aas Bandit posted:

"Facts on their own" are a foundation. Facts are not signs or instructions, but tools. You can choose to attempt building a hospital or a deathcamp from them, but if you use facts (rather than lies/distortions/falsehoods/misunderstandings) what you build will be stronger. (And note that the racist ideals that were partially at work as a rationale to construct deathcamps were very much *not* facts--the only potential facts involved were "these monstrous deeds might increase my chances of retaining power".)

Ytlaya posted:

The point isn't that facts don't matter; it's that they matter less than the assumptions you hold about the society/world and values/ideology, at least in the context of politically-relevant issues (which is presumably the subject matter of most D&D content).

A version of one of the most frequent arguments to occur in this subforum can be used as a good example. Let's say Person A believes that Biden's border/immigration leadership/policy is bad/harmful. Person B will frequently respond with the argument that you can't prove that he could have done anything differently to improve the situation (or that he already improved the situation enough that it doesn't make sense to condemn him in the same way Trump was condemned).

In this situation (and frankly most situations that involve "judging contemporary political actions/choices," which probably account for 90+% of arguments on this subforum), the core of the disagreement is that Person B believes that Person A has a burden of proof to show that their positive/neutral impression of the administration is wrong (and Person A believes that Person B has the burden to prove the opposite). Both Person A and B have a set of beliefs they default to, because literally everyone does.

This is the real source of most disagreement. It was never about some people just believing more true facts than others. Most political disagreements ultimately revolve around attempting to judge the beliefs/motivations of politicians or attempting to judge the outcome of different political actions. This applies to nearly every single political disagreement people have here (I actually can't think of a single exception off the top of my head). A person's core assumptions and world-view are the main source of these disagreements, because they determine what facts/evidence are necessary to support different claims.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

You are overcomplicating it. The expectation in any debate is straightforward: the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. To go with your examples, if you think that Biden has the power to unilaterally fix a certain problem with immigration, that means you need to provide evidence. Simply declaring that he should just ignore the law is not evidence.

fart simpson posted:

if you think biden is doing all he can to fix a certain problem with immigration, that means you need to provide evidence. simply declaring that there isn’t any more he can realistically do is not evidence.

that’s the point. you think it’s a “claim” because it challenges your base assumptions

Jarmak posted:

No, if you claim something exists that's an affirmative claim that needs evidence. In no circumstances does it make sense that you claim generically "a better way exists", not even state what that better way is, and then it's on other people to prove every possible permutation of that idea false.

That's not even getting into the issues with demanding proof of negatives.

It has nothing to do with assumptions, one is a null claim because it's the observable reality.

fart simpson posted:

yeah well, this is very obviously not some sort of consistent standard that gets applied regardless of the ideology of the people engaging with each other. you don’t need to look further than this forum and the ways it has engaged in this very issue over the last year.

throwing strawman weasel words like “unilaterally” in there does not elevate anything to “observable reality” because again, we generally aren’t disagreeing on the observable reality of kids being in cages. it’s everything else around that and the assumptions about what can be done about it that are causing the arguments

fart simpson posted:

if you think biden is doing all he can to fix a certain problem with immigration, that means you need to provide evidence. simply declaring that there isn’t any more he can realistically do is not evidence.

that’s the point. you think it’s a “claim” because it challenges your base assumptions

Discendo Vox posted:

1. Develop newsroom social media guidelines—and require all reporters to abide by them. It is critical in these situations to fight the impulse to publish—or tweet—immediately. Commit instead to being first, responsibly. For example in the event of an extremely newsworthy hack, have the top editor send an organization-wide email instructing all staff not to live-tweet the content. Instead, indicate to readers that you are aware of the development and your reporters are working to determine the provenance of the material.

GoutPatrol posted:

This is proving to be increasingly impossible due to the way that so many people get their news now (ie, from twitter.) When you're reading about Daniel Dale and his long list of trump lies, you would get pics of his dog and such. Dave Weigel is a very good twitter shitposter, good reporter, but I'm on his feed now and he's talking about Elden Ring. Do you think that every reporter needs to have two separate accounts for their "work" and their "life?" When someone like Weigel sees his twitter burns as a way to promote his own reporting work, I don't know if that is possible.

