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The big issue I have with the principles that DV is reposting is that for the most part, they're standard due diligence for any reporter dealing with any source, except DV's source reframes them as though this due diligence only needs to be applied to leaks - rather than every goddamn piece of info a reporter receives from anywhere. This derives from the underlying motive of that whitepaper: to bring reporters back into the practice of prioritizing the interests of official information sources in their reporting, and abiding by the unwritten gatekeeping rules that the media traditionally followed. You can see a bit of this poking through in items like #4, but it's stated much more clearly in the writeup preceding the guidelines (a writeup which DV didn't see fit to describe or quote from). In particular, when it gets to the section talking about reporters holding back their reporting for the sake of protecting democracy, the very first example it cites is NYT and WaPo reporters knowing about US spying operations before they were publicized, but refusing to report on them for the sake of protecting the interests of the intelligence establishment. It comes back to that theme a couple more times too, praising major outlets for gatekeeping, delaying, or burying info that might have impacted secret US anti-communist efforts. Ultimately, when poring over a piece about the need to distrust sources and know the motives of those who provided the info, it's only appropriate that we should dig into that very source. And what a source it is! The more interesting name on the paper is Andrew Grotto, a political creature through and through. One of the first employees of Podesta's personal thinktank Center for American Progress, he was brought onto Capitol Hill when Obama took office, starting as a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and climbing the ladder all the way up to the National Security Council before Trump took office and booted him out. Now that he's been revolving-doored out, he spends his time flitting between the traditional political off-year stuff like investment firms, consultancy companies, speaking deals, and honorary academic positions. The other writer is Janine Zacharia, who unlike Andrew, doesn't have any political record. She's been a journalist her whole career...alternating between being a Jerusalem correspondent for US outlets and being a US correspondent for Israeli outlets. You don't spend that much time being a reporter for major outlets in or about Israel without getting really good at taking extremely dubious press releases at their word. 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. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Jun 18, 2021 |
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Jun 18, 2021 03:06
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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. This perfectly embodies my complaint: disinformation and dubious leaked information are not "new and severe systemic threats". Information stolen or leaked by a motivated actor seeking to push an agenda is hardly a novel threat, and slapping a coat of digital paint over that isn't exactly a fundamental change. You're talking about leaking stories to distract media attention from other stories as if it's some novel attack, as if the media was never susceptible to that in the 20th century. The rush to publish without confirming info or vetting the source is hardly a recent development. The underlying issue is one of framing: it frames disinformation and manipulation of the press as exclusively the province of anonymous hackers spreading newsdrops on Twitter, as if corporate press officers or US government officials have never attempted to misinform the media to take advantage of the misaligned incentives driving journalists to carelessness.
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Jun 19, 2021 02:25
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Epinephrine posted:You've now missed the point, and twice, and it's beginning to look intentional. Your metric for "in field" is not relevant to the question of quality. Looks like there are thousands of college courses that think those books are worthy of some kind of discussion! How are they being discussed? We don't know, so we're left to just theorize and guess based on our own preconceived feelings about those books! Or, y'know, we could just admit that we don't know and that this line of argument is a dead-end we don't have the data to pursue. Instead of theorizing about the contents of college courses that none of us have ever taken, and relying on appeals to authorities we've essentially made up, why not focus on the actual arguments themselves? Is Noam Chomsky "in the field"? I'm not sure where we're drawing the boundaries of a field that first appeared in academia when Chomsky was already in his 40s, but the writers of the whitepaper DisVox is reposting here aren't trained media criticism academics either.
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Jun 19, 2021 18:56
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The Kingfish posted:If the DNC proved (or even claimed) that one specific email was a forgery it would put the trustworthiness of the entire leak in question. I’m not saying it would immediately put to bed all questions of legitimacy, but it would do a lot of work to discredit the whole. I can elaborate on why this is if you like, but it seems fairly self-explanatory. It's actually a lot of work to go through a massive amount of documents, comparing each and every one side by side to make sure that there aren't any differences or manipulations whatsoever. That means having staffers spending their time on it, probably with multiple levels of checking to catch human error by the checkers and ensure mistakes don't slip through. The DNC would prefer to focus their manpower and efforts elsewhere, especially during an election year. Diverting their resources away from campaigning to go through and authenticate a leaked data dump isn't something they really have much incentive to do. Even if they find individual fakes or manipulations, it won't meaningfully help their position. And besides, the leaks already did their job, regardless of whether they were true. As ACORN learned the hard way, backlash and outrage don't calmly sit around and wait for fact-checking and verification.
