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It isn't clear to me how the modern media landscape is meaningfully worse than it was in the past. The main difference seems to be that in the past there was more of a single/universal "understanding of events/reality" that has fragmented in more recent years (largely due to the internet and social media), but I don't see how that's a bad thing when in the past this "universal understanding" just corresponded to whatever the government and wealthy media corporations' stakeholders wanted people to believe. Discendo Vox mentions how "politicians do not control the media," but seems to misunderstand the mechanisms by which consensus is manufactured and media ends up staying within bounds that are acceptable to those with power/wealth. There is no need for the government to directly order the media to say certain things (though I'm sure this probably does happen sometimes). Media corporations have extremely strong incentives towards and against various behavior. They will virtually always want to behave in a way that is agreeable to at least one of the two major political parties, and they will avoid reporting that threatens the interest of their stakeholders. And this doesn't require some sort of direct malicious intent to deceive - it's easy enough for major media organizations to just end up with dominant ideological perspectives that reinforce themselves over time. There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview. The former isn't even particularly bad as long as the person in question admits when they make mistakes. For a relevant contemporary example, imagine that someone chooses to believe that President Biden should be given the benefit of the doubt and be assumed to be good and well-intentioned by default. This person, when exposed to a bunch of true information, might use that information to arrive at a positive conclusion, because all they require to reach that conclusion is "the mere absence of hard proof that Biden won't do anything good in the future (or stop doing bad things)." If Biden says he plans on creating a task force to study something, this person will interpret that as "Biden is being good on this issue." From their perspective, mistrusting Biden in this situation would be dishonest and cynical. Someone with the opposite assumption - that Biden should be assumed to be bad by default - will see the exact same true information but interpret it differently, because their position requires hard proof that Biden will do good things (as opposed to hard proof that he won't). This person will view the task force as "something that doesn't actually address the issue or even create any clear timeline for doing so." Using the exact same factual information, these two people end up with two completely different conclusions because they're viewing that information through different ideological lenses. The accuracy of individual points in the media ultimately isn't very important, because that usually isn't the main thing that determines peoples' overarching beliefs and actions. The problem has never really been "people are being exposed to wrong facts." Any attempt to judge media on this basis doesn't make sense, when you can instead simply look at what our society and country have done during different eras and their respective media environments. Any judgement of media that arrives at the conclusion that it's meaningfully worse now than it was in the past is using a bad measure of quality that doesn't translate to actual outcomes. Someone thinking that Trump is a crusader executing all the pedophiles may be a particularly extreme and amusing falsehood, but it's transparently less harmful than someone trusting the smart/serious-sounding reporting that Iraq had WMDs. The outcome of the information/reporting is the thing that matters, not "how obviously dumb it is." I think people make the mistake of judging these things through the lens of "how does it influence my opinion of this individual's intelligence" rather than any attempt to actually think of their impact on our society and world.
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Apr 30, 2021 03:50
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fool of sound posted:Inaccurate or deliberately false information leading to good outcomes is, at best, a product of prudent guesswork. Correct information is an inherent good regardless of which filters it has been run through by the time it gets to the recipient. Your example doesn't bear out your thesis, the actual outcome as it affects peoples' lives is unchanged regardless of the recipient's presumption of what the factual statement indicates about future action or lack thereof. You then go on to undermine your own point with discussion of serious people making claims about Iraqi WMDs; those were deliberate falsehoods that directly contributed to a bad outcome! The Iraqi WMD reporting would have been considered true (or at least not false, which effectively = "assumed to be true until proved otherwise") at the time it was being reported by the standards mentioned in this thread. This sub-forum (assuming it existed with its current rules/standards in 2002) would not have considered such reporting to be false. It would only be in hindsight that its falsehood would be revealed to a standard where people would feel free to assert it's false. When reporters wrote of government claims about WMDs, "the government/CIA is saying ______" would be considered a true fact, and it would be impossible to verify the actual claims at the time they were being reported. It isn't hard to find many analogues to this here. If a person or organization viewed as credible says something, people at the very least think it makes sense to assume that it's true absent proof otherwise (proof that generally won't be available until far later, if ever). The reason a person's assumptions are important is that it is very frequently impossible to prove or