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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. 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. In practice, what people like you view as "just news" or "objective/non-ideological/unbiased" or whatever is really just "ideologically biased towards the mainstream/status-quo consensus." It's actually kind of interesting to see stuff like this, because it's basically the result of successful propaganda. It's easy for most people to identify propaganda when it takes place in a different culture or in a historical context, but many people are incapable of perceiving the fact that contemporary mainstream media is also propaganda because it feels normal to them. In cases like Volkerball's, any sort of negative opinion towards mainstream ideology immediately conjures to mind various negative stereotypes. This isn't a coincidence; the interests of those who enjoy privilege under the status quo are defended through the discrediting of anyone who threatens to significantly change that status quo. In general, liberals specifically tend to cling to the idea that their interpretation of media/news must be correct as long as all the facts are technically true, but they're completely blind to the way the media acts as propaganda through ignoring inconvenient facts/ideology and giving emphasis to information that supports their ideological slant. They have a certain mental image of what constitutes "propaganda," and it's just obvious to them that the label doesn't apply to the normal media they take seriously. It is likely that most people who read this post and disagree with it have already mentally filed away this argument as contrary nonsense. An obsessive focus on only facts also lends itself towards defense of the status quo, simply by virtue of the fact that significant change to society is often driven by ethical/moral values (and it isn't possible to travel into the future and conclusively prove the positive impact of significant change). You see the results of this in the countless discussions where the left demands the addressing of some injustice and the liberal response is to ask for proof that doing so won't cause Republicans to win. I'm not even sure if the people making these arguments are aware of how consistently they try to draw conversations away from ethical concerns and towards some bizarre question of electability. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Dec 18, 2018 |
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Dec 18, 2018 21:11
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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. It may be better, but not to the extent that it makes sense to focus the vast majority of your negative attention on just the fake news (particularly when most US media fits the "propaganda through ignoring inconvenient information and highlighting convenient information" description more; heck, even FOX news doesn't directly lie that often in its non-editorial content). I also feel like there's a grey area that is at least as bad as the sort of explicit "fake news" you describe, where someone draws a false conclusion from information. Most Republican talking points fall under this category (for example, the idea that people are deserving of wealth and the poor deserve their situation isn't what most liberals would call "fake news," but it's definitely a false idea that is far more harmful than any sort of "fake news" in practice). I'm not at all willing to say that "fake news" is worse in practice than this sort of thing. awesmoe posted:e: like if you really believe they were obviously lies to everyone at the paper then yeah everyone at the nyt is a cackling ghoul sending young men off to die while grabbing bags of money But pretty much the entire mainstream media was helping peddle these lies, and they obviously haven't suffered in reputation for it. The issue (and you often see this with regard to the Russia investigation) is that most people just assume it's common sense to believe information they hear from mainstream authority figures, whether it's the government or large media (that is generally getting their information directly from the government). Like, in the case of the Russia stuff, there was no direct evidence to speak of for the DNC hacking being Russia until the thing with Dutch intelligence observing the hacking or whatever (though that also isn't direct evidence so much as "extremely strong circumstantial evidence"). But people still treated others like they were insane for expressing skepticism, despite it being entirely reasonable to be skeptical of claims with nothing but the statements of the government (or aligned organizations) supporting them. The claims likely being true doesn't change the fact that most people immediately unconditionally believed them even before sufficient evidence remotely existed, and the thing that stood out the most was the extreme attempts to mock and discredit anyone who expressed skepticism (which was entirely warranted prior to the Dutch info, and is honestly still not entirely crazy, even if claims in question are almost certainly true). Basically, the whole situation makes me 100% sure that most Americans, liberals included, would absolutely still swallow propaganda like that leading up to the Iraq War. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 17:56