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Oct 13, 2021 02:54
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Fritz the Horse posted:I mean, yeah, the conditions and treatment of migrants at the US Southern border were and are uncomfortable to read about at the very least. That's not the wording I'd use, more like "unacceptable," "disgusting," "inhumane," "horrifying" etc take your pick. Yeah, this is a really important point that I really wanna emphasize. We don't need to have a fully formed opinion on something the instant the first report of it hits the airwaves. That's a bad habit that's been encouraged by the rise of 24-hour news and scoop culture, and then driven into overdrive by Twitter. It's okay to see that initial report and decide to wait for more info confirming or denying it. You don't need to rush straight to judgment. You can wait a day or two for the story to develop and for other sources to investigate it further. It will be fine if we wait a couple of days to get mad, I promise. I find it particularly egregious when a mass shooting or some other disaster happens and everyone's hanging off every little unreliable detail they see on Twitter, instead of just logging off and coming back the next day when most of the spurious/hoax reports have been filtered out and things have settled enough to get an overall sense of what actually happened.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:22
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I was going to hold off and let someone else comment because I don't really have time to , but then I saw this bit at the end that pretty much sums up a whole heck of a lot. ram dass in hell posted:Did you appreciate the assertion at the end that Bush starting wars as a benefit to him of the political climate of the post-9/11 era, is on par with literal crackhead Mike Lindell screaming about a stolen election? Really? I think I missed that. That seems like a really weird thing for the WaPo to bring up in this context. I'd better go check the actual quote to see what kind of ridiculous nonsense the WaPo is peddling now! the Washington Post posted:During George W. Bush’s presidency, half of Democrats said Bush let the 9/11 attacks happen so he could start wars. Two-thirds of Republicans believe the “big lie” — that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Wow, that's quite a bit different from what you claimed it said! Somehow, "Bush let the 9/11 attacks happen" magically morphed into "Bush starting wars as a benefit to him" when filtered through your mouth! It's a good thing I didn't trust the framing the source gave, and instead went to find the actual quote rather than trusting the paraphrase from a clearly-biased third-party with an interest in pushing a specific portrayal! I'm sure glad I've been working on my media literacy, otherwise I might have been taken for a ride by that bizarre misquote and the resulting leap of logic. And by extension, I'm now quite prepared to distrust the source who's so insistent on claiming that they're so much more trustworthy than the bunch of liars at the Washington Post, and inclined to be far more skeptical of their in-depth "debunking" of the WaPo article if it's full of misrepresentations and lies like this.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:19
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ram dass in hell posted:Yes correct, so nefarious was my intent to deceive that I definitely didn't include 100% of the source article text in the post that you admittedly did not read before firing off your grudge-based hot takes about me. Nice catch MPF you're as sharp as ever. Yes, I'm well aware that you included the actual source text in the very same post. Is that somehow supposed to change the fact that you straight-up lied about what the source text said? That you completely misrepresented it, totally changing its meaning, all for the sake of turning a totally reasonable claim into ridiculous bullshit that you could then use to falsely accuse the original source of twisting things? Esran posted:That quote was literally part of ram dass' post, I don't know why you're acting as if you found a smoking gun here. Sorry, but no. That is just complete nonsense. The conspiracy theory it's alluding to isn't "Bush started wars", which is a well-known and verifiable fact with twenty years of evidence behind it. The conspiracy theory is "Bush let 9/11 happen on purpose". When you start making leaps to change an article's meaning to what you think it should mean, then it doesn't matter how big you think the leaps are - you're just making poo poo up at that point. Probably Magic posted:Main Painframe, I say this as nicely as I can, I don't think that article (which was in the Opinion section, so it's not pretending to be all that substantiated) is the hill you want to die on. It outright claims the contras are revolutionaries. "Whether Bush let the 9/11 attacks happen" is not a nebulous area, in any loving sense of the word. If you want to assert that Bush purposely allowed 9/11 to happen, or that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, then you're going to have to bring evidence to the table. "Weird poo poo" isn't evidence, it's just nonsense you're cobbling together to support motivated reasoning and a predefined conclusion you want any excuse to arrive at. I'm always shocked at how many actual conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork here whenever someone suggests that Bush was not, in fact, responsible for 9/11.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:46
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Harik posted:This was dropped in this thread as a given fact but it's completely and unequivocally false. If they're uploaded in their entirety, and if they have the same filename so that the dumped files can easily be compared against the originals. Wikileaks never made the original email files available, only a searchable database of web pages containing the text content of the emails. Can't just open up a folder comparison in a merge tool and scroll through the list - it takes real work to get all that set up properly. And besides, merge tools often aren't particularly friendly to text that's been reformatted. At least at the free consumer level, anyway. I can't speak to the capabilities of bespoke tools for professional document comparers with money to burn, and I can see how there might be room for professional data scraping experts to smooth parts of the process some. But that still goes back to the basic point of "it's the middle of election season, this is not the time to be putting money or manpower into a fight over stolen documents". There's no way enterprise-level professional document forensics is cheap.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:23
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An interesting piece of data for this thread: The Verge is changing their policy on anonymous sources, and gives some examples of how "on background" tends to work. https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1458449659735777283 quote:Today, The Verge is updating our public ethics policy to be clearer in our interactions with public relations and corporate communications professionals. We’re doing this because big tech companies in particular have hired a dizzying array of communications staff who routinely push the boundaries of acceptable sourcing in an effort to deflect accountability, pass the burden of truth to the media, and generally control the narratives around the companies they work for while being annoying as hell to deal with. A few of those can definitely be tied to specific incidents, but it's not really shocking to see that corporations have gotten used to exploiting loose sourcing policies and easy access to anonymity. It gives them plenty of flexibility to influence the narrative.