disprove contemporary reporting (in the sense of "reporting happening at the time you're forming opinions about it," not "modern reporting"). At some point you're having to decide "I trust this person/institution." evilweasel posted:This is basically the core of your post and so I'm going to respond to this. It boils down, in essence, to "if my ideology and the facts disagree, then the facts are wrong." ...no, the point is that facts on their own are meaningless, because the meaning derived from them is dependent upon a person's ideology/worldview (and its accompanying assumptions). People with bad assumptions can (and frequently do) end up coming to bad/wrong conclusions using technically-true information. One of the most frequent examples of this is reporting that relies on the claims of people or institutions (honestly this is most reporting - you're pretty much always relying on the honesty and accuracy of various people or institutions). Such reporting can be 100% free of direct lies while supporting a false conclusion (though frequently there are also lies that are simply impossible to prove - most people obviously don't have the ability to prove whether a public figure or organization is telling the truth about something). At least when it comes to political topics, individual facts are rarely the cause of disagreements. Trump supporters generally don't supporting Trump, Q-Anon, etc because they believe falsehoods - they believe falsehoods because they support Trump/Q-Anon. In this sub-forum, a very common situation (probably the most common source of disagreements) is one where a politician makes a statement or takes an action and people are coming to conclusions about their future actions based off of this. This is obviously and unavoidably a situation where assumptions/ideology come into play. It is impossible to truly prove that something will happen in the future, after all. In most cases, this manifests as some people assuming good of a politician by default and requiring hard proof otherwise. fool of sound posted:The driving factor being profit motive is obviously true but also uselessly reductionist. The way media companies generate revenue and the sorts of completion they have to deal with have changed quite rapidly and traditional outlets have struggled to adapt to the new marketplace. Less important than the profit motive is the simple fact that media organizations ultimately answer to those with power over them (namely their owners and the government). This does not mean that shareholders and the government are directly commanding them to say things, but it means that there's a clear and obvious incentive to not do things that would anger or be harmful towards the interests of those people/institutions.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:59
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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".) 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.
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May 27, 2021 03:09
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Worth remembering too that it came out at a time when Americans had grown up steeped in a bunch of fantastical cold-war narratives and just ridiculously exceptionalist propaganda that was by all accounts, earnestly bought into to an extent that there's no real contemporary comparison for. Injecting some doubt into the ways people related to media was much more novel and at the time even fringe. Now you can go on substack and find 50 different flavors of skeptical counter-narratives from open conspiracy to far right to far left to pro-china to anti-Russian and everything in between. Imo the last time the media ecosystem that Chomsky wrote about was the dominant media paradigm was the early 2000s up to maybe the mid 2000s. The burden is on you and the other people claiming that US media has suddenly transformed into not-propaganda post-Cold War to show that this is the case (especially in light of the fact that we have a massive instance of post-Cold War propaganda in the form of the reporting prior to the Iraq War, plus other really egregious stuff like the way Russia-gate was reported on). It should be transparently obvious that the "null hypothesis" about US media should be that it's not even remotely trustworthy on most issues. The thing you're asserting here is genuinely bizarre. The answer to questions like "who holds power" hasn't really changed in past decades, so why would something like this? Of course, all of this is basically unnecessary, since people should be applying the same standard to all media regardless of source - you should never be blindly trusting media that doesn't provide direct evidence of its claims. This discussion is only occurring because people want an excuse to completely dismiss certain sources and emphasize the authority of other sources. They have an idea in mind of what constitutes "serious discourse," and that idea requires the use of media sources with a certain tone and/or prestige. Herstory Begins Now posted:I like Chomsky and broadly consider him a net positive, but he needs to be understood in light of his own blindspots and especially the big one of 'what is the appropriate level of skepticism and scrutiny to apply when something truly horrible genuinely is happening and it aligns, at least nominally, with american (or chinese/russian for that matter) interests? How do you not end up years later having to explain why you downplayed the cambodian or serbian genocides because you assumed it was being exaggerated as an american casus belli? Also, with regard to this, what are you worried about? Because I can easily tell you what I'm worried about - the US using (frequently false) claims of "human rights abuses" in other countries as a pretext to ruin countless lives, a thing that has happened many times. But I don't understand what your concern is. That some Americans will downplay a foreign crisis, leading to....what?