Discendo Vox posted:

I am not sure you read the thing you're quoting. It has nothing to do with separating personal and professional material on social media. It's about avoiding repeating or promoting material from sources of disinformation.

quote:

4. Break the “Pentagon Papers Principle:” Focus on the why in addition to the what. Make the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story as the email or hacked information dump. Change the sense of newsworthiness to accord with the current threat. Since Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, journalists have generally operated under a single rule: Once information is authenticated, if it is newsworthy, publish it. How it was obtained is of secondary concern to the information itself. In this new era, when foreign adversaries like Russia are hacking into political campaigns and leaking material to disrupt our democracy and to favor one candidate, journalists need to abandon this principle. That is not to say reporters ought to ignore the hacked material if it is newsworthy. But high up in the story they need to focus on the material’s provenance. The why it was leaked as opposed to simply what was leaked. “You’re in a whole different universe where foreign governments are trying to game the American democracy, especially the First Amendment privileges of the press, to benefit themselves and the candidate that they want to support,” Taubman said. “And news organizations have to recognize that the Pentagon Papers Principle cannot apply in those cases. They have to have a different standard.”

In other words, authentication alone is not enough to run with something.

5. Build your news organization’s muscle for determining the origin and nature of viral information. A responsible newsroom would never take the authenticity of leaked or other non-public content at face value because the authenticity of the content goes to the very heart of its newsworthiness. In the digital age, the same is increasingly true of provenance: the who, why, when and how of content’s journey to the public domain may be an essential dimension of its newsworthiness. Establishing provenance, however, will in many cases require technical skills that few reporters possess. News organizations have options for filling this need, which range from establishing a dedicated, in-house digital provenance team with the necessary skills, to forming partnerships with other organizations to pool resources and build shared capability. The latter may sound like a stretch. But news organizations are already collaborating in areas like fact-checking.

6. Learn how to use available tools to determine origins of viral content. Reporters do not need advanced skills or degrees in data science to perform basic digital provenance analyses. Still lacking is a dream tool that could automatically tell reporters who first put something up on the Internet. But applications like Hoaxy, Graphika, CrowdTangle and Storyful help interpret trends and content on social media. The learning curve for these tools is not steep, and reporters who invest time in developing basic proficiency with them will often be able to develop a first-order approximation about provenance that could inform story development.

7. Be explicit about what you know about the motivations of the source and maintain that stock language in follow-up stories. Make sure that this guidance comes down from the top editors and is on a checklist of desk editors and copy editors so there are layers of oversight. There should be equal guidance to reporters who are active on social media that they prominently feature the provenance of the material and its goals in their distribution of this information. If the provenance isn’t immediately known, focus your teams on answering that question. When there’s a news imperative to cover a story, acknowledge that provenance is a question mark and explain in the story why the origin of the material is critical.

Epinephrine posted:

So, what news agencies are trying to follow these practices? Is there anyone who tracks whether they are? A list of sources that actually try to follow best practices would be really nice to have.

Discendo Vox posted:

4. Break the “Pentagon Papers Principle:” Focus on the why in addition to the what. Make the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story as the email or hacked information dump. Change the sense of newsworthiness to accord with the current threat. Since Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, journalists have generally operated under a single rule: Once information is authenticated, if it is newsworthy, publish it. How it was obtained is of secondary concern to the information itself. In this new era, when foreign adversaries like Russia are hacking into political campaigns and leaking material to disrupt our democracy and to favor one candidate, journalists need to abandon this principle. That is not to say reporters ought to ignore the hacked material if it is newsworthy. But high up in the story they need to focus on the material’s provenance. The why it was leaked as opposed to simply what was leaked. “You’re in a whole different universe where foreign governments are trying to game the American democracy, especially the First Amendment privileges of the press, to benefit themselves and the candidate that they want to support,” Taubman said. “And news organizations have to recognize that the Pentagon Papers Principle cannot apply in those cases. They have to have a different standard.”

Red and Black posted:

How might we apply our understanding of the propaganda model demonstrated by Chomsky and Herman to improve posting in D&D?