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Nov 11, 2021 18:52
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Corky Romanovsky posted:Could you expand on this more? There should be some analysis and criticism accompanying the posting of articles/tweets. The clip states that liberals only support masks and oppose ivermectin out of a need to "ritually stone" people who display too much "political independence". While it doesn't explicitly claim that vaccines are ineffective, his complaints about liberals scoffing at "natural remedies" to COVID certainly suggest he thinks vaccines are unnecessary. Sure, the article does go on at length about various negative impacts of COVID health policy. It also asserts that lockdowns have killed more people than COVID has, suggests that young people have nothing to fear from COVID, insists that the lethality of COVID was massively exaggerated, hints that it believes mask mandates don't work, dismisses social distancing and other NPIs as "futile", claims that vaccines are ineffective against COVID-19, and quotes extensively from "herd immunity" advocates who called for simply letting everyone get infected naturally. It insists that children are "at very little risk" from COVID, and blames school closures on a "hyper-online Western left" massively overreacting to "a handful of cases". The success of lockdown policies in countries like China and New Zealand is dismissed as nothing more than the magical anti-COVID effects of summer weather. If that's not anti-vax anti-lockdown, then what the hell is?
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Dec 14, 2021 05:04
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Lib and let die posted:Do you have any better suggestions on where I might find reliable anti-imperialist journalism that's Blue Check Approved? This seems like an incredibly bad approach? You want a source that reliably peddles your preferred viewpoint, but there aren't really any that are considered reputable, so you have to settle for this one - even though it also claims that mandatory vaccination is a human rights abuse by libs afraid that horse dewormer will singlehandedly destroy their political empire?
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Dec 14, 2021 19:00
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Lib and let die posted:Well, we have a fundamental issue in that I (and others) have a fairly un-navigable chasm between the models with which we use to evaluate media. That's kind of secondary though, so we'll leave it aside for now. Well, there certainly is a disconnect here. To me, the only acceptable endgame for healthcare reform is one where everyone gets extremely cheap healthcare, and any middlemen who do nothing but jack up the price and collect their cut are booted out of the system (and preferably into jail cells). As such, I want to find sources that share those objectives from a moral and public-health point of view, while keeping a close eye out for fallacies and misdirections such as the types that insurance companies love to deploy when called out on pricing. That doesn't mean that I'm just going to blindly trust any source that preaches Medicare For All regardless of what else they say, though! What if a source calls for nationalized healthcare, the banning of vaccines and surgery, and free Miracle Mineral Solution enemas for everyone? I'm probably gonna close the tab and start looking for a source that deals in facts and data instead! It's also very important to keep in mind that we, personally, are a laymen who don't really know loving anything about these subjects beyond what we've read on the internet. While it's tempting to go out there and broadly proclaim what's true and what's false based on what we've learned from Twitter and Something Awful, it's really easy to get ahead of ourselves and fall into a hole of biased reasoning if we aren't constantly paying attention to the little details and looking for reasons to doubt what we read (even if it's something we're inclined to agree with). When something sounds intuitively right to me and exactly lines up with what I'd expect to be the case, that's when it's most important to scrutinize the source carefully and ensure I'm not being fed some bullshit, because the number one way to shill nonsense is to cloak it in a headline the target audience wants to see. Lib and let die posted:This still doesn't make sense. It speaks to Professor McLuhan's support for the notion that the jester is the only one allowed to tell the truth, and in the modern age that's used to create a "guilt by association" effect - it wasn't all that long ago (this calendar year, even!) that if you were opposed to say, the US military presence in Syria, you were labeled an Assad lover, a genocide denier, and a terminally-online Dore-Brained grifter - as more and more emerges about the OPCW report on the gas attacks, there's less and less linking the attacks to Assad and more and more leaning towards an outside influence wanting to give the impression that Saddam is gassing his own people. I mean, Assad is gassing his own people - sorry - forgot which decade we were in This isn't actually a response to FOS's point in any meaningful way? If a source says some things you agree with, and also some things that are very obviously and blatantly incorrect, then you should start questioning the source's reliability. When you start snarkily remarking that complaints about the factually incorrect stuff are just cover for Them to discount the stuff you agree with, you're straight-up venturing into conspiracy theorist territory right there. Blindly trusting anyone who says anything you agree with, and refusing to doubt them even when they're shown to be wrong on things, is a kind of cult behavior that springs up all across the political spectrum - it's hardly unique to liberals.