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Jun 20, 2021 02:04
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hobotrashcanfires posted:Sometimes it's obvious, sometime's it's anything but, more often than not it's just a bunch of cogs twirling about inside a poo poo machine whose only understanding is their life, career, and prospects could be pulverized if they counteract inertia. Yeah, this is basically correct. There are a ton of incentives for media organizations to cooperate with (for example) pushing state-supported narratives and disincentives against reporting that angers powerful interests/stakeholders. There will obviously be exceptions, and there are occasionally conflicts between different stakeholders (a media's owners might disagree with the current presidential administration, for example). But broadly speaking, a media organization usually isn't going to want to report on things that their owners, funders, or major sources (namely the US government) dislike. There's generally no need to be heavy-handed with this, since most of it is simply maintained through inertia, as you mentioned. If you're a reporter, why rock the boat when you can instead stay friendly with the White House Press Secretary? After all, you might lose access if you don't cooperate. It's certainly what I'd do if I were in their shoes and just wanted to live a comfortable, easy life. But more often than not, people who rise up within these organizations are usually simply going to have personal views that don't conflict with owners/etc in the first place, so there's little need for something like top-down censorship. Someone from an upper or upper-middle class background who went to an ivy and then became a reporter at the NYTimes (or whatever) is likely going to already have a worldview that isn't threatening. As a side note, the article Thorn Wishes Talon mentions in their post is - ironically - actually a very good example of "media reporting that you should absolutely not consider trustworthy." It's representative of a LOT of reporting, particularly on issues connected to foreign policy. The article in question literally just references a "US intelligence assessment" and quotes a Pentagon official. That's about as close as you get to "media just acting as a government mouthpiece." It's not even laundered through the system of NGOs that exist to add extra legitimacy to this sort of thing. This doesn't mean that the conclusions of that article are false. It just means that it shouldn't seriously factor into your own opinions about the issue in question.
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Jun 26, 2021 06:16
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Lord of Lies posted:Not necessarily, but it isn't really disputed that media outlets are biased, and Western outlets can reasonably be expected to have a Western bias. Does that bias exist due to influence of corporations and government, though? That's what PM would claim, but no, that cannot be proven. Does the existence of that bias mean that the events in Xinjiang are not genocide? No, it absolutely does not, and if one ever finds themselves viewing media coverage of those events via that lens, that means it's time to pause and reflect on one's own biases. The media outlets themselves are usually corporations/businesses. They are not just collections of independent people. They are private organizations with owners and the goal of making money, and they are subject to the same pressures as any other business. As a result, there are people and organizations with very clear influence over them. Media corporations have an extremely obvious and direct incentive to not act in ways that people/organizations with power over them will be upset with. If a media organization acts in ways that most of the US government dislikes, that's a problem for them. Similarly, they're not going to behave in ways that their shareholders strongly oppose. It is no different than concluding that a think tank heavily funded by conservatives is likely to produce research aligning with conservative ideology. The correct way to think of this isn't "the government and owners/funders tell the media what to say" (though I don't doubt this also happens). It's "media has strong incentives to avoid conflicting with certain people/institutions." Sometimes there are situations where there is a conflict between stakeholders for a media organization, so there are exceptions where reporting might occasionally be opposed by the government. But one can very easily look at the history of US media and see that, far more often than not, it stays within the bounds of what is acceptable to our government and ruling class and agrees with US foreign policy narratives. The only times it doesn't tend to be situations where there's a partisan conflict (like media rarely reporting on Yemen or the conditions of US border camps until Trump was president). And this makes sense - from the point of view of being a business, a media organization is going to want to stay on friendly terms with the government and avoid angering their sources of funding. No one is arguing that you should just automatically assume that reality is the opposite of whatever the media is reporting. That's a strawman you've been forced to use as a weird sort of "god of the gaps" argument ("as long as any examples exist of the media conflicting with the government, it means the media doesn't usually support government narratives"). You and others are the ones actually making radical assumptions here. You're choosing to default to a belief that things the media says are true unless proved otherwise. This is not a reasonable assumption given the history of both US media and media in general - it is the position that requires evidence. The reasonable starting assumption about media should not be that it is independent and reliable - that's the position others should have the burden of defending.
