Toward a viable model of journalism

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Toward a viable model of journalism

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Probably Magic posted:

This is a common rhetorical tactic, though, in terms of hiding a clear bias, usually found in discussions of, for instance, North Korea. When North Korea is discussed in American media, ranging from major cable news television to newspapers with major reading bases to even late night shows that are generally doing softball interviews, then the immediate response to any advocacy for diplomacy is immediately met with prolonged questions about North Korea's civil rights record.

This claim didn't sound quite right to me, so I went to Google News, typed "north korea diplomacy" into the search bar, and it took me mere seconds to find several articles from major American media outlets calling for diplomacy with North Korea, without even a single mention of North Korea's ~~civil~~ human rights record.

Washington Post, The Kim-Putin summit highlights Biden�s failed North Korea policy, Sept 15 2023
Financial Times, North Korea to restart diplomatic activity after three years of Covid isolation, March 28 2023
National Interest, Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea Is Not Yet Exhausted, Oct 5 2023
Foreign Policy, The U.S. Needs to Talk to North Korea Any Way It Can, April 26 2023

Not only are all those articles advocating a reopening of diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, but I don't think any of them even mention human rights in North Korea at all. Which, of course, directly flies in the face of your claim here!

And that really cuts to the heart of my problem with your arguments in general: you're making huge sweeping claims about Western media, but those claims you're making aren't actually true. They range from "dubious at best" to "provably false", and I imagine the only reason they haven't been seriously challenged like this yet is because you're throwing around so many super vague and broad claims that it's honestly kind of a pain in the rear end for people to go digging through Google searching for contradictory evidence to challenge them all.

I think it would be nice if you could rein in these vast hyperbolic stories and instead focus on more specific and limited claims that you can back up with actual evidence, so that we can keep this conversation tethered to actual reality. Otherwise, I don't see how this conversation can do anything but fruitlessly go in circles.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 01:01

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 16:34

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

Three of those four are specific opinion-editorials advocating for diplomacy. And I can't read the Financial Times one because it's behind a paywall. That is said advocacy, not a response to said advocacy, so that doesn't really address my example at all?

Compare these two interviews from Stephen Colbert who, yeah, not a journalist, barely a media, but this is more of what I'm talking about :

Interviewing Dennis Rodman About North Korea
Compared to this Interviewing War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld

Lot more pushback on one than the other.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 01:14

WarpedLichen: Aug 14, 2008

I think this is very much a "vibes" thing and there's no real way to prove or disprove the degree of bias in a specific media sphere, given that it's almost impossible to do so on even one channel due to the variety of programming.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 01:19

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

WarpedLichen posted:

I think this is very much a "vibes" thing and there's no real way to prove or disprove the degree of bias in a specific media sphere, given that it's almost impossible to do so on even one channel due to the variety of programming.

I'd agree with that, and it's nigh impossible to fetch clips of CNN ragging on Trump on and on for daring to engage in talks with North Korea after weeks of withholding judgement on him blowing up people in the Middle East because it was just something I caught on television in the daytime, so it's impossible to show the specific examples that come to mind. But trust me, it happened, my uncle who works at Nintendo was there and everything.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 01:23

WarpedLichen: Aug 14, 2008

Probably Magic posted:

I'd agree with that, and it's nigh impossible to fetch clips of CNN ragging on Trump on and on for daring to engage in talks with North Korea after weeks of withholding judgement on him blowing up people in the Middle East because it was just something I caught on television in the daytime, so it's impossible to show the specific examples that come to mind. But trust me, it happened, my uncle who works at Nintendo was there and everything.

Yeah, but even mainstream US media is a broad category, and there are plenty of more smaller/independent outfits with a different set of biases that you can complain about.