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Dec 14, 2021 19:49
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Lib and let die posted:That's a lot of words to not address if it's responsible media consumption to just swallow up whatever state department memo CNN is regurgitating on any given day because it came from Erin Burnett instead of Max Blumenthal. Who said CNN should be taken as an unbiased source on everything? Certainly not me! And who the gently caress said that because GreyZone has issues, it's disallowed to question Capital in any way? That doesn't seem like anything anyone said here! Frankly, this discussion is going loving nowhere until you start engaging with what people actually post, instead of closing your eyes and boxing with the shadows of arguments you saw on Twitter years ago. You're not even trying to have a conversation, you're just ranting and raving about all the times liberals were mean to you in the past.
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Dec 14, 2021 20:33
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Probably Magic posted:I think a lot of this conversation does dance around what gets called a reliable source instead, though, regardless of the Grey Zone veracity. Like, what is a truly reliable source that can be depended upon? This has been referred to at multiple points as a mythical counter to whatever source is pushed by whoever, but never named. There are entire sub-fields of academia dedicated to questions like these. The first page of this thread is a decent primer, even if it doesn't really answer your specific question. What kind of source can qualify as reliable? To me, it depends on what the source is about! For something like a police shooting, the closest one could get to a reliable source is an unaffiliated passerby eyewitness who happened to take video of the scene. For something like a plane crash or building collapse, the closest one could get to a reliable source would be the nonpartisan investigation by the relevant accident board - eyewitnesses often make mistakes in the details of such events, or fail to accurately remember them, and videos can often be misleading. Of course, such investigations usually take months or years to do the detailed analysis they need to reach their conclusions. In the meantime, misinformation and speculation reign supreme; live 24-hour news coverage has made both the media and the viewers dangerously impatient. For something like bombs being dropped from aircraft in a country ravaged by civil war halfway across the world, I'm not sure there can be any such thing as a reliable source. Those kinds of incidents have the same problems as the above, plus an extra-special bonus: no one is recounting those events in English unless they're trying to influence American policy in some way. Everything about that which makes its way to English-language media is intended to influence the Western discourses from the start, and only makes it into English-language media at the behest of numerous layers of translators, advocates, and interest groups all actively working to bring it over, mostly at the behest of governments and organizations with a clear stake in various narratives and interpretations. It's even worse for things like intel agency claims. It's impossible to independently verify something that's secret, and oftentimes the only sources in either direction are the people alleging the secret and the people accused of keeping the secret. At best, it's a question of which side you trust more. It's not even a question of trying to determine how a source's bias may have affected or influenced the underlying facts, we just don't know any underlying facts at all. It's possibly the purest form of "person A says X, person B says Y" in all of journalism, even moreso than celebrity gossip. Of course, in any of these cases, that only applies to the original source, and you do have to find as much as you can about those original sources and be aware of how the story shifts and changes in the hands of reporters. Particularly a problem in science reporting. Lib and let die posted:No one. That is, once again, one of the fundamental issues with this thread: there's no shortage of being scolded as to what bad media or bad actors in media are, but very little discussion on suggesting more responsible media. This seems to be a controversial ask, and I'm not sure why. Why do you need to read any reporting at all? You've clearly already decided what's happened before you even click the headline. That's why, instead of asking for media that's reliably sourced or supported by facts, you're asking for media that consistently supports your preferred viewpoint.
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Dec 14, 2021 21:04
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Probably Magic posted:Would you say that you will take serious only media establishments that counter what Greyzone says because they confirm your own worldview? This whole, "Everyone has a static, unreflective viewpoint except for me," is very tedious and very quick to refute. Again, I want specific names of what an accurate conveyor of information would be instead of inferences of some hypothetical, unnamed one. If you're afraid of providing one because you wisely know that any source of information can be criticized based on some criteria or another, well, then, maybe stop hammering that point. There's no such thing as a 100% accurate purveyor of information. Even a video camera can lie or mislead, and human beings can't help but interpret and rephrase information as they relay it. Moreover, the base information that's being related often has accuracy and bias issues before a reporter ever hears it. As I said before, there are entire sub-fields of academia dedicated to these kinds of questions. No matter how many time you ask for a list of outlets that are categorically beyond criticism in any and all cases, you're gonna be disappointed because that is, frankly, a ridiculous request. This doesn't mean that all outlets are equally bad and we can just believe whatever the hell we want without a care, though! As much as possible, it's important to dig as close to the original sourcing as possible, keeping in mind the original's own potential biases as well as the potential biases of everyone the story passes through on the way to your eyes. As much as possible, it's important to remember nuance, resist hyperbole, and remember to especially distrust outlets that say exactly what you want to hear - when something fits a narrative too well, it's often propaganda.
