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Necrobama posted:Yup, you're 100% right on the publication name - that's what I get for posting at the end of a long day of air travel. Mea culpa. Okay, but if you're referring to the reason he was booted from the Intercept, it was because he wouldn't tolerate edits to an editorial he later posted on his Substack that ended up being factually wrong, all because he clearly wanted it to be true that there was a big media coverup that only he saw. That's just basic malpractice.
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May 1, 2023 05:22
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Lightly updated from the media lit thread OP material I'd provided before, since we're speedrunning the relativism and anti, uh, "gravitas" arguments...quote:“Think for yourself” doesn’t mean rationalize more
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May 2, 2023 04:04
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Most of what you quoted seems to be inveighing against an imagined foe who is somehow both a relativist but also sees the world strictly in terms of good and bad. You frequently scold unnamed interlocutors for reducing press outlets to "good and bad", but also decry relativism or applying a universal standard of skepticism. It's not very insightful to say that people should exercise judgement, but exercise it correctly. This doesn't doesn't seem to be useful advice, but the rest of it does raise some interesting questions. Are there risks to be concerned about other than active malice? Why is "'crit' theory" in scare quotes? It's hard to discuss the role of journalism or reporting without reference to the field. Are you referring to a specific theory here? In what shared way do the Intercept and RT say or imply that it's the only source of truth? How does that differ from, say, Propublica? How does it differ from "All the news that's fit to print" or the implications of "Democracy dies in darkness"? Is there a reason why you mention the Intercept, whose reporting is well-respected, in the same breath as RT, who is not?
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May 2, 2023 04:54
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Cease to Hope posted:Most of what you quoted seems to be inveighing against an imagined foe who is somehow both a relativist but also sees the world strictly in terms of good and bad. You frequently scold unnamed interlocutors for reducing press outlets to "good and bad", but also decry relativism or applying a universal standard of skepticism. It's not very insightful to say that people should exercise judgement, but exercise it correctly. This doesn't doesn't seem to be useful advice, but the rest of it does raise some interesting questions. You can go to the media lit thread and relitigate all of those questions again, if you want. I'm not going to repeat the same back and forth with you here and pretend you didn't already try it there.
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May 2, 2023 06:39
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I asked those questions because they seem particularly relevant to the topic at hand. Framing the failings of the press only in terms of malicious actors is polarizing. Helpful if your political goals or business model benefit from inflaming the audience! But I do think there are other sources: simple error, unconscious bias, self-censorship (to avoid criticism, or liability, or loss of access, or indeed stochastic or official harassment), a desire to adhere to convention, socioeconomic factors dictating who is allowed to do the work, etc. Critical theory is obviously relevant here. I was wondering what causes of failures you saw beyond willful deceit, because it does seem to me that those failures increasingly erode people's trust in the media in general. Similarly, I'm curious what framing you feel is intended (or has the unintentional effect?) to encourage the reader to be suspicious of other sources of news. You seemed to have your sharpest criticism for RT and the Intercept, so I focused on those rather than, say, Fox News, the National Review, or Zerohedge. In particular I am curious about your thoughts on how the Intercept compares with Propublica, which has a similar reporting focus and mission statement (if very different structure). I wonder what the role of reporting-with-a-mission is, as generalized reporting of the day's notable events becomes more centralized. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 07:52 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 07:37
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To bring up a different argument: Platform economics seems to have moved toward centralized platforms that actively bucket audiences, rather than letting links or shares drive engagement (thus solving the problem that click-driven engagement has proven difficult to monetize, outside of a certain brand of loony apocalypticism. You know the kind). That is to say, Tiktok segmented advertising trumps Instagram engagement, and influencer pay-per-action campaigns trump social media pay-per-click campaigns. One is back to content programming with a technological twist. We may be in a period where the Adwords PPC era is slowly disintegrating but newer centralized organizations have not yet fully coalesced to take advantage of the new dynamic, both on the "supply side" (civic interest groups or other stakeholders that want to mobilize a message) and the "demand side" (audiences that might be interested in such messages in their media feeds). This may substantively alter how journalism production in the particular is impacted.