Even Russia has other outlets like Meduza which I consider to be worth reading, but they will have flaws too if you read everything they ever put out critically, and that really shouldn't be the bar you use to judge things.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 01:45

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

That was my point though with asking DV directly about what conflicts he does and doesn't consider detached from reality, is not to try to trick him into saying he doesn't support Occupy Wall Street (I assume he does, and if he doesn't, well, lol) but to say that he paints RT with just as much a wide brush as I do "American media." Because sure, RT does stuff like promote anti-vax poo poo, they are, to repeat, a bad news agency, but they're frequently villainized when brought up as a counter to American propaganda, and then it becomes the question, what's being villainized, the Russian nationalism and conservative claptrap, or legitimate leftist views that have been routinely blocked from American media? And that becomes a murky conversation, an intentionally murky conversation, which leads to a lot of red herring arguments that anyone who quotes someone who works for RT saying America is a bad actor in the Ukraine/Russia War must also agree with RT's other dumb viewpoints as well. When the opposite could be argued too, that anyone who hates RT hates leftism. I don't believe that anyone who hates RT hates leftism, but there's a quick resort to dismiss leftist arguments by saying, "Well, it's associated with RT, and therefore-" Just because the US Media that I don't respect covers protests in Iran doesn't mean those protests are illegitimate. But that's literally the gist of this "disinformation" argument: "It's true, but I don't like the person who said it."

# ? Jan 3, 2024 02:13

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Discendo Vox posted:

This is the part where you should think about why Al Jazeera, which is also a state-funded foreign-facing propaganda outlet, wants you to find this model useful.

lmao what exactly are you insinuating about AJE here

e: don't probe DV for the arguing by insinuation either, i want to see an actual defense of this

Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jan 3, 2024

# ? Jan 3, 2024 03:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cease to Hope posted:

lmao what exactly are you insinuating about AJE here

e: don't probe DV for the arguing by insinuation either, i want to see an actual defense of this

It's not remotely hard to see that the state-funded foreign-facing propaganda outlet finds it useful for their audience to internalize an approach to media that lets them rationalize continued access to sources that tell them what they want to hear. Like, the idea of continuing to promote Chomsky's bullshit at this point should be a giant red flag not only for the deficits of the model but for its own track record in his hands. I'm pretty sure you know all this, though, because both you and Probably Magic actively participated in the media lit thread.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 04:14

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Main Paineframe posted:

The reason is that instead of paying people to produce or moderate content, Reddit and Wikipedia just rely on volunteer armies of obsessive nerds constantly fighting each other for gamified clout. StackOverflow too.

It's actually a pretty terrible model. It just wins by default because it's turned out to be very difficult to make a profit publishing useful information on the internet for free, so every site that actually pays their employees has gone behind a paywall, turned into a low-quality content farm, or dropped out of the free information business altogether.

.

I mean, yes. It's pretty terrible. But it seems to be the best available option, largely because it is driven by a nonprofit model.

Unless anyone has a better proposal, that's your viable model for modern journalism. Reddit and Wikipedia.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 04:24

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I mean, yes. It's pretty terrible. But it seems to be the best available option, largely because it is driven by a nonprofit model.

Unless anyone has a better proposal, that's your viable model for modern journalism. Reddit and Wikipedia.

neither of which actually produces original content insofar you are talking about news, they just aggregate/source existing ones. The entire model of wikipedia relies on sourcing content other people produced

journalism presumably involves producing OC, that's media companies (even "new media") pay people whose full time job is to produce news, and signifiacant expenses will be incurred on top of wages paid

Typo fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jan 3, 2024

# ? Jan 3, 2024 04:44

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Discendo Vox posted:

It's not remotely hard to see that the state-funded foreign-facing propaganda outlet finds it useful for their audience to internalize an approach to media that lets them rationalize continued access to sources that tell them what they want to hear. Like, the idea of continuing to promote Chomsky's bullshit at this point should be a giant red flag not only for the deficits of the model but for its own track record in his hands. I'm pretty sure you know all this, though, because both you and Probably Magic actively participated in the media lit thread.

Okay.

First, lol, but also lmao.