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Dec 15, 2021 07:07
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Harold Fjord posted:That's the vibe I've been getting from this thread. No source is perfect, but certain sources that happen to line up with certain ideologies are acceptably bad in a way that other sources are not. Those other sources are fully tainted by their badness in all ways, while approved sources should be examined critically and compared to other approved sources. Hey, can you point to where someone said this? Because it sure does seem like people are making up poo poo no one actually posted, and then arguing with those strawmen instead of the actual posts that are being made in this thread. Seriously, there are multiple posters loudly claiming that "this thread" is saying that whether a source is acceptable depends primarily on its ideological leaning. But as far as I can tell, the only person who's even gotten close to saying anything like that is Lib and Let Die. And I don't think they're the one you're trying to argue with here.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:19
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Lib and let die posted:I've claimed that you shouldn't trust sources who simply regurgitate state department propaganda - you can call this an "ideological agenda" all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that uncritically regurgitating state department talking points on a capitalist news network with investors and personalities with close ties to the military-industrial complex and its profit motive is, at best, propaganda, and not news media. Have we all forgotten how quickly the sphere of Trusted Media turned on Biden during the Afghanistan withdrawal? Overnight he went from the most progressive president ever, to a blundering moron who's in over his head in pulling out of Afghanistan - and that was the most favorable coverage! You sound like a conspiracy theorist because you can't have a loving conversation, because while others are trying to discuss nuances and details, you go off on a wild rant about something unrelated every loving time. I've made specific posts about what reliable sourcing looks like in a foreign policy context, but instead of even acknowledging that, you're monologuing blindly like a politics podcast reject.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:44
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Lib and let die posted:Sorry, but maybe I am functionally illiterate - going back through your posts in the thread it seems like your advice is based on completely insane hypotheticals and none of the real world examples I've actually been trying to discuss. Main Paineframe posted:There are entire sub-fields of academia dedicated to questions like these. The first page of this thread is a decent primer, even if it doesn't really answer your specific question.
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Dec 15, 2021 17:08
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Lib and let die posted:I actually agree with most, if not all of this post. Kind of echoing on what Gumball just posted, I also dislike that I have to go to somewhere like Jimmy Dore or the GreyZone to get a counter-narrative to whatever the spooks are pushing through Official Channels. I'd much rather have anti-war allies in far-reaching media like CNN or MSNBC rather than some dudes on Rokfin or YouTube, but the simple matter is - I don't. The closest I'll ever get to that in the current media environment is when Glenn Greenwald goes on Tucker for his once a month flagellation for saying The Right Thing On The Wrong Network, and that's just a cruel mockery of anti-war journalism at that point. I think when it comes to current foreign policy events, there's no truly reliable sources. At best, there's people who try to pick through pieces of motivated info and biased accounts like they're tea leaves to construct an educated guess at what's going on, but I wouldn't really call that reliable, even though it's far better than people who just cherrypick out their preferred take or straight-up make stuff up without even worrying about the sources. Solid primary sources that don't have a blatant interest in a specific narrative often don't become publicly available until years or even decades later, depending on the event. This doesn't mean that we can just believe whatever because it's all untrustworthy - it means we should regard it all with suspicion because none of it is good info. This is something that I think a lot of Westerners struggle with in the modern era: the idea that we can straight-up just not know what's happening. We're so used to cameras on every corner, live-tweetings of every remotely-notable event, and 24-hour news flooding us with info. When something happens in a place where we just have no reliable info at all, it seems like folks have a hard time accepting that...and, in the lack of reliable info, they embrace questionable info instead. No matter how clearly sketchy the info is, people prefer bad info now to good info a year or two (or even a week or two) down the road. Of course, that's a fault shared by the mainstream media, who are just as happy to run to press with unreliable info from certain kinds of untrustworthy or motivated sources even if they can't verify it independently. But blindly running with equally-untrustworthy sources that portray an opposite narrative isn't really a solution. Overall, it's all part of a larger problem: effective public oversight of foreign policy and intel issues is nearly impossible. Much of what happens in those fields is inherently non-public or intentionally hidden from the public.
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Dec 15, 2021 19:39
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Lib and let die posted:So what are the good purveyors of anti-US Imperialism journalism? Historians, mainly. The lack of reliable primary information concerning current ongoing wars in remote areas that don't speak English means that hoping for accurate info is largely futile. Lib and let die posted:So what's a good information mediator on US military activity? The state department alone? There isn't one! That doesn't mean "There isn't one, so you can trust any source you want", though. It means "There isn't one, so give up on any hope of pretending you actually know what's going on and aren't just guessing".