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May 2, 2023 08:33
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We don't need two parallel threads on the same topic, and we especially don't need to be quoting the other thread to steer the conversation here. While there is certainly going to be some overlap, please keep posts here relevant to the main topic of "a viable model of journalism".
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May 2, 2023 09:05
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Inferior Third Season posted:We don't need two parallel threads on the same topic, and we especially don't need to be quoting the other thread to steer the conversation here. While there is certainly going to be some overlap, please keep posts here relevant to the main topic of "a viable model of journalism". Would it be too god damned much to ask for to see DV eat more than a token sixer for their consistency in speaking down to other posters as though the simple act of questioning him were a personal offense?
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May 2, 2023 14:06
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Cease to Hope posted:I asked those questions because they seem particularly relevant to the topic at hand. I'd echo almost all of this verbatim, especially given that The Intercept is one of the few outlets that's actually done much of a deep dive into the tech layoffs that happened at the beginning of the year, and spoken directly to impacted employees. Ms. Lacey there has been doing phenomenal work covering the tech software sector and I'm curious what exactly is wrong with it.
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May 2, 2023 15:30
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Related to Vice - Patrick Klepek mentioned that Waypoint being shut down wasn't because they weren't profitable (they ran in the black extremely stably basically since it's inception), it was only canned because they weren't bringing in year after year growth. https://twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/1652841557521735680 Ultimately I think probably the biggest blight upon journalism (and a lot of entertainment industries in general) is the investor demand for growth over something quietly stable and profitable.
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May 2, 2023 15:31
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Necrobama posted:I'd echo almost all of this verbatim, especially given that The Intercept is one of the few outlets that's actually done much of a deep dive into the tech layoffs that happened at the beginning of the year, and spoken directly to impacted employees. Ms. Lacey there has been doing phenomenal work covering the tech software sector and I'm curious what exactly is wrong with it. The Intercept also did incredible work in disclosing the government's secret censorship tribunals, although it was pretty much roundly ignored. Sample graf: quote:In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”
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May 2, 2023 15:50
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Willa Rogers posted:The Intercept also did incredible work in disclosing the government's secret censorship tribunals, although it was pretty much roundly ignored. It's terribly unfortunate that our resident expert in dem campaign fundraising and financing got run off the forums because it'd sure be a boon to the community if someone within the company was able to comment on a story like this one: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/23/saudi-arabia-democratic-party-campaign-ngp-van/ Perhaps Vox is simply making the very mistake w/r/t The Intercept that he warns others against: quote:and all too often it means rejecting good sources that are just communicating challenging or unappealing information. It may be unappealing to read that the dem's GOTV and voterfile database is now just another ledger in a private equity firm's catalog rather than an organic tool of the Democratic party, but just because one might not like that conclusion that isn't carte blanche to write the reporting off. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 2, 2023 16:02
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T Zero posted:I think this is an interesting dilemma. And I actually do kinda agree with twitter's stance on labeling outlets NPR as "government" funded, though NPR obviously has a few layers of abstraction and isn't as directly funded as, say, Al Jazeera. On one hand, if you have media funded by a democratic government, you can have outlets with a public service mission at their core. On the other, it can be an even greater instrument of Chomsky's propaganda model for news by circumscribing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. I'm stuck on the end of this and I really think the question is "can you make money with the news?" And the answer feels like no and also you never could. Profitable newspapers never sold you the news. They sold you a place to publish and read information. The product was their platform of the newspaper and the internet has superseded that in a lot of ways. Now that advertisers have many more options and the platform itself is free they're back to selling just the news and that doesn't sell.