Second, this idea that Chomsky is some obviously discredited crank is laughable. It's hard to argue that someone is a fringe figure when the NYT will take his calls, be it on linguistics or the politics of the day. You are suggesting that AJE must be up to something by "promoting" Chomsky's work; how deep does this conspiracy run? This argument by association doesn't hang together. "Chomsky is a fifth columnist" is a crank belief, and no amount of linking to an old thread is going to make you look less silly when you espouse it.

Third, AJE's interest in promoting this is obvious, and much less sinister than you imply: they are arguing that you should seek out news outlets that aren't part of the American consensus because that consensus excludes certain viewpoints (with truthful examples how of that is done). It's somewhat dishonest to imply that any news outlet is immune, but "Trust us, we're the real source for news" isn't a sinister plot to undermine people's confidence in whatever, just an advertising pitch.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 04:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cease to Hope posted:

Okay.

First, lol, but also lmao.

Second, this idea that Chomsky is some obviously discredited crank is laughable. It's hard to argue that someone is a fringe figure when the NYT will take his calls, be it on linguistics or the politics of the day. You are suggesting that AJE must be up to something by "promoting" Chomsky's work; how deep does this conspiracy run? This argument by association doesn't hang together. "Chomsky is a fifth columnist" is a crank belief, and no amount of linking to an old thread is going to make you look less silly when you espouse it.

Third, AJE's interest in promoting this is obvious, and much less sinister than you imply: they are arguing that you should seek out news outlets that aren't part of the American consensus because that consensus excludes certain viewpoints (with truthful examples how of that is done). It's somewhat dishonest to imply that any news outlet is immune, but "Trust us, we're the real source for news" isn't a sinister plot to undermine people's confidence in whatever, just an advertising pitch.

I have already linked and described at length the problems with Chomsky's views and the propaganda model, which is what the video is mediating. The problem with Chomsky's track record with the model is not that he is a "fifth columnist", nor that he is party to some conspiracy, something I've claimed nowhere; it's that he's repeatedly used it to deny genocides.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 05:40

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

I'm not sure what model theory allows for refusing to answer questions directly but always vaguely gesture to some prior response, maybe James Joyce, I don't know, but it's very tiresome. The forum equivalent of "If You Want To Know More, Go To My Website At John Kerry Dot Com."

# ? Jan 3, 2024 05:55

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Discendo Vox posted:

I have already linked and described at length the problems with Chomsky's views and the propaganda model

yes, chomsky denied the evidence of the khmer rouge massacres for far too long, and it serves as a valuable lesson that while it is reasonable to be skeptical of the american media consensus, that isn't the same as always believing the opposite. regardless, he's still not some sort of fringe figure and your posts on somethingawful have not convinced anyone to stop treating his views as respected political criticism.

but what does this have to do with AJE? you responded to my post by citing previous posts, none of which had any points relevant to AJE. you need a whole lot more than the fact that they made a video about chomsky's political theory to justify calling AJE a "propaganda outlet." did you have anything else, or was this weak tea nonsense it?

Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jan 3, 2024

# ? Jan 3, 2024 06:18

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cease to Hope posted:

yes, chomsky denied the evidence of the khmer rouge massacres for far too long, and it serves as a valuable lesson that while it is reasonable to be skeptical of the american media consensus, that isn't the same as always believing the opposite.

regardless, he's still not some sort of fringe figure and your posts on somethingawful have not convinced anyone to stop treating his views as respected political criticism.

as such, you need a whole lot more than the fact that they made a video about chomsky's book and political theory to justify calling AJE a "propaganda outlet." did you have anything else, or was this weak tea nonsense it?

You do not actually speak for everyone on this subject; I and others have described, at length, the numerous reasons why the propaganda model of media is less than worthless, and why Chomsky's subsequent which, again, I have already linked for your convenience. Here, let me save you some additional time.

evilweasel posted:

It seems to be that there is a distinction between what the "propaganda model" purports to claim or prove, and how it is used in practice.

It claims to show that what the media will focus on or report vs not report is affected by the media's interests. Call it american imperialism, whatever, who cares. The crux of the argument is that certain things will be reported, certain things not, certain things given emphasis, certain things not, and to the extent there is an editorial slant, it will be in one direction.