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Jul 2, 2021 03:00
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:You don't want a single framework, you want a toolkit. Requoting the same part from the OP: This is basically a fancy way of saying "if I can find multiple 'good' media sources that don't directly contradict my assumptions about things, it means I'm correct." (never mind how bizarre it is to link a post by some goon like it's an authoritative source) In practice, what generally happens (and in fact is what happened in the discussion about the interaction between CIA/US intelligence and media) is that people have certain assumptions about topics, and this influences what they consider to be "necessary evidence." So to use the earlier example, you have people whose default assumption is "the CIA doesn't do the sort of things it did in the past." Solkanar512, in his earlier post, directly implies that it's ridiculous to use an organization's past actions to predict its current actions (this might sound uncharitable, but there isn't really any other way to interpret that post). This is naturally going to influence what they consider to be "necessary evidence" - they're going to want some sort of recent concrete proof of activities, while the alternative view is going to want completely different proof - proof that the CIA has become a fundamentally different organization than it was in the past. And absent any concrete proof (which is going to frequently, if not usually, be the case when discussing something like contemporary CIA activities), both sides are going to come to completely different conclusions, because they have completely different ideas about the nature and activities of the CIA. Here's a pretty simple summary about how one should actually think about these kinds of issues: - What do I think are reasonable assumptions to make about this issue, and why do I think these assumptions are reasonable? (this is where the actual core ideological differences are) - Based upon these assumptions, what evidence is needed for the claim in question? (this is where the disagreement usually happens in discussion - one side has a different idea of where the burden of proof lies and what sort of proof is necessary) - Then you finally reach the stage of "is the evidence from these specific media sources reliable" This might not be as satisfying for someone who wants to be able to claim they're objectively correct about things, since it requires actually clearly defining one's beliefs and maintaining some level of consistency.
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Jul 30, 2021 22:58
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CommieGIR posted:Wikileaks got the Podesta and DNC leaks from Russia, pretty much undoubted at this point, as part of the Russian strategy they often slip in more incriminating falsified documents to help spread the fire. While there is no exact, direct link to Russia, there's a lot of overlap, and Wikileaks had a fairly comfortable relationship with the Russian government during the DNC leaks, going as far as to not accept leaks against the Russian government itself. If one's concern was actually "is there fake information in the Podesta/DNC leaks," it seems like the part of the article you linked saying quote:"But when the Clinton campaign warned that its hacked emails, posted to WikiLeaks, shouldn't be trusted, it couldn't point to any specific fakes in the collection." might be relevant! It's kind of amusing that people talk about all these devious Russian propaganda strategies, while essentially echoing a perspective of "any leaked information can't be trusted because you can't guarantee it's not part of some foreign propaganda (and no, we can't actually point out the parts that are faked, but some information was faked once before, so really you can't trust anything that isn't printed in government press releases or the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post)" The report cited in two of those links (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/97197/3/Report%2392--Taintedleaks.pdf) even admits that it doesn't really have any clear evidence of anything beyond "the phishing methods were somewhat similar in these different phishing attempts." It mentions that there might just be a "phishing kit" and that many of the people/groups involved in phishing use in similar ways. The key conclusions seem to stem from "this phishing method is similar to others that have been used from sources in the Russian Federation, and Everyone Else is saying it's probably tied to the Russian government so we also think this is probably the case." So not only is the actual underlying evidence really weak with this stuff (it's never proved anything deeper than "there has been hacking/phishing stemming from Russia"), but the whole point of this exercise should be to determine "is the hacked/phished information true or not" (since it's a lot harder to argue that people should just ignore true information, regardless of the motives involved its release!). And if it supposedly isn't true, it's really weird that no one can seem to point out the falsifications in the major leaks actually motivating this sort of research (like the DNC leaks). It's basically just casting the specter of uncertainty over all information that doesn't come from official sources.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:25
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I think a lot of the confusion in this thread and elsewhere is that some people are under the impression that the Leftists (for lack of a better description) are coming to wrong/unreasonable conclusions because they uncritically consume certain media. This is not the case. Those conclusions - whether about the US government, the Democratic Party, or foreign nations - had already been reached for a multitude of reasons and based off of a ton of evidence outside of the context of the specific discussion taking place. So when someone posts a link about a Democrat being bad or something, they did not arrive at this conclusion because of the contents of that link. They arrived at the conclusion due to the entire history of both the political party and our country in general. The link is posted not because the person is 100% sure it's true (something that is usually not possible with contemporary political media, since we can't read politicians' minds or predict the future, and more often than not the sources are just "people saying things"), but because this is a political discussion forum and there wouldn't be much to discuss if people ignored everything that