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May 2, 2023 16:03
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Necrobama posted:It's terribly unfortunate that our resident expert in dem campaign fundraising and financing got run off the forums because it'd sure be a boon to the community if someone within the company was able to comment on a story like this one: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/23/saudi-arabia-democratic-party-campaign-ngp-van/ Who or what are you even arguing against here? Did anyone say anything bad about the Intercept? Or does this have something to do with how the Intercept makes money? This feels like yet another thread turned into "yell at the evil dems"
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May 2, 2023 16:14
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socialsecurity posted:Who or what are you even arguing against here? Did anyone say anything bad about the Intercept? Or does this have something to do with how the Intercept makes money? This feels like yet another thread turned into "yell at the evil dems" I was building off of this post: Cease to Hope posted:Similarly, I'm curious what framing you feel is intended (or has the unintentional effect?) to encourage the reader to be suspicious of other sources of news. You seemed to have your sharpest criticism for RT and the Intercept, so I focused on those rather than, say, Fox News, the National Review, or Zerohedge. In particular I am curious about your thoughts on how the Intercept compares with Propublica, which has a similar reporting focus and mission statement (if very different structure). I wonder what the role of reporting-with-a-mission is, as generalized reporting of the day's notable events becomes more centralized. I don't care to actually go digging through DV's post history, so I am operating under the good faith assumption that CtH is not simply making things up about DV.
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May 2, 2023 16:21
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Necrobama posted:I was building off of this post: This ironically circles back to the issue of "people just want to read the headline" DV posted a single Intercept article in that thread that was bad. He then posted dozens of times about how just because a place posts a bad article or has weaknesses doesn't mean it's a useless source of information. So trying to "own" him with good articles from the Intercept just proves the point he was trying to make in the first place. Which leads to the problem journalism seems have, people mostly only care about headlines and outrage not what actually happened or reading any sort of actual article describing the situation, certainly not enough to pay for it.
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May 2, 2023 16:41
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socialsecurity posted:This ironically circles back to the issue of "people just want to read the headline" DV posted a single Intercept article in that thread that was bad. He then posted dozens of times about how just because a place posts a bad article or has weaknesses doesn't mean it's a useless source of information. So trying to "own" him with good articles from the Intercept just proves the point he was trying to make in the first place. So would you agree then, that it's not enough to write off say, journalists with anti-interventionalist biases simply based on which platform was willing to elevate them?
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May 2, 2023 16:47
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https://twitter.com/YahooNews/status/1652390098166509572 I was kind of dismayed to see a bunch of people dogpiling this idea because it's another gently caress Elon feeding frenzy, but this is basically the idea I was talking about earlier, and Twitter would've been the ideal platform to test it on. Not anymore, now that Musk has completely destroyed the credibility of Twitter both in real terms by transferring verification from news organizations to literally the dumbest people on the planet, and in reputational terms. Also Elon has never successfully implemented anything he's promised for Twitter, so I don't expect outlets to sign on or for the feature to be offered at all. But if Twitter was run like a real company I think this would've been a good idea.
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May 2, 2023 16:58
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Necrobama posted:So would you agree then, that it's not enough to write off say, journalists with anti-interventionalist biases simply based on which platform was willing to elevate them? Why don't you just get to the point/accusation you obviously want to make here? Are you upset that someone doesn't believe some RT article or something? I think there's room in the topic to discuss that kind of thing because at the rate things are going maybe state ran propaganda outlets might be one of the few traditional media left.
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May 2, 2023 17:11
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/YahooNews/status/1652390098166509572 It would be interesting to see but I have to imagine that the population this would extract value from is minimal. At best it creates a psychological effect where people associate more value to a subscription as a result of individual article prices. Otherwise it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that news aggregators and sensationalist headlines have created. In other news Vice is going bankrupt and nobody wants to acquire - which seems to me that the reputation a news source builds up is worth very little - one news source is likely as good as the next to the majority of people. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/business/media/vice-bankruptcy.html
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May 2, 2023 17:37
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WarpedLichen posted:It would be interesting to see but I have to imagine that the population this would extract value from is minimal. At best it creates a psychological effect where people associate more value to a subscription as a result of individual article prices. Otherwise it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that news aggregators and sensationalist headlines have created. I mean like paying $0.25 to read the latest Chotiner throat cutting without having to sub to the New Yorker. I probably run into a "give us your email" or "you are out of free articles this month" a couple of times a day. I don't know if that's a viable revenue model or not, if Twitter was still a public company I think it'd be a good test of the concept, but under Elon's rule it will not be.