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What is special about the dutch info that everything before that might be a fabrication from the lying lamestream media but the lying lamestream media couldn't just make up the one last thing that convinced you? Prior to the Dutch thing there appears to have been no actual direct evidence (and as mentioned even the Dutch thing isn't actually direct evidence so much as "very persuasive circumstantial evidence"). Just the statements of the government and other affiliated organizations. Prior to that point it was still reasonable to think it's extremely likely that it was Russia (largely because they had the most likely motive), but it was never unreasonable to retain some level of skepticism or demand direct evidence. Just in case there's confusion, skepticism does not mean "believing something to be false." It can be hard to tell if you guys understand this distinction, so I figured I should clarify. You might want to step back for a moment and realize that literally everything you're saying could have been said against skeptics of Iraqi WMD claims. It is important that people always demand evidence of things like this from governments, and it should set off major warning signs in your mind when people start trying to act like others are crazy for doing so. Like, can you tell me right now what the direct evidence is? And if this question is sending you off to Google, maybe you should do some introspection about why your default reflex is to join in the ridicule of skepticism aimed at evidence-less government claims. Every time this comes up it feels like being gaslighted, because people always say "you're ignoring the direct evidence!" and then I go and look around for the tenth time because I don't want to make a fool out of myself, but nope, there's still no direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence that makes you think "yeah it was almost certainly the Russian government," sure, but nothing that makes it equivalent to global warming denialism or whatever*. Like, prior to the Dutch thing I'm pretty sure the only evidence was "the government and that organization hired by the DNC say it's Russia" and "the hacking appears to have come from somewhere in Russia." I'm always more than open to people explaining what I'm missing here, but the response is always just this reflexive ridicule (and at the very least it is extremely obvious that most of the people doing this ridicule aren't even aware of the evidence themselves!). * I would say that someone explicitly saying "I don't think it was Russia" is being ridiculous, but that's a very distinct opinion from "I want the government to provide direct evidence of the claim before acting on the basis that it's true." Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 23:58
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I think a big part of stuff like positive sentiment towards Stewart (and other liberal figures in media/culture) is that people have trouble comprehending the fact that "the extent to which you lay sweet owns on Republicans" isn't actually very connected to how left-wing/progressive you are. There's often an understandable assumption that since the Republicans are really bad and right-wing, that if someone is really angry at them it must be because they're left-wing. But it turns out that it's entirely possible for someone to attack and make fun of Republicans while not actually supporting any sort of significant positive change themselves (or supporting other bad things). More broadly, I think that people see the rhetoric coming from Republicans and the rhetoric coming from Democrats, and it is just obvious that the Republicans are the Bad Guys, and if someone is attacking the bad guys you just assume it must be because they're the Good Guys (and despite the language I'm using, I can actually sympathize pretty strongly with why someone would feel this way). Democrats will also often condemn or support the right things with their rhetoric, or otherwise make value statements that most left-leaning people would agree with. Like, Republicans will openly say "the poor deserve to be poor," while the Democrats say "income inequality is bad," and the difference in rhetoric is very obvious (with Democrats rarely saying obviously-bad things) and people understandably get confused when the radical left treats both parties negatively. It's only when you look at the specific things the politicians actually do and support, and the actual net impact those things directly have on people, that the picture becomes clearer. But it's hard for people to get past that knee-jerk feeling that there's obviously a huge, fundamental divide between US political factions, with the Democrats fundamentally being Good (if imperfect) and the Republicans fundamentally being Bad. And it doesn't help that there's a ton of media/cultural messaging that preemptively discredits/delegitimizes the left's messages (see: the uncannily frequently "SO YOU'RE SAYING BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME" reaction to any attack against the Democratic side). People are told from the beginning "the radical left is wild and crazy and thinks Both Sides Are The Same," so they're already primed to reject anything outside of their comfort zone. Fortunately (well, arguably), this is largely changing as more younger people end up living in a status quo that is fundamentally unacceptable and hopeless regardless of which political party controls government. I think the "irritated towards the radical left" liberal response is actually exaggerated on a website like SA, because exceptionally privileged millennials (who more strongly trust institutions, since they've always served them well) are highly over-represented on this website, but most other left-leaning young people seem to be either ignorant/ambivalent or supportive towards the radical left (and they certainly don't have a strong partisan allegiance to either mainstream political party). Ardennes posted:I think if anything it may have helped start the split in the left, I could tell there was deep disappointment and that may have helped feed into the Occupy movement the next year. (Also the recession was still quite raw during this period.) Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint when my politics became more left-wing, but I remember thinking the Rally to Restore Sanity was ridiculous at the time. By the time Occupy rolled around, I had definitely already made the transition (this is also when I became extremely disenchanted with NPR, due to their coverage of it).