Importantly, none of this purports to claim that it shows the media will lie. to take the "dead priest" example: it does not claim that the media will report a fake death of a priest in poland, nor report that there have been no deaths of priests in us client states. Instead it claims that one will be reported and/or given more emphasis, and one will not be reported and/or downplayed. Not reported is very different from "claimed did not occur" = for example, the new york times did not report on any of the myriad random hearings in the eastern district of new york bankruptcy court yesterday; but did not claim no such hearings occurred (or if no hearings did occur yesterday, the last time any did, I didn't bother to check because virtually nothing important ever happens there).

So in essence the "propaganda model" may claim that a reader of the targeted media may be left with the wrong impression based on the implicit assumption that all newsworthy things were reported equally - but it does not appear to claim that the media will lie.

All of that is not terribly meaningful and rarely relevant for evaluating a specific piece of media to determine its factual accuracy. It is relevant for reminding people that the availability heuristic (what you see is a reasonable slice of the world from which to extrapolate) frequently steers you wrong. It steers you wrong in much simpler, basic issues - like "it bleeds, it leads" and other aspects of media biasing what will be presented.

However, in practice people use it to try and do precisely that: to disregard media that gives them facts they find unpleasant. for example, a facially valid use of the "propaganda model" might be to claim that the ongoing genocide against the Uighurs gets greater attention than other similar genocides due to whatever grab-bag of interests you want to point to. But in practice, the people who look to chomsky and the propaganda model use it to discredit the factual reporting to attempt to minimize or disregard the evidence of the ongoing genocide and claim it is not reliable - which is not what the model purports to allow you to do. In practice, it is simply used to provide a simple way to shunt undesired information away.

A model that is consistently misused - even by its creators - is a bad model in practice even if the instruction on the box say not to misuse it in that way; if people given the model consistently misuse it, then find a better model that doesn't suffer from that. it is much the same as putting a warning label on the "eats small children and pets" peloton: you need to consider the real world and getting correct results, instead of slapping a blame-shifting warning label.

I think that's what Vox was getting at when he says that all of the aspects of Chomsky's work that have validity are done better by other people. It is the correct approach for a model that has potentially useful insights, but is consistently misused: to take those insights and put them into a model that does not get consistently misused.

Discendo Vox posted:

evilweasel and others already repeatedly articulated the problems of the PM, which were also given at the beginning of the thread when some of the same users trying to promote it now made similar generalized attacks on media literacy. I'm going to summarize some these issues as they appear to me. This is not exhaustive, but it articulates many of the root problems with a model of �everything and nothing�, including its harm to good faith discussion.

1. Fuzzy lenses The "lenses" which serve as the primary formal components of the model aren't clearly articulated and lack boundary conditions. Some of the lenses consist of separable observations on forms of media influence, which are long-held and trivially true under some circumstances, and do not fall within the confines of the model. The PM did not discover access journalism or advertiser conflict, and these aren't functions exclusive to the settings the authors describe. I promise, flak is not exclusive to a corporate mass media ecosystem! These individual elements are made less useful by their muddled presentation in the PM. If you want to, as Ytlaya does, point out that an article has one new source and it's on background, then, great, that can be helpful in scrutinizing the piece and its context (Someone remind me to work up a short post on attribution practices sometime). That's not the PM though, and the PM doesn't help you identify that issue or its context.

2. Selective evidence and no testing - Herman and Chomsky's cited evidence for the PM is, to put it charitably, selective. For example, some samples are drawn exclusively from the New York Times on a single issue, or lean heavily on abuses of the Reagan administration. The authors do this because it's easy; it makes the conclusions of their work appeal to their target audience, and the media abuses often aren't in doubt. These case studies and narratives do not actually serve as strong support for their broad claim (and it truly is an extremely broad claim). A stronger model would hold well outside these settings - actual tests of the model's applicability, with limitations and consistent criteria of evaluation. The authors are not interested in articulating limitations or boundaries of their ideas; they're interested in promotion.