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May 2, 2023 17:46
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Necrobama posted:Would it be too god damned much to ask for to see DV eat more than a token sixer for their consistency in speaking down to other posters as though the simple act of questioning him were a personal offense? please stop trying to get someone i'm trying to have a conversation with probed, thanks Willa Rogers posted:The Intercept also did incredible work in disclosing the government's secret censorship tribunals, although it was pretty much roundly ignored. this is an odd description of a project that is described in the second para as a failure that never got past the planning stage. it's also not a very good article, relying on tangents and innuendo in a way that distracts from clearly explaining what happened and what is still happening. good reporting but bad writing, it happens. (it's also fascinating in the wake of the "twitter files" nonsense, that the project's influence on social media chiefly took the form of censoring revenge porn of hunter biden.) i don't think it's helpful to hold tribunal in this thread over accusations of discarding a site out of hand because of bias. everyone does it, and everyone should do it! i have no interest in either zerohedge or the national review except insofar as i'm occasionally curious about the sorts of things their audiences are reading. it's possible to read them adversarially to glean specific facts of interest, but frankly i have better things to do most of the time. it's also easier to see the flaws of arguments you disagree with, of publications that don't flatter your own biases. doing that can help you see the flaws in the publications you do agree with, both to better your own ability to recognize misleading or incomplete reporting (which can happen even in great reporting!), or understand why people find an outlet unpalatable. i don't think it's likely that the intercept is very much like RT, or that either of them are why news media is in an overall decline. but please, at least let people make the case before jumping into the same boring feeding frenzy, okay? what willa thinks about what vox thinks is not an interesting or informative post, i think. it's much more informative to find out what people who disagree with you think that to pre-emptively maneuver to prevent having to hear anything you disagree with.
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May 2, 2023 21:38
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zoux posted:I was kind of dismayed to see a bunch of people dogpiling this idea because it's another gently caress Elon feeding frenzy, but this is basically the idea I was talking about earlier, and Twitter would've been the ideal platform to test it on. Not anymore, now that Musk has completely destroyed the credibility of Twitter both in real terms by transferring verification from news organizations to literally the dumbest people on the planet, and in reputational terms. Also Elon has never successfully implemented anything he's promised for Twitter, so I don't expect outlets to sign on or for the feature to be offered at all. But if Twitter was run like a real company I think this would've been a good idea. Ideally, twitter and the substack notes/mastadon/bluesky clones would harness the current moment to try out a bunch of different monetization models. Gumball Gumption posted:I'm stuck on the end of this and I really think the question is "can you make money with the news?" And the answer feels like no and also you never could. Profitable newspapers never sold you the news. They sold you a place to publish and read information. The product was their platform of the newspaper and the internet has superseded that in a lot of ways. Now that advertisers have many more options and the platform itself is free they're back to selling just the news and that doesn't sell. Good point, though I think "never sold you the news" may be overstating it. If you look at some "pure news" products out there, namely industry trade journals, business intelligence, and newswires, those can be pretty stable and profitable, depending on the sector. They depend on a dedicated audience willing to pay a premium for information, but those audiences exist. Witness the Bloomberg media empire with its half-dozen subscription products, mostly without ads. And the fact that during emergencies and disasters most newspapers drop their paywalls I think shows that they are selling the news otherwise. Also, if we expand beyond newspapers, some forms of news media were historically quite profitable. 60 minutes is CBS' most profitable show ever ( https://theweek.com/articles/528690/legacy-60-minutes) . To your point, yes it was likely because it was a great vehicle for ads, but it's the information in the show that gave the platform its value. Maybe it's useful to frame the question more narrowly - Can you turn a profit selling the news to a general audience? Or, can the news media profitably perform a public service mission? I think you can, but it requires some shielding from the predations of capital: DeathSandwich posted:
I think the ongoing WGA writers strike is an interesting parallel. Entertainment companies are also struggling to stay afloat and their writers are trying to cope with changing landscape and business model. I believe WGA also represents some journalists, but I don't believe many of them are involved in the strike. T Zero fucked around with this message at 04:14 on May 4, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 04:11
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the social media sites and google are the rentiers choking journalism to death. i don't think them becoming payment middlemen in a different way is going to save anything.