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Dec 21, 2018 00:06
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Lightning Knight posted:Glenn Greenwald is going to bat for Tucker Carlson's "free speech" because people are trying to boycott companies that place ads on Carlson's show. Carlson is a white nationalist. Greenwald just constantly memes himself on issues related to freedom of speech and it's hilarious but also sad because he should know better. Yeah, free speech fundamentalism is stupid and probably the biggest issue with Greenwald's personal ideology. Lightning Knight posted:Glenn Greenwald is simultaneously an incredibly talented journalist and writer, and a great philanthropist who hooks up homeless people with puppies, and yet also a big old fuckin' idiot, and I know why he is both of these things and yet it is also baffling to me. I dunno if I'd go as far as to say "incredibly talented." It's more that, in the context of US media, he isn't a particularly offensive figure and the ire aimed at him is obviously deranged and unreasonable. I can't help but doubt the judgement of someone who feels the need to express their strong distaste towards a person like Greenwald but has almost nothing negative to say about more mainstream non-Republican media figures. Like, take this post: Tab8715 posted:EDIT : Greenwald's reporting has been going downhill ever since Bush left in '08. His constantly cries of Russiaphobia are complete nonsense. I can virtually guarantee that this person knows almost nothing about Greenwald or Greenwald's opinions beyond maybe seeing a few selected dumb tweets*. This sort of thing annoys me not because I care about Greenwald specifically, but because it's indicative of a larger trend of mocking and belittling non/less-mainstream voices while largely ignoring more mainstream/prominent ones who say and do things far more harmful. And it's also highly debatable about whether they're even dumb with regard to the Russia stuff, since Greenwald has never denied or claimed that he thinks Russia didn't hack the DNC or whatever; he's just demanded direct evidence and encouraged skepticism towards the claims of the government and aligned organizations, which is a completely reasonable thing to do even if it's almost certain that (in this case) Russia is responsible. There is nothing harmful about having (in this case) a small minority of media figures who always default to strong skepticism in situations like this, and I can't help but wonder why some people get so irritated about this. I think that in most cases, people have just absorbed this attitude and opinion through a sort of cultural osmosis after being exposed to it a bunch in liberal/Democratic-aligned media and discourse. The Russiaphobia stuff is also a completely legitimate concern, since there has been an actual effort to discredit people and ideas that have appeared on Russian television or in Russian social media propaganda. Again - I can't help but wonder why some people get so irritated and defensive about this. What are they worried about? That this will somehow cause us to be "too soft" on Russia which will, uh, lead to something bad, somehow? It makes no sense. Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:did he narc out a whistleblower at some point, or is this another bit of that wonderful snarl-word game where because a bad thing happened the guy you already hate must have been responsible Yep, this is another one of the things that has somehow been absorbed into the liberal psyche through osmosis. It's funny how liberals talk about conservatives blindly believing things, when they're completely willing to do the same when it aligns with their preconceived beliefs. Silver2195 posted:Edit: After looking through Johnson's Twitter timeline, his ratio of good to bad takes is better than I'd expected. I guess the awful takes I'd seen getting retweeted were somewhat unrepresentative. Yeah Johnson (and the podcast he does, Citations Needed) is actually good; Hamprince's opinion isn't exactly rational and is just based out of a reflexive disdain towards anyone vaguely associated with the left. Dunno why; my personal hypothesis is that people like him may have had some nasty break-up with a leftist in the past or something. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 18:17
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Helsing posted: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. From reading the comments in the twitter thread, a lot of (presumably European) journalists are reacting like it's crazy to give contact information for sources to staffers in this manner. Is there any reason for this belief? Is it about privacy or something? I honestly have no clue if there's a legitimate concern behind this reaction or which way makes more sense. My gut feeling is that as long as you tell sources that you're going to give their contact info to the paper (or whatever) that it should be fine and good to contact them to verify their statements.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:47
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I wasn't bringing it up in the sense of it being something that there should be a discussion about, I think it's pretty straightforward that letting people post propaganda in the news thread is a bad idea on a whole bunch of levels and I'm confused and concerned how you can equate that with actual media sources that do meaningfully give a poo poo about journalistic standards (even if only because they want to win pulitzers). No one is claiming that the New Yorker, Reuters, AP, NYT, WaPo, Atlantic etc. are without any bias, but they are fundamentally different on almost every significant level from the foreign equivalents of Voice of America. The point is that the "fundamental difference" between these outlets that you perceive doesn't actually exist. US media also participates in propaganda (to the same - or realistically significantly greater - harmful results) and ignores or downplays inconvenient things, which is something an organization like, say, RT also does. Some of those things it downplays are given a platform by RT, even if the motives are cynical. Ultimately, if a particular piece of journalism is false (or unsupported), it should be possible to directly show or explain why that's the case. That standard should be applied to both US media and media like RT, and there is certainly no lack of terrible media coming out of mainstream US sources like the ones you mentioned. The point isn't that US media should be universally disregarded; it's that other propaganda media shouldn't, because sometimes the cynical interests of other countries involve revealing things that the cynical interests of US media aren't interested in revealing. There is also no conflict between an organization winning awards for good reporting that doesn't threaten the interests of its stakeholders and that same organization acting as propaganda for issues that do.