3. Inconsistent application - The model prevaricates on whether it can inform the interpretation of individual pieces of media. The authors want this both ways because it renders the PM and those employing it immune to criticism. In practice, the reasoning of the model is constructed from specific to general- a group of examples (selective ones whose interpretations appeal to the reader's prior beliefs) are deployed to make a general (across all mass media) claim.

4. Too many variables Breadth of explanation is not a benefit. Using several overlapping lenses that may or may not be applicable to individual cases or broader narrative contexts means that the PM is infinitely versatile; some part of it can be deployed to explain any message. The result is the equivalent of an overfitted statistical model; some lenses are redundant, the model will attribute meaning to things that don't matter, and is less informative than an alternative that doesn't claim such a broad scope. A detailed, specific accounting of, for example, different forms of advertising pressure, the details of how it is done, and where it's more or less impactful, is more useful than a "lens".

5. The elite interest loophole - Conversely, the most significant boundary condition for the model is the interests of the "elite", which are variously referenced as the political parties, corporations, and their managers. The authors assert that the systems of control presented by the model fail when there are disagreements among the elite, and the extent to which other groups in society are interested in, informed about, and organized to fight about issues. But how can users tell the interests of the "elite"? With such a wide-ranging and nebulous definition of elite interests, there's no way except by working backward from the media under examination. So if you want to believe that a media message reflects the manipulation of the elite, then it does, and if you want to believe that it doesn�t, then it doesn�t. Whether the model applies is based on the desire of the user to assign interests and control to nebulously defined elites. As someone observed earlier, it's like reading the will of God into weather events. Is this article or media narrative the way it is because of the delegitimizing propaganda control of the elites? Is it because the elites are in conflict? Is it because the elites don't care? Or maybe those dastardly elites are inflating the opposition, pretending that the marginalized non-elites have more strength than they really possess? The interpretation and application of the model depends on what the user wants to believe, rather than what is. This is a really unhealthy relationship to information.

6. Proof and Faith - I disagree with others that the model is delegitimized by its authors merely dabbling in genocide denial. The problem (articulated well by evilweasel) is you can use the same model to argue simultaneously for and against the presence of elite media control in any specific circumstance, as well as argue toward any interpretation of media. Presented with the same information, the model can be used to say that a media narrative is propaganda or not propaganda, legitimate or illegitimate, true or not true. At root, the propaganda model of mass media is a cipher that encourages users to believe whatever they want by giving them the illusion of insight. It combines well-known preexisting information about the media to spin an overarching and uninformative mythology that panders to its target audience�s preferences. Users of the model become less interested in engagement with specific information about the media under discussion - it functionally makes them less media literate. Because PM users can ignore or bypass specific causal or contrary information to argue generally from the intentions of the "elites", they become resistant to contrary information. This also makes people who deploy the model uninterested in good faith discussion; unfalsifiable claims of wide-ranging propaganda control can't be reasoned with.

All of these problems are why I said the following in the OP materials:

"A core issue with many people�s approach to media literacy is they think of it as finding a single, true lens through which to understand information and the world- a rule or worldview or rubric that they can use to decide what sources are good or bad. This is often couched in the language of universal skepticism, or seeing through the �mainstream media.� �I�m skeptical of every source� and "all media is biased" is bullshit. No one can be skeptical of every source equally, and all too often it means rejecting good sources that are just communicating challenging or unappealing information. Taking these positions actually makes a person even more vulnerable to disinformation, because disinfo campaigns actively target such individuals and prey upon their biases. The Intercept article I cited above and OANN will both tell you- they will give you the stories no one else will.

Similarly, a single theory (including, or even especially, �crit� theories that provide an overarching narrative telling you what sources are good or bad) will instead steer you toward messages that appeal to you for all the wrong reasons. There�s a reason these posts are a bunch of material pulled from different sources- a toolkit will make you much more intellectually versatile than a single mythological correct way to understand media."