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Dec 16, 2021 19:11
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Gumball Gumption posted:And this would apply no matter the ideology that the media supports, right? Neutral or pro-imperialist sources also have the same problem of trying to report on remote wars in non-english speaking countries if they don't have the resources to go in and talk to native sources on the ground. Yeah, exactly. Government announcements relying on secret information are largely impossible to verify one way or the other. It's not like CNN sent investigative journalists in to personally verify the existence of Saddam's WMD caches. It's not like there's tons of citizen journalists strolling down the street past a sign saying "SADDAM'S SECRET NUCLEAR STOCKPILES, DO NOT ENTER" every day and posting photos on Twitter. And even if there were, there's still the matter of verification, as respectable Western media outlets have been fooled by fake tweets, fake Twitter accounts, or even just real people who were wrong in their interpretation of events. If the only source we have for a claim is the CIA, well, they don't show their work publicly - instead, it gets filtered through several layers of ambitious officials, bureaucrats, and political figures with an agenda to push, only to finally make its way to the public eye in the form of a press release. Typically, the actual sources the CIA got that info from are concealed until long afterward. In the end, at the time, it's unverifiable with the information reasonably available to people who don't have security clearances and need-to-know positions. Typically, it's only later that more info begins to trickle out and more sources begin to be discovered. But even then, that doesn't mean that every source that emerges is necessarily accurate either. Investigations have suggested that intelligence officials in the US and UK deliberately exaggerated or fabricated parts of the public case for the war because they knew much of their evidence was uncertain or inconclusive...but there were also aspects where they had simply believed forged documents or lying informants that told them what they thought the political leadership wanted to hear. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of trust, and the mainstream media inherently trusts the US government on some issues for various institutional reasons. But even if you entirely reject the US government as a source of reliable information, all that really means is that the government claims lack evidence and can't be independently verified. It doesn't magically grant reliable knowledge to those who author rival theories that claim even more certainty despite having far less access to any evidence at all. People tend to fall into conspiracy rabbit holes when they use their distrust of one source or perspective as an excuse to unconditionally trust rival sources or perspectives. Lib and let die posted:And that's, forgive my lack of decorum, like, turbo-hosed. To me, the notion that we simply can't know what's going on in an age where, if properly motivated/enabled, a monitoring agency could be notified every time you took a bowel movement says that this - to borrow a term from Neil Postman - information glut is intentional. Not for some international pedophile enclave (although real-life scandals like Epstein's little operation there don't help this angle), not for some blood-of-the-newborn satanic cult's ritual sacrifice that's going to culminate in the return of satan in the flesh Any Day Now If You Don't Send $100 A Month To Mike MyPillow, but for the simplest, most banal reason of all: money (and by extension, concentration of wealth further in the hands of Those Who Already Have It). Well, yeah, the people who have money can probably spend a hundred million bucks on investigators or mercenaries to go sneak into Iraqi military facilities and do horribly illegal and extremely dangerous things in the course of trying to find out whether he has WMDs. But why would they go through all that trouble only to turn around and tell the public for free? The US yearly intel budget is more than forty times CNN's yearly revenue. Between 24-hour news, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the general proliferation of pocket-sized devices with cameras and constant internet connections, Americans have gotten used to expecting instant news about everything at the tips of their fingers. Spending a whole hour not knowing the cause of a mass shooting leaves people desperately searching through social media for any hint of anything, leading to crowdsourced nonsense taking root. The thing is, public worldwide knowledge of literally every single thing that ever happens is not the default state of affairs. It's not like you'd know exactly what was going on in Iraqi military bases if not for the evil billionaire capitalists covering it up. The problem here is with our own expectations... ...and also with the extreme lack of nuance which lets you somehow make a giant flying leap from "we simply have no way of accurately knowing the exact events of Syrian Civil War massacres" to "just asking questions about Jeff Bezos' stock trades".
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Dec 16, 2021 21:16
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Probably Magic posted:This is a very rosy recoloring of how the news was reported back in 2002. The news agencies weren't just duped, they allowed themselves to be duped. It didn't take much research to throw doubt over known antagonist of Saudi Arabia Saddam Hussain making deals with an Al-Qaeda organization largely funded by Arab sources. Keep in mind Iran was thrown in as a collaborator in all this despite them being Shiite (something the CIA does to this day!) It was a very questionable framework for work that the news media simply did not question. There's a reason for that too - in the documentary Control Room that was mainly about Al-Jazeera, you can find interviews from non-Fox News correspondents bemoaning that Fox News got exclusive access to Bush administration briefings etc. even during the war. That was the MO for the Bush administration in general, and all the other companies were desperately prostrating themselves to buy back in to that kind of access. Actually questioning the war got people fired. That's a bit more than just, "Well, the CIA told us one thing, and what could we do, get our own people to verify that was a lie?" It specifically eliminated criticism of the invasion. I wasn't talking so much about what the news media actually did as I was about what they potentially could have done. I'm trying to cover the actual availability level of evidence, to back my overall point of "there is literally no such thing as credible info on this subject". And I'm doing it in great detail, because every time I say "no, it's actually literally impossible to find a credible source on this subject within this time period", at least one person responds with a variation on "well, what source should I get info on that subject from instead?????". Yes, the American news media handled it irresponsibly; as I pointed out, there's numerous institutional reasons for them to trust the government case on things like that. But I'm trying to drive home "there is no good news source in foreign policy, and anyone who says they know with any certainty what's going on in a secret military base or an ongoing civil war is wrong or untrustworthy", and that's something that goes above the level of individual actors or organizations in one particular incident! Lib and let die posted:Given their performance over the last even 5 years, I don't think it's outrageous to entertain the notion that some of the most disgustingly rich motherfuckers in America