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May 4, 2023 05:58
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T Zero posted:Ideally, twitter and the substack notes/mastadon/bluesky clones would harness the current moment to try out a bunch of different monetization models. Yeah, I should be more clear in that I think unbiased news is hard to sell. Biased news and sensationalism sells. 60 minutes is honestly a good example of that since so much of their success was built on being an exciting hard hitting news investigation show compared to the stately news programs of the time. And for everything they get right they seem to have a pile of sensationalist panics to balance it out. They're famously one of the catalysts for the satanic panic in the 1980s. The success of print journalism as we think of it was their control of the platform and otherwise if we look at news it's hard to sell unbiased and unspecialized news.
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May 4, 2023 06:32
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a viable model of journalism (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 10, 2023 02:36
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From CJR's most recent issue: Survival Guide Advice for navigating digital media’s upheaval This contains a bunch of brief statements from people in news media trying different approaches, and giving different suggestions for how journalism can move forward and exist. Some of these are quite unusual and may help restart discussion. edit: vvv I have no idea what you're talking about. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Dec 3, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 23:16
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i am not finished reading this but extremely lol that this was obviously copy and pasted out of people's response emails without fixing up their horribly ugly formatting before publishing
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Dec 3, 2023 00:47
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T Zero posted:To this forum I pose the following questions: T Zero posted:How do you support people doing the kinds of journalism you find valuable? T Zero posted:Do you pay for any forms of media? Why? Or if you used to, what made you stop paying? T Zero posted:Do you have an idea for a media business model? T Zero posted:What's an obscure or non-mainstream source of news you found to be useful or reliable? T Zero posted:Should there be government funding for media a la BBC? Or a bailout for ailing local news outlets? T Zero posted:How do you think the news media industry will actually shake out over the coming years? I also read one person on Substack, Jason Pargin (AKA David Wong, formerly of Cracked.com), but that's free - he's happy to remind everyone that he's primarily an author of fiction and his Substack / email newsletter is basically an advertising vehicle for his books. I've poked around Substack once or twice to see if there's anything there I might like, but all I have found is execrable garbage.
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Dec 4, 2023 07:44
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T Zero posted:To this forum I pose the following questions: T Zero posted:How do you support people doing the kinds of journalism you find valuable? T Zero posted:Do you have an idea for a media business model? T Zero posted:What's an obscure or non-mainstream source of news you found to be useful or reliable? T Zero posted:Should there be government funding for media a la BBC? Or a bailout for ailing local news outlets? T Zero posted:How do you think the news media industry will actually shake out over the coming years?
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Dec 4, 2023 19:24
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Discendo Vox posted:Yes. CPB exists, and should be funded at levels vastly beyond the current rate. their budget for last year was $17.5 billion dollars, don't you think that's enough? the corporation for public broadcasting has a budget of $0.465B, so yes, definitely. 34 states also fund public broadcasters. technically public universities funding public broadcasting counts too but that would be a lot of research and i am lazy
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Dec 4, 2023 20:30
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I would support $17.5 billion in federal funding for CPB.