I wrote that with the PM in mind, and the resulting cudgel approach to media that it entails is what people got probated for earlier in the thread. I wanted to wait to tackle the PM and similar mechanisms of media illiteracy until after we'd worked through a lot of more basic material. There are many more specific issues I could raise with the model (agency attribution and conspiracy, mass versus capital media as condition, implicit warrants, alternative models, misrepresenting other authors), but I'd much rather get back to my planned effortpost on Albert Hirschman's book on reactive and progressive rhetorics, a thing flaks actually know and use in trying to influence public opinion on policy. It�s old, it�s got issues, its examples are all in political history, but people can directly apply it to a source and draw meaningful conclusions- including sometimes that the author has read the book and is deliberately using it to write a persuasive message!

piL posted:
What? I've lost track of the thread because I don't care about the PM and I'm not going to read multiple books to find out more about it and make informed judgments about its implementation. Is it really a point of agreement that only falsifiable models are of value to a thread on media analysis and communication? Shannon-Weaver, as applied in post two of this thread is done so in a manner that would be unfalsifiable. It makes no predictive claims first of all, but to use it to make predictive claims about media intent and interpretation (vice signal accuracy) would require you to narrow a question so greatly as to be absurd.

Per the OP�s introduction, SW is a model of communication; it's a simplified representation that explains one set of relationships by sacrificing detail elsewhere. The example in the OP isn't real and isn't a demonstration of applying the model to media. It's intended to illustrate what the parts of the model are, in the same way that a classroom map of the state won't help you get across town. My principal goal in writing up the model was to provide a functional vocabulary for further discussion. Toward this end, and in keeping with the pluralist approach I describe in the OP, I do my best to be clear about any limitations or simplifications of the materials I provided.

At the same time, SW is an extremely falsifiable model. Alternatives to the relationships it describes can be articulated and tested. The relationships between concepts provided by the model are necessary to it. The relationships between parts of the PM are not. The lenses do not categorically apply in such a way that the pattern of relationships can be falsified. What's made SW remarkable is how universally it has held; its conceptualization of information as a stochastic error space is a foundation of all modern communication and information technology. (This is one of my favorite facts about the model, because it's a fully parallel expression of the logics of falsifiability in an applied setting).

piL posted:
There are entire swaths of questions a person could try and should try to ask about media that are by their very nature unfalsifiable without very rigorous and narrow definitions of all of the terms that would greatly reduce practical value.

Is this article well written?

Is this source trustworthy?

Is this article true?

What types of sources are trustworthy?

What are some ways to notice that I am being manipulated by media?

What rhetorical techniques should be considered appropriate in a particular format and which should cause doubt in the reader?

Does this collection of articles on a subject represent sufficiently diverse range of opinions to ensure that I'm well-versed on the arguments?

Is this an appropriate type of media to make and support this claim?

Should I spend $10 to access this media?

Does the funding source of a content generator affect the trustworthiness of the generated content?

Should I trust this content funded by this source?

Is this clickbait?

What is the author's intent?

How did the publication of a particular piece of media affect a particular situation?

All of these seem like appropriate discussion points for this thread and none of them have any place in any falsifiable model without defining very restrictive terms. Prescriptive models that address these questions could be generated or referenced and could be of value to this thread. They would by necessity be unfalsifiable and would be inappropriate for establishing claims of causal relationships or making prediction.

This list is a bit of a mess of prescriptive and descriptive questions ("is this article true?" is an empirical question that, yes, I think we can specifically interrogate). I provide tools to begin to address some of these questions in the OP material. These tools are useful because they do make causal claims and are based in defined terms or explanations. As Peirce, and Popper, and Shannon, and Weaver will tell you, information is useful to the extent that it can be falsified, to the extent that it is open to error.

fake edit:
Since I drafted that post you've expended a whole lot of words to indicate you're not familiar with the distinction between na�ve and sophisticated falsifiability. This model example you're presenting is, uh, creative, but has little to do with what's being discussed. We're not trying to solve the problem of induction here, and no one is holding PM to anything like that standard. We also do not have to pretend that all truthfulness is relative to observers in order to make specific observations about the mechanisms of specific media. The PM makes descriptive claims- it just does so poorly, for the reasons articulated many times over. Prescriptive claims have to rely on a factual substrate or, again, if they don't,

fool of sound posted:
Generally if people have decided that they are opposed to truth that is deleterious to their ideology they should probably stay out of this thread and preferably subforum.