Main Paineframe posted:

So that's the pair that wrote 14 pages (including a couple of flowcharts) on the need to doubt sources of leaked info, without even once mentioning the existence of press releases or other "official" lies. This white paper is only concerned about foreign governments, bots, and Facebook users lying to the press, and it shows.

quote:

8. So the provenance doesn’t get lost in follow-on stories or sidebars, consider having a box or hyperlink attached to every story on the topic with stock language reminding the reader of the motivation of the leak and why the news outlet is publishing the information. Extend this practice to any accompanying photos, videos or other content. For example, stock language for the 2016 DNC hack reporting might have read something like this: “These emails were hacked by Russian operatives to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The xxx is reporting on the portions that are deemed to be in the public interest and is refraining from reprinting those messages that are solely personal in nature.”

9. Don’t link to disinformation. If you do, make sure it is a no-follow link. We noted in our consultations with major news outlets that most are already independently deciding not to link directly to disinformation, an example of the kind of organic form development that we seek to promote with this report. When news outlets link to disinformation, the content and its source (e.g. site, group or user) get amplified in people’s feeds and in search engine algorithms. To avoid such amplification, refrain from linking to questionable content. Instead, describe the information with text and explain to the reader why you aren’t linking to it. Alternatively, link to the content using a “no-follow link.” Technologist Aviv Ovadya has explained how to do this in First Draft’s report here. [note- link inactive] Actions such as these signal to search engines to not count the link as a “vote” in favor of the target page’s quality, which would improve its ranking and exposure. As Cornell Tech University expert on online information technologies Mor Naaman warns, however: “Remember that search engine and social media platforms may consider reader clicks on the link as a signal for interest, thereby contributing to the direct propagation of the linked page.” For content that is authentic, he suggests, bring the file under your own domain name, instead of linking to a third party whose web platform and associated content you can’t control. This has the added benefit of drawing and keeping traffic on your site.

10. Assign a reporter to cover the disinformation/propaganda beat if you haven’t already. Especially in the run-up to the election, having a reporter writing about information manipulation is recommended.

Raenir Salazar posted:

For one, there was a lot of fabricated stuff mixed in with true stuff; and true things could be disingenuous because of misleading or lack of context.

I'm not sure if it is clear that the public has a "right" to know something as obvious that politicians campaign on one thing while knowing there may be limits to what they can accomplish. Many people in day to day conversation may say something ridiculous that comes apart under scrutiny but that's because they're making a rhetorical point; and a rhetorical position is not necessarily going to match up with their practical position because what's practical is boring. A politician that supports "Defund the Police" (their public position) vs their private position (reassigning funding to social services).

Discendo Vox posted:

Red and Black posted:

You’ve got it right. DV is essentially engaging in gatekeeping by saying only those within the news industry can offer a valid critique of it. It’s an attack that’s notably free of substance.

DV, I’m curious, have you read Manufacturing Consent? Because if not I don’t think you have grounding to claim it contains no useful information for media analysis.

If you have, then please base your argument against it on the actual content of the book

fool of sound posted:

Hey Red and Black, for the benefit of the discussion, could you outline the frameworks that you think are useful to media criticism?

quote:

many firms will always refuse to patronize ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as damaging their interests, and cases of overt discrimination add to the force of the voting system weighted by income. Public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western in 1985 after the station showed the documentary “Hungry for Profit,” which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World. Even before the program was shown, in anticipation of negative corporate reaction, station officials “did all we could to get the program sanitized” (according to one station source).53 The chief executive of Gulf + Western complained to the station that the program was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American,” and that the station’s carrying the program was not the behavior “of a friend” of the corporation. The London Economist says that “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.

quote:

To determine whether these actions are typical, I sent a questionnaire about advertiser pressures to 241 members of Investigative Reporters and Editors employed at commercial television stations. The questionnaires asked reporters about advertiser muscling of their news operations and their stations’ responses to these pressures. Only one IRE member at each station was sent a questionnaire, thereby eliminating duplicated answers. Just under 50 percent of the questionnaires sent out were completed and returned.