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Dec 4, 2023 21:49
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ExecuDork posted:
Australia is an interesting case study. They passed a law last year that forced Google and Facebook to pay about $200 million per year, which then used to fund news outlets. I'm wondering if you've noticed any effects on the media you follow in Australia. : https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/australia-pressured-google-and-facebook-to-pay-for-journalism-is-america-next.php quote:The legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, has enabled Australian news organizations to extract more than $200 million (almost $150 million US) in the year since it went into effect. As a result, the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country, while the McPherson Media Group, which publishes such papers as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and the Deniliquin Pastoral Times, expects tech money to fund up to 30 percent of editorial salaries. Monica Attard, a journalism professor in Sydney, says she can’t persuade many students to take internships these days because it’s so easy for them to land full-time jobs—and that change coincides with the gusher of code money: “I swear to God, I have not seen it like this in twenty years.” Canada recently passed a similar law: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/google-online-news-act-1.7043330 Probably too soon to tell, but I'm really curious how forcing platforms and gatekeepers to pay for content will shake out.
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Dec 8, 2023 02:13
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I haven't been paying enough attention to Australian media companies (public or private) to be able to contribute any insights into this change. I'm Canadian, in Australia for about 5 years, so the Canadian laws are also very interesting to me. But, I haven't paid any attention to any Canadian media since I cancelled my subscription (dead tree version) to The Globe and Mail in about 2006. My wife was a regular CBC radio listener and still listens to a few of their podcasts pretty regularly, including Front Burner, which is a daily podcast about current events. They broke the news about Buffy Sainte Marie's identity questions (working with the CBC investigative TV journalists at The Fifth Estate), for example. The surge of money going to Aussie outfits is interesting. I'm in a regional city of only about 25000 people and the major local news is almost entirely ignored by every Australian news organisation other than the local newspaper, which imposes a rigid paywall on everything other than article headlines. Those headlines are deliberately crafted to omit key details of the story but hint that you'd learn what you want to know if you pony up the dough. And the stories are never picked up by any other organisation later, so in effect there's a monopoly on local news here. I can only assume there are similar urban / rural divides in news access, along with everything else.
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Dec 8, 2023 05:57
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Discendo Vox posted:Lightly updated from the media lit thread OP material I'd provided before, since we're speedrunning the relativism and anti, uh, "gravitas" arguments... I wouldn't regard the Intercept as a bad source at all and while RT is Russian state media, I think it has its uses as a comparison to American corporate media. Russia is lovely but they are not the sum of all evils. I am particularly appalled by their treatment of the LGBT community and its choice to invade Ukraine rather than using some other method, for instance. On foreign policy though, they are also up against American Empire and all of its cruelties, including genocide, abusing 3rd world debt to impose pro-business policy on less powerful countries, sanctions that starve people, and most importantly for this thread, a compliant mainstream media that it pressures in to doing stenography for the pentagon and state department. They didn't invade Ukraine for no reason at all or because Putin is the new Hitler. Folks over at C-spam gave me a perspective I had not considered, that the Euromaidan protest was an illegitimate coup against a democratically elected leader by a minority of the country situated in the west, that was stirred up at least in part by the CIA. I feel that RT, for all its flaws is a useful counterweight to US corporate media, as long as it is in moderation, and used in comparison to US media, which has blind spots. We should see more than one side to the story.