The PM does not meaningfully inform prescriptive behavior unless you want to just argue against any media that exists under capitalism or in a political context. The people making that argument look like this:

Similarly, Al Jazeera is literally a state-funded foreign-facing apparatus that promotes coverage in alignment with the state that funds them, to the point of extensive criticism of their claims and, hey presto, the promotion of bullshit like the propaganda model of media as a way of enclosing their audience. The fact that Al Jazeera doesn't engage in the sort of active disinformation or conspiracy theory that RT does, does not mean their material is not propaganda.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Jan 3, 2024

# ? Jan 3, 2024 06:31

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

copypasta filibustering isn't going to make the argument that citing chomsky one time makes AJE a propaganda outlet any less ridiculous, man.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 06:35

theCalamity: Oct 23, 2010; Cry Havoc and let slip the Hogs of War

Discendo Vox posted:

Similarly, Al Jazeera is literally a state-funded foreign-facing apparatus that promotes coverage in alignment with the state that funds them, to the point of extensive criticism of their claims and, hey presto, the promotion of bullshit like the propaganda model of media as a way of enclosing their audience. The fact that Al Jazeera doesn't engage in the sort of active disinformation or conspiracy theory that RT does, does not mean their material is not propaganda.

Which of their material is propaganda? Was it only the Chomsky bit? Or is it their coverage of the war in Gaza?

# ? Jan 3, 2024 06:57

Gumball Gumption: Jan 7, 2012

Imagine how loving funny it would be if real academic citations sometimes included papers that ended with

# ? Jan 3, 2024 07:10

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

An actual case for AJ being propaganda is they were critical of vandalizers having their faces shown during the Ferguson riots, but by this standard, CNN and MSNBC refusing to cover certain Trump speeches is also propaganda.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 07:13

Kavros: May 18, 2011; sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

Discussions about whether Al Jazeera get to be called propagandistic or not (or if they're only propaganda if an imperfect comparison is also called propaganda) are less useful to me than potentially analyzing a history about how Al Jazeera really did become a disappointment, with the worst of the decline in their usefulness as a source happening some time ago now and getting no better under the current emir.

But it's not exactly surprising, given the priorities of the government of qatar.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 08:09

Inferior Third Season: Jan 15, 2005

12 out of the current 16 reports in the report queue are from this thread.

It is this kind of poo poo that got the media lit thread closed.

Instead of wasting my time going one-by-one through all of the reports, I am giving a one time forgiveness for all of them in the belated spirit of Festivus.

If this thread continues generating tons of reports, that forgiveness will be rescinded, and there will be plenty of bans and multi-day probations to go around, and this thread will also be closed.

Do better and post less poo poo. Quoting a closed thread as a workaround to it being closed will going forward be punished harshly.

You have been warned.

:siren:

# ? Jan 3, 2024 12:23

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Typo posted:

neither of which actually produces original content insofar you are talking about news, they just aggregate/source existing ones. The entire model of wikipedia relies on sourcing content other people produced

journalism presumably involves producing OC, that's media companies (even "new media") pay people whose full time job is to produce news, and signifiacant expenses will be incurred on top of wages paid

That's a fair point, but there is a certain amount of original content produced on Reddit (hell, virtually everything on Buzzfeed is cannibalized Reddit threads from AmItheAsshole or other popular subs).

Similarly, before it was captured, Twitter often functioned as an aggregator of on the ground first hand reports from bystanders or volunteers.

So it's not impossible to imagine other models of viable journalism along those lines. Deeply flawed and problematic in many ways, sure, but checking the threshold boxes of minimally viable and minimally journalistic.