wasn't 100% confirmed. The "Just The Facts" version of recent news is open to a variety of interpretations, and even then is still often full of editorializing. Some people get mad about people interpreting it in a way that negatively reflects on the Democrats, but these same people are choosing to interpret it in a way that always assumes that the Democrats are being honest and generally have good intentions (or at the very least assumes they're ambivalent about the left). Neither of these interpretations can be directly supported with hard/direct proof (with rare exceptions), because it's not possible to read minds. And the thing is, everyone does this. The "non-leftists" (again, ignore the term, you guys know what I mean) aren't going to suddenly get extremely skeptical if someone posts a link about a Republican doing bad stuff. This is because you have an understanding of the Republican Party formed from the history of its politicians' actions. If that specific article is debunked, it doesn't have much bearing on your opinions because your opinions are based off of a much wider body of evidence (and if the source has a strong bias, you probably just don't care because it's a bias you think is correct). It's the same with us. The reason we view both US political parties as being hostile to left-wing goals is "the entire history of those parties and the US government in general." It's not because we read an article by David Sirota that was ungenerous towards Joe Biden. Basically what I'm saying is, it doesn't really matter if someone posts articles that aren't accompanied by hard proof that they're true (or that comes from a "biased" source - which is basically "literally every source people link to"). No one is actually forming their viewpoints from the contents of those articles, and someone can always simply explain how the article is false. Arguments about a particular article/source are really just proxy arguments for a bigger political disagreement that stems from a much bigger range of information. And "unbiased 100% true and reliable" sources don't really exist in the first place, outside of linking directly to legislation text or something (and even then, people might complain if the text is posted via a biased website or Twitter account). Discendo Vox posted:Specific attributes of the the mediating sources of the information have been provided, including a pattern of selective representation and timed distribution, as well as a past pattern of altering mediated information. "Russia bad" has never been the root argument here. I mean, c'mon, I wasn't even the person who was originally talking about this. Scroll up and read. You selectively apply this "critical thought" in ways that exclude the sources you would prefer to avoid scrutinizing. What use is "critical thought" if it's only applied to the things you don't like? The reasons you use for disregarding sources can be applied to literally any mainstream media source (only significantly more so - and with far more significant consequences - than the media sources you feel most comfortable discrediting). This sort of source-centric discussion is not very useful if your goal is to actually understand or come to reasonable conclusions about anything. There is no reason that a source that is openly biased can't also publish true negative information about the thing it's biased against. This obviously also applies to mainstream sources; as far as I'm aware, no one has argued that everything published by the Washington Post should be ignored; just that you should be highly skeptical if (for example) the Washington Post publishes something where the only sources are from the government or NGOs with a direct incentive and history of being dishonest about the topic(s) in question.
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Oct 11, 2021 19:37
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Josef bugman posted:Do you think that stuff like the below opinion piece is an example of "not giving our owner preferential treatment"? This ties into a repeated misrepresentation of what should be extremely obvious, where people will be like "owners aren't dictating everything their companies do" when that isn't how these things usually work. There's rarely a need to directly enforce this kind of thing, because managers/employees are generally going to avoid attempting to publish things that might anger shareholders. People keep acting like journalists must be completely independent if you can't find the written commands of Jeff Bezos himself telling them what to write, when there's no need for such a thing in the first place. Anyone in such a position who cares about their career is naturally going to be incentivized to avoid things that might draw the negative attention of the owners of the organization they work for. This also ties into why media is frequently untrustworthy when it comes to issues related to the US government. Media organizations directly benefit from a positive relationship with the government. It gives them access, and they risk losing that access (which they need to continue to be viewed seriously by broader society) if they anger those who grant it to them. The only exception to this is situations with a clear partisan angle - a media organization might be willing to anger a Republican/Democratic administration if it's in the interest of their preferred political party (since they'll still be assured a high level of access through their positive relationship to one of the two major parties, which will inevitably be in power again at some point). This same (extremely basic) understanding of conflicts of interest also applies to politics, where people will make absurd arguments like "unless you can prove quid pro quo, there's no problem." If a politician is receiving money (or any sort of support) from an industry, there's no need for the industry to explicitly say "we're going to cut you off if you don't do what we want." The politician will simply understand that it's in the best interests of their career to behave in ways that don't jeopardize their important connections (this is also an effective way to determine the limits of what our political parties are willing to do - they will never take actions that will jeopardize one of their major industry relationships). The same applies to businesses, including media ones. Over time, there becomes less of a need to directly enforce anything, since you simply end up with organizations staffed by people who share the perspective of their owners. And not just businesses, but also other organizations that directly rely on donations (if anything, those are often even more vulnerable to this). fool of sound posted:Confusing opinion pieces for actual reporting is indicative of poor media literacy and is one of the things that this thread specifically discusses. The whole fact that people confuse these things is proof in and of itself that they're just as relevant in terms of displaying the biases of the news organization! The fact that people shouldn't treat it in the same way they do reporting doesn't change the fact that they do treat it that way, so it's absolutely relevant if you're discussing the motivations of the media organizations in question.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:19
