contemporaneous witnesses and visits to the site. Relotius said the same of his article "God's servant," which DER SPIEGEL published in February 2015. The article is a political profile of gynecologist Willie Parker, the last doctor to perform abortions in the U.S. state of Mississippi. But how can we know if that is true in light of the new knowledge we have about Relotius' relationship to reality? How can we be sure that there is only one abortion doctor left in the state of Mississippi? Or that the doctor had previously been anti-abortion and had completely reversed course? Speaking from personal experience, if you want to know whether somebody performing abortions in Mississippi was formerly pro-choice then you can always... call them and ask. You find the number (typically the journalist gives you contact information for all their named sources) and you summarize the statements they're quoted as making and get confirmation from the person in question that they did say what is attributed to them. Often you'll also get them to verify other information they provided, in this case while I was checking that abortion doctors quotes I would have also asked them if they thought it was accurate to say they were the last abortion doctor in the state. Now in fairness fact checking used to be a paid position whereas its now its often either been eliminated altogether or is done by unpaid interns. Still, I have to roll my eyes at this internationally famous magazine throwing up their hands and saying "How could we possibly have known what this abortion doctor said? What were we supposed to do, have a fact checker call them and ask or something?!" Some of the stories involving Syrian refugees are easier to forgive but if you don't even bother to do follow up interviews with easily reachable people like doctors then you really shouldn't be claiming to have a rigorous fact checking process.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2018 20:10
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Facts may or may not exist, but I generally operate on the assumption that they do. I'm far from an ardent defender of the press but you seem to be taking this set of arguments well past their breaking point here. You correctly point out that journalism can't really fulfill its own self stated objectives very well because ideology is to at least some degree inescapable and merely "piling up" more factual data doesn't bring us closer to a true picture of the world because inevitably these "piles" of facts have to be shaped into an ordered narrative by some ideological assumptions. That's all fine as far as it goes but I think you can still construct a case for the utility of journalism. I also think there's more overlap in the average person's incoherent ideological worldview than you really grant here. To use a fairly pedestrian and local example, the area where I live had a tainted water scandal a while back that lead to several deaths. Subsequent reporting showed how deep government cuts to water safety and inspections had helped create the conditions that lead to the deaths, and the government lost a lot of support in the polls and went on to lose the next election. There was enough of a common worldview that "clean drinking water is good" and "deaths from tainted water are unacceptable" to give the story an impact. Journalism can't fix the basic problems of liberalism like the existence of different economic classes or the basic injustices and irrationality that class society creates. That doesn't mean it doesn't play a pedestrian but crucial role in making liberal democracy somewhat more livable than it otherwise would be.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2019 17:54
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The problem with that line of thinking is that it takes the existence of a hosed up water supply as the natural state. Rather than a state that arises because of the politics of the country in which you live, and those politics are massively decided by the media environment. The media didn't create the world though. It didn't create capitalism. It didn't even create neoliberalism. You write as though our entire social structure is just a byproduct of media ownership, which seems to be putting the cart in front of the horse. While the media legitimizes the status quo and places boundaries on what is considered reasonable debate it doesn't actually create reality. There are some basic problems with liberal capitalism that clearly cannot be sufficiently addressed within the system itself, but that doesn't mean there are literally no differences in the quality of life between one capitalist society and another. Competitive elections and a free press have historically provided a degree of protection and bargaining space for labour and social movements that more absolute and dictatorial societies have not. Whether that is enough to actually justify the continuance of liberal government is a different question but it seems foolish to outright dismiss the fact that the organization of actually existing capitalist institutions varies across societies and that obviously the exact way these institutions are designed can have implications for the quality of life of the people living those societies.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2019 20:21
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:No it didn't create the world but it has existed in the capitalist world for long enough that it is a fundamental part of how it is maintained. Again I do not assert that this is a conscious plan by some big fucker with a bag of cash sitting at the top and directing the entire press to do things. I am suggesting that the press, at this time, is a fundamental pillar by which the status quo is maintained. This relationship is emergent. And how it came about is not relevant to one's reaction to it. Unlike previous modes of social organization capitalism has an inherently dynamic element that relies on some degree of free competition between decentralized actors. How this competition plays out is structured by the institutions of a liberal society, and obviously those institutions can function in ways that have better or worse outcomes for the people living in the system. The structure of those institutions also help create the domestic conditions on which classwar plays out and in which hegemonic and counter hegemonic narratives emerge. Most of the points you're making aren't wrong per se but they are so abstract that they're almost meaningless. Yes the press is a central pillar of the status quo, it doesn't follow from that that there's no difference between living in a society with strong norms for freedom of speech vs. living in a society where the government openly criminalizes dissent. quote:I also would not suggest that the existence of the "free press" means that it is responsible for improvements in rights. The press is overwhelmingly reactionary in that respect, it argues for the status quo, collectively. It is a lead weight on societal change. When things change it's through outside forms of organization, the press does not and can not lead the way other than the parts of it owned by people who use those companies as propaganda outlets, and you might have noticed that the efficacy of these outlets increases with the amount of money behind them, and the more money behind them, the more lovely their politics? That's a losing battle. The media can lead you to worse places, it cannot lead you somewhere better. I wouldn't say that the free press is automatically responsible for improvements in rights. Instead I would refer to specific historical examples and try to critically analyze the role of the media within a specific context. It's very clear that the differences in the press between, say, early 20th century America and early 20th century Russia, had important implications for how social movements and political parties organized themselves and what their goals were. So I would try to understand how the political economy of the American vs. Russian media of that period is implicated in the strategies of actually existing people in that time period. It would be meaningless to