have investments in lockheed martin. These are some of the richest people you can conceive of, with the most hyperconnected of financial advisers looking for advantageous market trends - any fiduciary not advising their client to invest in defense companies while the US and its media mouthpieces saber rattle for war simply isn't acting in their client's best interest. I simply don't see it as a stretch for someone like Bezos or Zucker to be enriched through this way when America goes to war (even more, because we've never not been at war as long as I've been alive) There's a far simpler explanation, with plenty of historical context behind it: warmongering is culturally popular and drives up readership. That's why journalists have been implicated in warmongering for more than a century. Hearst and Pulitzer weren't writing more and more sensationalist stories advocating for war against Spain for the sake of defense industry investments. They did it because sensationalism drives anger, and anger sells papers. You should recognize that principle well, because it's exactly how modern media functions, with the same principle of sensationalistic ragebait being the engine that drives the success of clickbait, social media algorithms, and outright propaganda. How common is this practice? Well, just above, I mentioned a guy named Pulitzer as an example of extreme hyperbole and sensationalism? Yes, it's the very same Pulitzer that the Pulitzer Prize is named after. But really, even aside from the sensationalism thing, the government and journalism have always had a close relationship when it comes to warmongering because it's mutually beneficial, especially in the modern era with powerful intelligence agencies. The government needs a cooperative media in order to create public acceptance for war, and the media can get lots of info and opportunities only if it maintains a friendly relationship with the government. It's a similar dilemma to access journalism: that source might not be telling the truth, but if you ignore them completely, your rivals and competitors might be the ones to get not only that scoop but also future potential scoops that person might be willing to give to journalists. Of course, there's also the fact that journalists tend to come from upper-class circles themselves - not necessarily part of the top 1%, but still well-off, highly-educated, and used to rubbing shoulders with the upper-middle class - and absorbing many of their cultural beliefs. Take, for example, Tucker Carlson. While Tucker was attending the most prestigious private grade school in the area, his dad was using his position as a broadcast journalist to out individual trans people in the community. While Tucker was attending a prestigious private boarding school (that's where he developed his love of bowties), his dad was marrying a wealthy heiress and climbing the executive ranks at a bank owned by one of Ronald Reagan's best pals. While Tucker was off at an expensive private college, his dad was serving as director of Voice of America under President Reagan. That's plenty enough reason for him to end up a conservative racist warhawk, we don't need to throw in wild speculation about stuff that we assume must be true despite the absence of any actual evidence supporting it. Hell, his dad spent the 2016 election cycle writing satirical fiction about Hillary Clinton. That's not the act of someone who's in it for the money, that's a true believer right there.
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Dec 17, 2021 00:04
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selec posted:I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what Considering the multiple pedophile scandals that rocked the BBC just a few years ago, and the ongoing inquiries related to that? Even managing to somehow do this completely by accident would still be a sign of there still being serious management and cultural issues regarding the BBC's handling of pedophilia. After just how loving horrifying the BBC's mishandling of the Jimmy Savile stuff was, as well as Stuart Hall on top of that, any even mildly competent organization would be putting a lot more executive scrutiny on their handling of anything even slightly pedophile-related.
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Dec 31, 2021 03:00
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Harold Fjord posted:There are always multiple contributing factors to all things. This feels a lot like "we can't prove any individual storm was specifically stronger because of climate change" argument. Where if a more proximate because exists we can't or shouldn't blame (and as a result we'll never address) something with a broad net impact. You can't paint a picture worth reading if you're using a brush so wide that the strokes barely fit on the sheet of paper you're using. Absolutely refusing to acknowledge the existence of nuance and insisting on making vast sweeping claims about the entire media environment all at once is not particularly useful nor interesting. Whether any specific storm is specifically stronger because of climate change isn't particularly important. It might be mildly interesting for a scientist to dig into the specifics of one storm to measure the impacts and influences as precisely as possible, but throwing out a blanket "climate change makes all storms stronger, no exceptions" is not only a waste of time but also a big loving distraction: storm strength is not the primary impact of climate change, nor is it the primary reason that climate change is bad.
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Jan 1, 2022 00:39
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Cow Bell posted:See this is what I don't get. Why is it reductionist to look at stuff like the profit motive and the fact that most papers are owned by the incredibly wealthy? It may not diagnose any specific problems with reporting (though I would disagree here) but it certainly helps to understand the framework, inherent biases, perhaps the motive behind the reporting in question when you consider something like, "is this rich guy trying to sell me a bad bill of goods?". Maybe I'm begging for another probe by not reading the insanely tedious last 40 pages but I do not see the issue with pointing out that the profit motive exists and may lead to Media Analysis & Criticism based on the fact that the profit motive exists. We live in a capitalist society, so observations like "the profit motive exists" aren't exactly novel. And since they apply to the entire media industry (including sites such as the Grayzone) it's not especially useful in the analysis of individual media outlets, only in the media industry as a whole. Even Max Blumenthal makes a living off being paid for his reporting, and even Max Blumenthal needs to pay for plane tickets and staff salaries. But theorycrafting about which members of a capitalist society are completely beholden to the need for profit and which ones are heroic ideological crusaders who don't give a gently caress about money? That's just wild speculation in service of greater ideological goals. It's pure fanboyism, not fit for any serious debate. On top of that, the single-minded focus on funding tends to be reductionist, and dismissive of the many other factors that go into things. For example, it's been repeatedly asserted in this thread that the mainstream media supports wars because they're war profiteers. As a result, instead of discussing the cultural and social factors behind literally centuries of American jingoism and war-lust, and looking at the influences that led to the rises and falls of this tide of warhawkery over the generations, we're just ignoring history and evidence in favor of blindly repeating the same old Marxism 101 arguments.