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:I totally get that there is no substitute for knowing the ins and outs of a particular media environment, that continents are not neatly homogeneous perspectives for a given topic, that confirmation bias exists regardless of the diversity of sources yours exposed to, and so on. That said, I do appreciate the effort in what you're saying. It might just make sense to look up various major news sources in whatever country you're interested in (as well as minor ones if you're looking for a specific sort of different perspective) and then do the machine translation. Though as Discendo Vox mentioned, there's not going to be any reasonable/easy way to do this for a really big country, unless you're just looking for the broadest of strokes.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:45
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DTurtle posted:Do you have anything specific to point to here? For one, I find ArsTechnica to be one of the better tech news outlets out there. And for another, one problem with Tesla is that they do not have a PR department. So there is no one for the media to officially talk to. The main issue here is that enthusiast sources are frequently very credulous with their reporting on the topic(s) they focus on (and as Discendo Vox mentioned, this seems to be exceptionally bad in tech reporting). I think it's a combination of a couple things. One is that the people who choose to do such reporting already have a preexisting perspective on the topic of their reporting - they want tech stuff to be cool and exciting, and will be inclined to just credulously believe stuff that sounds cool. The other is that they have direct business incentives to report in this way. Not only will readers be less interested in reporting that says "maybe Tesla is full of poo poo about ______," but companies will be less willing to give access to media orgs that don't treat them positively*. If you want the high-profile interviews with the leaders of X company, you're going to want to report on them in a way they approve. And there's also the fact that you can do "technically true" reporting that is still extremely misleading. Like if a company issues a press release where they're completely full of poo poo, a media org can report on this as "company says X" without challenging any of their claims. I think this happens a lot with Tesla specifically - Musk or Tesla will make claims that are transparently complete nonsense intended to pump the stock price (like the recent thing with the "Tesla bot"), but the media still treats them seriously. * This is also an issue with news media in general with regard to political reporting. They have an incentive to not anger the government (or at least both major political parties - they're okay as long as one likes them), so they might just lose access to interviews, press events, etc.
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Nov 12, 2021 03:55
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I mean, breaking down lovely articles from mainstream sources would actually be great. "Look at how CNN hired an ex-director of the CIA! This proves they are a part of the propaganda machine!" is dumb as balls. When people point things like out, they're not doing so as "proof this media organization (or political party, etc) is bad." The judgement about the organizations/people in question has already been made based off of a bunch of other facts/context. The easiest to understand analogy is probably the way you might talk about Republicans. If you post a news article about some Republican being connected to some bad person/organization, or indicating they might have done something bad, you're not posting it to prove to other people that the Republican Party is bad, right? That's something that you understand to be true based off of a ton of other information, and the media piece in question is not necessary to that understanding. If some specific reporting isn't true (or more likely just has some ambiguity or isn't proof on its own), it doesn't affect your opinion about the Republican Party (or Trump or whoever), because that opinion has a much broader basis to it than a particular news story. It's the same with situations like this. A lot of arguments here stem from this misunderstanding. Someone posts something and other people respond to it as if the poster's intent was to use the thing they posted as proof of something. This is not the case. There's just a difference in assumptions about the world that influence how people interpret and engage with information. If you don't already think that person/organization is bad, it's going to matter much more to you whether you can "debunk" (or at least cast some doubt on) a media piece indicating otherwise (because it's running contrary to your starting beliefs). And you might think that someone else is acting in bad faith when they don't change their own opinions in response to this, even though that isn't the case (because the media piece in question was never integral to their perspective). So with something like "an organization hiring an ex-director of the CIA," the person posting it probably isn't posting it as all-encompassing proof of anything. It's just one data point among a long history of other information. Sort of like how you'd probably think about a Republican Senator hiring someone who used to be a director at a gay conversion facility; in and of itself it isn't hard proof that they're homophobic, but in the greater context of their career and the history of the Republican Party it's easy to ascertain the relevance of it. For something like "the nature of major US media as propaganda," there'd need to be an actual serious discussion about the broader topic (that includes information outside the scope of a single article), but that's obviously considered outside the scope of this thread (which seems to just focus on either individual pieces or theory/hypotheticals).