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Jan 3, 2019 18:14
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OwlFancier posted:Again this continues to act under the assumption that there is a towering corpus of publicly accepted fact which RT is trying to knock over. There isn't. There's the ideological positions put out by many different groups from which the populace selects according to their preference. This is already the world we live in, it's the world we have always lived in. What difference does it make when factual, sensible, honest reporting produces the world that nearly obliterated itself during the cold war? Or the atrocities of the world wars? When was this loving age of truth that was not drowning in the blood of wasted lives every loving second? How do you look at the 20th century and come to the conclusion that the way the media works, or has worked for its entire existence, is a good and stabilizing force that threatens to be undermined by wild cynicism and distrust of pricks who make money selling people whatever people want to hear or printing whatever their governments tell them to? Yeah, people talk about "facts" and stuff, but generally speaking their opposition to RT is based on them having a very clear bias and acting as a propaganda outlet, which doesn't actually require explicitly lying. Even RT doesn't frequently directly lie; they just have a clear agenda. I would also argue that propaganda of the more blatant nature you see from certain foreign media isn't actually worse than the far more sophisticated propaganda you see from mainstream US sources (like WaPo, NYT, etc). The latter creates the illusion of being unbiased and providing alternative points of view, while still making it clear what the "correct" conclusion is supposed to be, and it succeeds in convincing people (like some posting in this thread!) that it's fundamentally more "serious" and trustworthy as a result. Or it just ignores certain facts or opinions, instead of lying about them. It's basically propaganda intended for an audience that knows to be suspicious of more blatant propaganda. And these value judgements also ignore the actual material impacts of the media in question (because if you take that into account, you'll find that US media is considerably more guilty of cheerleading harmful actions). Regardless, the important point regarding this whole thing is that there shouldn't be any substantive difference to the way people approach media both from mainstream US sources and from sources like RT. In both cases you shouldn't just trust that they're telling the truth, and in neither case should you blindly disregard information they provide as long as sources are also provided. If a particular piece of news is bad/unsupported, it should be possible to explain why, and I'm certainly not denying that you'll find more bad things from media like, say, FOX News than you will media like the Washington Post. But there's never a good excuse for just saying "oh, this is from (insert source), so it should be entirely disregarded." It's not hard to just explain why a particular story/report isn't credible/supported (assuming that's the case).
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Jan 5, 2019 05:01
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Discendo Vox posted:What definition of propaganda are you working with, because it appears to be so broad as to encompass all information passed through human hands. The actual definition of propaganda can be applied to almost any media, yes. Which is why it's not useful to think in terms of thinks either "being propaganda" or "not being propaganda," but instead in terms of "what the form of bias is" and "whether specific information is supported." There is never any situation where you should just believe un-sourced information from any media source, so I'm really struggling to see where the substantive difference in how people should approach different media is. I'm not denying that differences technically exist between the different forms of propaganda we're discussing. But the US is an existing example of why, even with a degree of free speech, it's possible to manufacture consent for policy no less harmful than that pursued by countries with more "direct" propaganda. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the bad things that RT or whatever does, but there is definitely something wrong when someone focuses almost exclusively on this almost entirely irrelevant media while completely ignoring the more subtle (but no less harmful) ways that domestic media influences public opinion. The only legitimate reason to "sort" media in this way is that there's limited time in the day and you can't just read everything. I would generally agree that mainstream US media like WaPo or whatever is mostly okay for getting the basics of "events that took place," but anything with significant political ramifications should be taken with a huge grain of salt and researched elsewhere (ideally from media with a different ideological and/or national source). It's also important to keep in mind that "what facts you're consuming and the emphasis/priority they're given" also has an impact on the way a person perceives the world/issues, and I think most people are completely blind to the fact that you can get a heavily misleading/biased impression from a bunch of 100% technically correct information (heck, reporting on Russian election meddling is a great example of this; many articles are full of nothing but technically true things, while strongly implying the far less likely to be true conclusion of "and thus this had a significant impact"). Squalid posted:I guess I'm just thinking about the issue differently. I might call what you refer to as cynicism pragmatism. If all media is inescapably biased, and there is no avoiding the issue, pointing this out ceases to be criticism, at least in a constructive sense. You have simply described the system as it exists. I wouldn't criticize an earthquake for destroying houses, even as I characterize its destructive effects. If bias is inescapable fact of nature then it follows we must simply learn to accommodate it. I mean, you basically just said it in this post. There's value to acknowledging that bias is inescapable, and you should take into account the bias of all the media you consume (though I'd add that you should also never blindly trust anything unsourced, but I imagine you just left that unstated). The point in this case would be that there's not much value to sorting media into "propaganda" and "not propaganda" columns, and I would also argue that current national discourse on the American left (referring to all Democrats) doesn't give nearly the focus it should to the issues with domestic non-right-wing media (while the issues of comparatively negligible foreign media, like RT, receive a lot of focus).