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents reported that advertisers had “tried to influence the content” of news at their stations. The majority of respondents also reported that advertisers had attempted to kill stories.

quote:

The magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups. In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the U.S. Air Force revealed that its public-information outreach included the following:

140 newspapers, 690,000 copies per week
Airman magazine, monthly circulation 125,000
34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas
45,000 headquarters and unit news releases
615,000 hometown news releases
6,600 interviews with news media
3,200 news conferences
500 news media orientation flights
50 meetings with editorial boards
11,000 speeches65

quote:

A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the ongoing conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist states have contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on Communists and “play into their hands” is rationalized in similar terms.

quote:

That the same massive political bias displayed earlier in the coverage of Popieluszko and the hundred religious victims in Latin America continues today is suggested by the media's usage ofthe word "genocide" in the 1990s, as shown in the accompanying table. "Genocide" is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes. Thus, with Saddam Hussein and Iraq having been U.S. targets in the 1990s, whereas Turkey has been an ally and client and the United States its major arms supplier as it engaged in its severe ethnic cleansing of Kurds during those years, we find former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith stating that "while Turkey represses its own Kurds, its cooperation is essential to an American-led mission to protect Iraq's Kurds from renewed genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein."28 Turkey's treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq's treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for Galbraith, Turkey only "represses," while Iraq engages in "genocide."

The table shows that the five major print media surveyed engage in a similar biased usage, frequently using "genocide" to describe victimization in the enemy states, but applying the word far less frequently to equally severe victimization carried out by the United States or its allies and clients. We can even read who are U.S. friends and enemies from the media's use of the word. Thus, with the United States and its NATO allies warring against Yugoslavia in 1999, allegedly in response to that country's mistreatment of the Kosovo Albanians, official denunciations of that mistreatment flowed through the media, along with the repeated designation of he abuses as "genocidal." The same pattern applies to the Iraqi regime's abuse of its Kurdish population-after it had ceased to be a U.S. ally -an enemy state, official denunciations, harsh sanctions, and parallel media treatment

On the other hand, Turkey and Indonesia have long been U.S. allies and client states and recipients of military and economic aid. In consequence, and Just as the propaganda model would predict, the media not only gave minimal attention to the severe abuse of the Kurds by Turkey throughout the 1990s, and to the Clinton administration's lavish help to Turkey's implementation of that ethnic-cleansing program, they rarely applied the word "genocide" to these Turkish operations.

Similarly, the word was not often applied to the Indonesian mistreatment of the East Timorese, who were subjected to another wave of terror as Indonesia tried to prevent or defeat a U.N.-sponsored referendum on independence in 1999. The United States, after helping Suharto take power in 1965 in one of the great bloodbaths of the twentieth century, and after supporting his dictatorship for thirty-two years, also gave him crucial military and diplomatic aid when he invaded and occupied East Timor from 1975. 31 In 1999, as Indonesia attempted to prevent the independence referendum in East Timor by violence, the United States maintained its military aid programs and refused to intervene to stop the killing, on the ground that what is happening "is the responsibility of the government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from them" (as stated by Defense Secretary William Cohen in a press conference of September 8, 1999). This was long after Indonesia had killed thousands and destroyed much of East Timor. Shortly thereafter, under considerable international pressure, the United States invited Indonesia to leave the devastated country.

We have shown elsewhere that in 1975 and later the U.S. media treated the East Timorese as unworthy victims, saving their attention and indignation for the almost simultaneous killings under Pol Pot in Cambodia. The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by theVietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile.32 The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990S, as the table suggests.

As the leader of the faction insisting on harsh sanctions against Iraq following the 1991 Persian GulfWar, the United States itself was responsible for a very large number of Iraqi civilians deaths in the 1990s. John and Karl Mueller assert that these "sanctions of mass destruction" have caused the deaths of "more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] throughout all history."33 A large fraction of the million or more killed by sanctions were young children; UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy pointed out that "if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998."34 However, as these deaths resulted from U.S. policy, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared on national television that these 500,000 child deaths were "worth it" we would expect the U.S. media to find these victims unworthy, to give them little attention and less indignation, and to find the word "genocide" inapplicable to this case. The table shows that this expectation was realized in media practice.

evilweasel posted:

Discendo Vox posted:

I will address Chomsky at some point, because apparently I have to. Manufacturing Consent offers little to no useful material for actual media literacy; it's a lay-facing popular book from outside the field that has real scope issues. The text I used most for teaching on propaganda references Chomsky only for a different book, and covers the underlying mechanisms (including specifically with regard to the Iraq war) by reference to other sources. They cover the subject with less totalizing language, and they're not exactly fans of corporate media themselves!