speak of "the free press" absent that kind of specific setting. Instead we might speak about how the liberal political culture of the United States allowed populists and later socialists to organize more or less openly and agitate for reforms whereas in Russia all political movement was forced underground by virtue of Czarist absolutism. Obviously as we expand the discussion it gets more complicated. American liberalism was under-girded by the private terrorism of the Klan, the emergence of the populists spurred the creation of Jim Crow laws to halt organizing across racial lines, etc. American political liberty was thus partially made possible by the extra-legal terrorism of certain non state actors. Freedom of the press was made acceptable by the fact that serious threats to the status quo were simply murdered, which of course makes it relatively easier to tolerate free speech. But that's exactly why those discussions are valuable: to have a warts-and-all appraisal of actually existing free speech regimes instead of just blandly praising or attacking a meaningless abstraction. I'm not interested in writing a glowing one sided triumphalist narrative about the glory of the free press and it's unique ability to heal social ills. It could even be that after examining things closely we conclude the free press is a more reactionary and pernicious institution than censorship (this is not my personal belief but my point here is that it's up for debate). But first the actual discussion has to be had, the particular evidence needs to be examined, the context has to be provided. And that's kind of the point of this thread. To critically analyze the specific role of the media in various times and places, both contemporary and historical. But that requires a degree of precision that isn't present in your posts right now, which seem to treat the press across all periods as basically the same. quote:So you have to acknowledge that relationship, you have to say "the press is bullshit and lies, this is what we believe" and go from there. You have to be telling people that what they read in the paper and see on TV is bullshit, you have to promote media cynicism. Because otherwise you cannot advance any other position than what they do. You have to reject the status quo to advocate for an alternative. Going off what I said above, all of this seems pretty much meaningless when it's so devoid of context.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2019 01:03
|
|
|
Ok, my first comment here is that you wrote a lot without addressing anything to anyone in specific. You've also written in a way where you basically just move from one assertion to the next without really arguing positively in favour of your positions and without really targeting your ideas very well. For instance, if you want to do a big critique of Manufacturing Consent and you're going to put this much effort into it anyway then it would be helpful for you to actually summarize what you think the Propaganda Model laid out by Chomsky and Herman is. The way you write here is so vague that I really don't get much more out of your post than if you'd just said "I disagree with Chomsky's model". I also have to comment that despite you saying you think the thread is terribly framed I can't help but think you didn't read the OP at all since you write as though this thread is leaning heavily on the work of Chomsky when he barely comes up at all. Discendo Vox posted:
I have two comments here. 1) If you're going to write this much specifically criticizing Manufacturing Consent then I really think you should be citing Manufacturing Consent or at least giving a decent summary of what you understand its arguments to be. You wrote a giant text brick of a post there which tries to make a lot of specific criticisms and basically none of it was actually in dialogue with any outsider sources (except another goon's post). It's generally a best practice that if you're going to make a formal criticism of a theory then you start by demonstrating to your audience some actual familiarity with the theory. Right now it's hard to tell if you've read Manufacturing Consent or if you're just attacking what you perceive its arguments to be based on someone else's summary. 2) I find it funny that you attack the Propaganda Model as being unfalsifiable given what you later suggest as a better way of thinking about propaganda seems utterly unfalsfiable since it literally relies on interpreting other people's motivations. quote:Propaganda functions best as a term used to describe messages, but it is a definition that is best grounded in the motives and practices of the people making the message, because this influences message composition practices, and their effects. Propaganda is an 1) institutional, programmatic effort composed of messages that are 2) intentionally designed to influence target beliefs or behaviors in a manner or means that 3) intentionally disrupts or limits the message cognitive process of the recipient, either immediately or in the future, in service of the program's 4) institution-scale goals. What are you basing this one? This is what I was talking about above. Are we to understand this is the summary you personally determined is best based on personal experience? Are you getting this from some theorist? Instead of just declaring "Hey guy's here's how we'll define propaganda now" it would be nice if you explained where this idea comes from. Also, how do you think this definition you're providing actually differs from the one being used by posters in this thread, or by Chomsky and Herman? quote:Here's an OK rule of thumb on this. At some point in message creation, either at a very high level or on the part of the direct message content development, was someone actively designing a message apparatus to gently caress with the recipient in order to do something other than make money? How would someone falsify this? Anyway I find it remarkable you'd type that many words up without ever actually engaging with the ideas written in the OP or the ideas written in the full length book you purport to be dismantling. No references to the idea of news consumers as the real product being sold, no discussion of the five filters, no critique of the actual attempts Chomsky and Herman make to apply their ideas to test cases. Why bother putting as much effort as you did into that post when it makes no effort to actually engage anything else? Here's a general rule of thumb for you: when somebody offers a big criticism of a book that appears to have been written by somebody who never actually read that book, be suspicious of that person.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2019 19:13
|
|
|
Herstory Begins Now posted:idk I found that post fairly straight forward and it accords with how propaganda is understood in political fields. What is your background Helsing? He wrote a post that is supposedly criticizing the propaganda model outlined by Chomsky and Herman and yet he demonstrates no familiarity with the text itself. He doesn't quote or summarize any of its arguments and honestly seems like he might genuinely not know what they are except in the vaguest summarized form. Then he offers an alternative model that is so vague that it's not entirely clear how he sees it as distinct from the propaganda model he's criticizing. Then his final "rule of thumb" for propaganda is incredibly vague, depends on words that don't have clear definitions (what does "gently caress with" mean in this context?) and focuses on discerning the internal psychological motivations of the propagandist. This is ironic since prior to offering this definition he specifically attacks Herman and Chomsky for not offering a sufficiently falsifiable theory.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2019 20:46
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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 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? 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
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:39 |
|
|
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. 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
|
|