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Dec 30, 2021 07:47
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Discendo Vox posted:A war of unfalsifiable declarations of prior ideological commitments immune to criticism isn’t compatible with good faith discussion. While I'm not sure if you're referring to what I posted, there's obviously room for debate on the different ideological assumptions people have, but it's usually outside the scope of this thread (or Current Affairs for that matter, and this thread was basically prompted by peoples' posting in Current Affairs and its predecessors). This is relevant, because, more often than not, the complaint made about some article isn't "this article is factually wrong" but instead "this article doesn't necessarily prove the point (or implied point) of the person who linked it." Your issue usually seems to be something along the lines of "this person is saying/implying X, but the article they linked is not proof of X." Right? But that's rarely why they're posted. These articles are usually posted in the Current Affairs thread, which is just a "discussing recent events" thread that is explicitly not about discussing broader views about ideology/government. So you end up with a sort of proxy war where the only allowable "weapons" are recent news articles and anything beyond that is outside of the "rules of engagement." (To be clear, I'm not implying this is bad - I understand why this is done, since things would just descend into a Thunderdome situation otherwise.) The reason why I made the comparison with the way people discuss news about Republicans is because it's directly analogous and an easy way to demonstrate that this is something that applies to everyone involved. You know drat well that you and most others won't complain about random negative articles posted about Republicans (despite there being many contemporary instances of egregiously horrible reporting on Russiagate-related issues by the most well-regarded media organizations). This is probably because you don't think it matters much, since you (usually not wrongly) already believe the Republicans are bad due to a large amount of other information/context. Even if a particular article about Trump (or whoever) being bad isn't that convincing or has some misleading elements, it doesn't trigger the "I need to push back against this" feelings, because "people thinking badly of Trump/Republicans" isn't exactly something worth being concerned about. Even if a specific article isn't a smoking gun, there's no actual doubt about who Trump is, so the gist is correct. All of this - deciding what matters and what warrants being contested - stems from ideology. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Dec 30, 2021 |
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Dec 30, 2021 20:07
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I think that one issue with the way people discuss the topic of "media literacy" is that "the correct interpretation of individual media items" isn't exactly the most important thing. Much more important is the ability to derive a viewpoint from the full context of existing history/information (which obviously includes media past and present). Only after that can you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions from a new piece of media. So you can do a perfect job of filtering all bad information from your media consumption and still end up believing a lot of really wrong things, because any meaningful or significant political belief is going to depend upon a much wider variety of information than "whatever media I've looked at recently." It's for this reason that I think opinions like the ones in the OP that amount to "misleading headlines and tweets are making people be dumb and have bad politics" are misguided. Those things do matter! I'm not saying it's good when someone reacts to a misleading Twitter headline. But they aren't exactly the main source of wrong or harmful political beliefs. This is why you can't really separate media literacy from broader political/ideology views. Whether you interpret a piece of media correctly is dependent upon how your broader worldview. For a simple example, if you read an article where a Republican claims to oppose a bill because they're concerned about the deficit, your interpretation of this article is dependent upon the understanding - gained from the much broader context of past Republican behavior - that Republicans are obviously not being genuine when they claim to care about the deficit. Media literacy in this situation - and most others, especially in the realm of politics - is dependent upon a broader base of knowledge. You can't debate the accuracy of such a media article without drawing from a much broader context. Ideology isn't something separate from "media literacy" - it's something that should be derived from information both past and present (obviously including media). While it's always been an issue, this is a particularly big problem in the current media landscape, where we're constantly bombarded by new media stories/events. Everyone (and I'm not excluding myself from this, though I try to at least be conscious of it) is constantly responding to the latest story/stories. There's never really any time in "the discourse" to incorporate the latest news into any sort of deeper understanding. Some people respond to this by trying to put all this information they're bombarded with through a "filter" where only the correct and reliable information remains, and while this is better than nothing, it's still missing the forest for the trees. Most important conclusions about US politics can be derived fully from historical context, and you can't have any meaningful discussion about the topic when limiting yourself to just the "data points" that showed up in the news in the last 1-2 years.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:01
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