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Dec 10, 2023 18:18
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Zoeb, you should read all of the exchange that followed my post.Zoeb posted:I wouldn't regard the Intercept as a bad source at all and while RT is Russian state media, I think it has its uses as a comparison to American corporate media. No. RT is, demonstrably, by design, a state propaganda outlet which works to sabotage and undermine the ability of viewers to participate in civic discourse, including through the spread of disinformaton. It is not a good source of information or a contrast to "American corporate media", a term too broad, too vague, and too inaccurate to meaningfully inform beliefs or practices. There's plenty of sources of information that aren't "corporate" or aren't "American" without using the actively disingenuous source of information. The point of the part of the post you've focused on is communicating that a part of the disingenuous appeal made by both the Intercept and RT is to present the claim of hidden knowledge, which is a very bad source indicator because they are encouraging privileging their framing and mediation over others. On the Intercept, from the earlier exchange: socialsecurity posted:This ironically circles back to the issue of "people just want to read the headline" DV posted a single Intercept article in that thread that was bad. He then posted dozens of times about how just because a place posts a bad article or has weaknesses doesn't mean it's a useless source of information. So trying to "own" him with good articles from the Intercept just proves the point he was trying to make in the first place. Zoeb posted:Russia is lovely but they are not the sum of all evils. Russia does not need to be the sum of all evils for you to recognize that their propaganda outlet is not a good source of information. Zoeb posted:I am particularly appalled by their treatment of the LGBT community and its choice to invade Ukraine rather than using some other method, for instance. On foreign policy though, they are also up against American Empire and all of its cruelties, including genocide, abusing 3rd world debt to impose pro-business policy on less powerful countries, sanctions that starve people, You really, really need to learn what Russia is doing with its own foreign policy and what it is actually attempting to accomplish by its own actions, including state propaganda directed at the US. You will not learn about those things from RT. Zoeb posted:and most importantly for this thread, a compliant mainstream media that it pressures in to doing stenography for the pentagon and state department. "Mainstream media" continues to not be a useful term- it's a way to avoid thinking about the specifics of what works or doesn't work about sources. There are plenty of sources of information, including mass media outlets, that are not...whatever you think this "stenography" is. Zoeb posted:They didn't invade Ukraine for no reason at all or because Putin is the new Hitler. Zoeb posted:Folks over at C-spam gave me a perspective I had not considered, that the Euromaidan protest was an illegitimate coup against a democratically elected leader by a minority of the country situated in the west, that was stirred up at least in part by the CIA. You need to stop and reconsider why you are specifically getting this "perspective", grounded in state propaganda and a conspiracy theory, from the forum with even lower moderation standards, and you should engage more critically with the idea of using cspam as media. Zoeb posted:I feel that RT, for all its flaws is a useful counterweight to US corporate media, as long as it is in moderation, and used in comparison to US media, which has blind spots. We should see more than one side to the story. You do not need to consume propaganda "in moderation", nor do you need to use RT as a "counterweight" to anything, and as you are apparently consuming it as mediated through cspam, you are already demonstrating why: the "perspective you have not considered" is already loving bonkers. There are plenty of other sources of information than RT or cspam, and you can in fact get "more than one side" to issues from such other sources. However, conversely, you should not feel compelled to "see more than one side" to reality. External reality exists, and equivocation about that will primarily serve to drive you to sources, like RT, that will make you unable to participate in good faith discussion rooted in facts. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 19:35
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Zoeb posted:They didn't invade Ukraine for no reason at all or because Putin is the new Hitler. Folks over at C-spam gave me a perspective I had not considered, that the Euromaidan protest was an illegitimate coup against a democratically elected leader by a minority of the country situated in the west, that was stirred up at least in part by the CIA. Russia and only Russia pushes this narrative. This has been hugely debunked on poo poo loads of occassions. Much like how the colour revolutions were all CIA as well. This is just one of many lovely reasons Russia uses to justify it's war. You should not be using any part of SA as a source of info on these kind of subjects. RT sucks. It's an obvious arm of the Government and pushes a lot of bullshit and you should avoid it. It's on par with Fox news on it's bull poo poo. There is no counter here. It sucks. Don't read/watch it.