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Jan 6, 2019 05:30
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I'm not exactly opposed to limiting the specific term "propaganda" to what Discendo Vox described (even if it's relatively arbitrary), though I would still end up returning to my earlier point of "why is this fundamentally worse in practice?" I mean, it's certainly distinct, though I'm not seeing any reason to think that distinction is actually meaningful. I am not seeing why the actual outcomes of that sort of intentional (which, as Helsing mentioned, is something often unfalsifiable) propaganda are inherently worse than the outcomes resulting from institutions internalizing harmful ideology to the extent that they believe their own form of bias to be "objective." To be honest, it seems like the only real difference between media he describes as propaganda and media he doesn't is that, in the case of the latter, the institutions are actually "true believers." If the motivating ideology is just as bad/harmful...isn't that even worse? Like, if calling the latter propaganda makes someone uncomfortable, okay, fine; we can call it something else. But I'm not seeing how the actual outcome of a bunch of people earnestly enforcing harmful ideology is somehow superior to people making a concerted effort to manipulate and deceive. In both cases, the actual primary source of harm is the ideology itself. Openly malicious propaganda in favor of foreign policy that kills 1000 people isn't worse than earnest reporting in support of foreign policy that kills 10000. If anything, the latter is far more concerning. I also feel like it can be very hard to draw the line between someone "genuinely believing" a message/ideology and someone spreading it because they personally benefit in some way. Like, I have no doubt that many rich people genuinely believe that, for example, low taxes (or whatever) are good, because they have personal incentives to hold this view. So when they spread that view, it's not clear where the line between "wanting to inform people based on their genuine understanding of the world" and "wanting to perpetuate a status quo they benefit from" lies. To attempt to sum up, I won't deny that there are distinctions between the different types of media being discussed in this thread, but I strongly question the relevance of those distinctions (particularly in our current world where the biggest superpower - that has committed the same sort of atrocities as many of the more "authoritarian" nations referenced - doesn't frequently use the type of propaganda being spoken of most negatively). I can't help but feel like many of these opinions are basically retroactively trying to justify a perception that certain media is uniquely bad; one side is talking about actual real-world outcomes, while the other is talking about abstract ethics. Helsing posted:This is actually a pretty common observation among many media critics: that American propaganda is vastly more sophisticated and effective than most of the clumsy totalitarian state propaganda regimes of the 20th century because instead of criminalizing ideas it mostly operates by setting largely invisible but powerful boundaries on reasonable debate. The fact that within the limited scope of the media establishment you get an arena in which different elite factions or individuals can have limited conflict and disagreement actually functions to make the system much more effective and durable, much in the way that a tree that can sway in the hurricane can survive a storm better than the tree that doesn't bend and thus ends up snapping in half. Yeah; the sort of propaganda described by Discendo Vox and others simply isn't necessary in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, contemporary media is just viewed as a logical evolution of the more hamfisted propaganda of authoritarian states. It also helps that, in the case of the US, it's ultimately "the wealthy" who have the power, rather than government leaders specifically. And the wealthy can have genuine disagreements, which are then reflected in media, even if none of their opinions will involve actually threatening their wealth or power.
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Jan 10, 2019 08:26
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This seems like a really roundabout and overly verbose way of just saying that you think alternative media is generally worse and less credible than mainstream media. While it's true that some alternative media is obviously dumb (which isn't that surprising, considering the label "alternative media" applies to literally all non-mainstream media), the judgement of anyone who directs more negative attention towards it than mainstream media is highly suspect, because mainstream media (pretty much by definition) is far more influential and relevant, and generally reflects the perspective of those with wealth and power. When the mainstream media supports false or harmful things, there are dramatically more harmful and extensive consequences than a random local alt weekly publishing something dumb. There's also a cultural element where (also partly by definition of being "mainstream") mainstream media "feels" more reasonable and "serious" in its general presentation. When WaPo or NPR give false or misleading information, their reputation and tone lead to a perception of "well no one's perfect, sometimes mistakes are made" (if people even acknowledge the issue in the first place), while the same thing in alt media (or foreign media in a non-US-aligned country) would be viewed as completely discrediting the organization in question. It's not exactly hard to show that US media has frequently behaved in a way that directly reflects the interests of the US government, but people still have a gut feeling that it's weird, if not outright ludicrous, to consider it propaganda in the same way they might consider foreign media. Higher production values also lead people to be more forgiving of lies and falsehoods than they would be of the same information coming from a cheaply produced local paper.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:08
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