Discendo Vox posted:

I will address Chomsky at some point, because apparently I have to. Manufacturing Consent offers little to no useful material for actual media literacy; it's a lay-facing popular book from outside the field that has real scope issues.

Discendo Vox posted:

Well, it's a whitepaper on "How to Report Responsibly on Hacks and Disinformation", not all aspects of press activity. It's not intended to deal with those, it's responding to a particular pattern of abuse of the press. If we go back to the model at the start of the thread, it's particularly concerned with the use of timed leaks to occupy "channels" of information and to thereby bury other information. In the context of the subject Red and Black provides, it's a very strong example of the negative effects of that sort of activity; pushing back against the rush to publish and the pentagon papers principle has merit precisely because bad actors can and do deliberately target the weaknesses in information systems that result from these impulses. The problems of press releases and "official" lies are real, obviously, but they weren't a new and severe systemic threat in the moment of creation for the whitepaper.

Red and Black posted:

Also DV didn't say "experts have criticized the book" which is a fallacious argument anyways (argument from authority)

quote:

Correct uses of argument from authority involve deferred justification: Insofar as your claim accords with what experts on the issue believes, then your claim is also supported by the evidence the experts are relying on, even if you may not yourself be aware of what that evidence in fact is.

In order to be fallacious, the argument must appeal to and treat as authoritative people who lack relevant qualifications or whose qualification is in an irrelevant field or a field that is irrelevant to the argument at hand. For example, saying "There is no God, because Stephen Hawking said so and is a knowledgeable physicist." is a fallacious appeal to authority as Hawking's qualifications in physics do not automatically make him an authority on whether God exists.

joepinetree posted:

quote:

Treating ‘mass media’ not as a monolithic entity to be confronted, but as an assemblage of culturally and spatio-temporally specific entities and practices to be examined, this course will draw heavily on ethnographic examples and contemporary theory in exploring how anthropological inquiries of mass media differ from approaches in other disciplines such as mass communications, cultural studies and media studies.

quote:

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments.

Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

Lord of Lies posted:

Sorry, but I don't think the rebuttal to "MC offers little to no useful material for actual media literacy" is "Yes it does! Look! It is being used as a source in a bunch of undergrad courses — I found references in their syllabi!" To me that is very normal and expected because Manufacturing Consent is a popular book that has had impact on public discourse and criticisms of media, and no respectable university program that studies the media will neglect to cover it, and they will discuss it at least for a week or two. What really matters is the actual nature of that coverage.

joepinetree posted:

But it wasn't a rebuttal to "MC offers little to no useful material," because that is a non-statement that can't be argued. It was a rebuttal to it being for "lay persons" from someone "outside the field." It is clear that people in the field don't think of Chomsky as being outside the field, and it is clear that, to criticize it or not, it is included in a number of academic curricula (and one of the syllabi is from a graduate seminar). I don't think my post in any way was an argument that the book is good. It was simply pointing out the absurdity of an appeal to authority about "fields" and lay persons that simply wasn't true.

Solkanar512 posted:

Your claims aren’t self-justifying (nothing you’ve said is clear) and you’re misusing the appeal to authority fallacy as explained earlier in this thread.

joepinetree posted:

I find this meta argument tedious, but if they must be had the point is simply that "it's a lay-facing popular book from outside the field" is not something that people who are most certainly within media studies would agree with, and I would take their word as to what is in the field or not or of relevance to "experts" or not over anyone in this thread.

Epinephrine posted:

Using something in an undergraduate course doesn't make it respected in the field, and you should know this. Let's take psychology. Do you know who's thoughts are a required topic in every introduction to psychology course? Sigmund Freud. Do you know who is seen (at best) as an absolute joke in the field and for good reason? Sigmund Freud.