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Dec 10, 2023 20:10
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Zoeb posted:Folks over at C-spam gave me a perspective I had not considered  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 10, 2023 23:37
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https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/the-right-wing-palestine-grifters-part-134534937/ It could happen here did a three part series on how far right and nationalist grifters are using the Palestine situation. I saw aspects of myself in this discussion and this thread gave me things to think about. They talked about the radicalization pipeline that folks like me went through, who came out of college just in time for the 2008 financial crash to make my degree worthless. We spent our youths learning about how America were the perfect good guys and got to college and discovered we were lied to. We learned about the war crimes, the overthrown democracies, and how the media is managed by the military industrial complex which leads us away from the mainstream media. Eventually we see the flaws in organizations like Occupy Wall Street and the DSA and are led to buying in to the narratives of nationalists from dictatorships that oppose the united states, then we start to adopt Russia's culture war grievances. This podcast and your responses gave me a lot to think about. I saw some of myself in it. I was drawn to C-Spam's perspective because when I first got here I wanted to talk about Israel Palestine but the DnD thread itself is kind of useless, so I went over to C-Spam. I generally favor the Ukrainian side of the Ukraine conflict but C-spam's consensus changed my mind about Russia. It probably helped that they shamed me. But hearing this podcast made me wonder if I was being manipulated by apologists. I just want to do the right thing and advocate for the side of good. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/the-right-wing-palestine-grifters-part-134791623/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/the-right-wing-palestine-grifters-part-135045329/
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Dec 14, 2023 20:29
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this isn't really specific to journalism, it's just the consequences of campism outliving the USSR. wanting governments to be more just or more socialist, to not only end their colonial projects but undo them along with their empires; holding those beliefs did (and remain) a strong basis for anti-americanism. combine that with a decently strong soviet propaganda narrative that they wanted those things (which wasn't entirely false), american propaganda that wrapped itself in the flag as a shield against communism, and constant revelations that the US's anti-socialist foreign policy was bloody-handed and often pointless cruelty. it was very easy for socialism/communism to be pro-soviet and anti-american, just by default. (this is also the origin of "tankie". the putative tankies were people who supported the USSR sending in the tanks to crush pro-democracy socialist revolutionaries in hungary and czechoslovakia. before it was "leftist who sucks," it was "leftist who loves licking boot more than justice.") anyway that sort of anti-american, pro-whoever-the-US-is-mad-at attitude is still generally a reasonable attitude to have by default when looking at american foreign policy, especially if you're also generally leftist. it was always a short path to go from that position to being a tiananmen-cheering crank, but as the US focused more on containing iran or islamists, it became more distant from, y'know, leftism. russian english-language media has always been happy to pick up american or british fringe voices. it's cheap heat, since they're controversial but have a pretty open calendar. (this isn't particular to russia; it's a longtime voice of america strategy.) they have fairly free rein to say or do whatever they want, as long as it isn't anything that specifically gets in the way of russian political interests, and most english speakers did not care much about russian politics until fairly recently. so RT gets something of a reputation for being a place that publishes various american left-leaning commentators and writers, and the ways commentary is shaped by RT's boundaries are hard to spot or largely irrelevant. what changed is how russian and american interests have increasingly come into conflict over the last decade. being a full-throated believer in the idea that gaddafi was standing up to american imperium was just a weird opinion to have. but russia's been more focused on MENA in recent years, directly conflicting with the US, and has taken a hard right into culture war issues to cope with a prolonged economic downturn and increasing economic focus on fossil fuel extraction. meanwhile american conservatism is increasingly wrapping itself in an anti-establishment aesthetic, with culture war against the "woke establishment". if you're unhappy with (what you see as) the US's political establishment, you now have a narrative other than leftism to grab onto. it's the trap of campism, where nominal leftists let their anti-americanism (or, in different circumstances, american nationalism) get in the way of whatever left-leaning political beliefs they originally held. this plays out in the press mainly by the fact that there is so, so much money floating around to throw at anyone willing to flatter right-wing billionaires. you're seeing a bunch of people who were nominally leftist (or just agreed with leftists on some particular cause) jump after that gold ring. there are clusters of it happening - i know more about one single social circle of fascist cokehead socialites in new york than i ever cared to learn - but the upshot is that there's a lot of money to be made in "former leftist who took the red pill." RT is one of those clusters. and it is probably the chief reason reason there are now a significant number of english-speaking leftist assad apologists, or why anyone treats "NATO caused russia to invade ukraine" has any currency. but it's not the main cause i do not think (and i think russian politicians are downstream of american culture war froth rather than upstream). i just think it has more to do with how much more money there is in being a right-wing contrarian than a principled one. ultimately that is The Problem. it isn't so much capitalism as just capital: you get the press the people with the capital are willing to front the money for.
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Dec 14, 2023 23:12
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