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Jan 1, 2022 20:07
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HookedOnChthonics posted:You might be interested in "A Test of the News," in which Walter Lippmann read through the entirety of the New York Times' coverage of the Russian Civil War, comparing their coverage to the recorded history. I'm just gonna quote from the introduction of the book here: quote:The first question, naturally, is what constitutes the test of accuracy? A definitive account of the Russian Revolution does not exist. In all probability it will never exist in this generation. After a hundred years there is no undisputed history of the French Revolution, and scholars are still debating the causes and the meaning of the revolt of the Gracchi, the fall of Rome, and even of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. A final history of the Russian Revolution may never be written, and even a tolerably settled account is not conceivable for a long time. It would be foot- less therefore to propose an absolute measurement of news gathered amid such excitement and confusion. It would be equally vain to accept the account of one set of witnesses in preference to any other set. I think that's a take a lot of us should keep in mind, honestly! It very much agrees with what I've been saying all along. And it's a line of thinking that he continued in his later book, the famed Public Opinion, in which he concluded that "news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished". Before anyone gets too excited, though, he didn't mean that the news was bad or that news organizations were bad. In his telling, the whole idea of trying to figure out which news articles were right and which ones were wrong was Part Of The Problem. He meant that it is literally impossible for journalists to report completely accurate information, and that the general populace shouldn't consider themselves well-informed on an issue and prepared to make judgements on it just because they read some articles. He went on to declare that direct democracy was essentially impossible, and that instead of pretending that it's possible for journalists to convey information to the masses and let the voters decide things, we should just hand control of society over to a bunch of technocratic specialists instead. quote:There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. quote:The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy. It lies in social organization based on a system of analysis and record, and in all the corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis. If at the centers of management there is a running audit, which makes work intelligible to those who do it, and those who superintend it, issues when they arise are not the mere collisions of the blind. Then, too, the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that is also a check upon the press. That is the radical way. For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one. quote:IN real life no one acts on the theory that he can have a public opinion on every public question, though this fact is often concealed where a person thinks there is no public question because he has no public opinion. But in the theory of our politics we continue to think more literally than Lord Bryce intended, that "the action of Opinion is continuous," [Footnote: Modern Democracies, Vol. I, p. 159.] even though "its action… deals with broad principles only." [Footnote: Id., footnote, p. 158.] And then because we try to think of ourselves having continuous opinions, without being altogether certain what a broad principle is, we quite naturally greet with an anguished yawn an argument that seems to involve the reading of more government reports, more statistics, more curves and more graphs. For all these are in the first instance just as confusing as partisan rhetoric, and much less entertaining. He spent the last few chapters sketching out a vision of a world in which society is essentially run via debate club, where the two sides of an issue go into court and argue their cases in front of a neutral mediator who has the relevant government departments and statistics agencies on speed-dial, but I honestly didn't find it that interesting. When it comes to detailed positions on events, though, let's not forget that Walter Lippman wasn't a disinterested observer free of biases either. He was a founding editor at The New Republic, a magazine founded by an investment banker and his old-money heiress wife. He supported American intervention in WWI, including actively working with the Committee of Public Information, the government's pro-war propaganda agency. He was close with one of Wilson's advisers, and after the war he spent some time directly involved in helping craft Wilson's post-war foreign policy. And that's just what he'd done up to the point where he wrote that book.
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Jan 2, 2022 07:55
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Discendo Vox posted:Yes, the person being paid to produce content for a propaganda entity is a propagandist. This isn't complicated. Lots of people get paid to repeat things they actually believe. There's plenty of people who get paid lots of money to go in front of people and honestly express their personal beliefs, which genuinely align with what the group paying them wants to spread. You seem to be angling toward the idea that Russia is incompatible with Rall's beliefs, and therefore it's impossible that he could be going on RT if he truly believed what he claimed. But isn't it entirely plausible that he's simply inconsistent in his beliefs, or that your read on his beliefs' incompatibility with Russia is incorrect? You're making extremely strong (and rather acerbic) assertions about Rall's honesty or beliefs, without anything to back it up beyond restating that he went on RT and was paid. That's really a rather weak support for the claim, especially given that it's of secondary importance here and could easily be dropped.
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Nov 6, 2022 19:33
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