Again the test threshold posited for the thread is "viable" not "good."

# ? Jan 3, 2024 13:56

Lib and let die: Aug 26, 2004

Inferior Third Season posted:

12 out of the current 16 reports in the report queue are from this thread.

It is this kind of poo poo that got the media lit thread closed.

Instead of wasting my time going one-by-one through all of the reports, I am giving a one time forgiveness for all of them in the belated spirit of Festivus.

If this thread continues generating tons of reports, that forgiveness will be rescinded, and there will be plenty of bans and multi-day probations to go around, and this thread will also be closed.

Do better and post less poo poo. Quoting a closed thread as a workaround to it being closed will going forward be punished harshly.

You have been warned.

Does this clemency mean I get one (1) called shot of an 18-hour probation of my choosing as a matter of making me whole in light of this new attitude of clemency, ITS?

# ? Jan 3, 2024 16:46

Inferior Third Season: Jan 15, 2005

Lib and let die posted:

Does this clemency mean I get one (1) called shot of an 18-hour probation of my choosing as a matter of making me whole in light of this new attitude of clemency, ITS?

No, my benevolence is arbitrary and capricious.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 18:07

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Probably Magic posted:

Three of those four are specific opinion-editorials advocating for diplomacy. And I can't read the Financial Times one because it's behind a paywall. That is said advocacy, not a response to said advocacy, so that doesn't really address my example at all?

Compare these two interviews from Stephen Colbert who, yeah, not a journalist, barely a media, but this is more of what I'm talking about :

Interviewing Dennis Rodman About North Korea
Compared to this Interviewing War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld

Lot more pushback on one than the other.

This is confusing the hell out of me. You're saying that when some Western media figures express one position, some other Western media figures express a different position? I thought you were expressing complaints about Western media as a whole.

In fact, you were! You were talking about "when North Korea is discussed in American media", and went so far to suggest that following up any pro-diplomacy talk with "prolonged questions about North Korea's civil rights record" was mandatory in the Western media environment.

If you think Stephen Colbert is a hypocrite, sure, you've provided enough evidence that you could reasonably accuse Stephen Colbert of being a hypocrite. If you're going to issue a sweeping condemnation of the entire American media as a whole, you need more than two clips from a political satire talk show.

As WarpedLichen said, your criticism feels very based on "vibes", where individual instances of coverage from individual figures or outlets appear to have colored your views toward American media as a whole.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I mean, yes. It's pretty terrible. But it seems to be the best available option, largely because it is driven by a nonprofit model.

Unless anyone has a better proposal, that's your viable model for modern journalism. Reddit and Wikipedia.

Just because it's driven by a nonprofit model doesn't mean it's accurate, reliable, unbiased, or any of many other important things. That also doesn't mean that it's good at doing original research or finding information nobody else knew. The only advantage it really gains from being nonprofit is that it still exists, while for-profit information has largely retreated behind paywalls, leaving the nonprofit model to compete only with content farms and SEO nonsense generators.

The real solution, honestly, is for people to accept that we have to either pay for information ourselves or accept the demands of the people who pay for it on our behalf. That's the only viable course for journalism: convincing people that information is actually worth something.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 20:23

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Main Paineframe posted:

As WarpedLichen said, your criticism feels very based on "vibes", where individual instances of coverage from individual figures or outlets appear to have colored your views toward American media as a whole.

At the end of the day, we are all describing the elephant. I'm not going to wade into the specifics of whatever this nonsense about NK is - I'm not stupid, my posts notwithstanding - but it's important to remember that what a news report or editorial means is not an exact science.

At least, not until SA's politics forums all acknowledge the perfect truth of the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 21:33

Zoeb: Oct 8, 2023

Discendo Vox posted:

Like, the idea of continuing to promote Chomsky's bullshit at this point should be a giant red flag not only for the deficits of the model but for its own track record in his hands.

Chomsky is one of the most respect public intellectuals in the world, for good reason.

# ? Jan 3, 2024 23:11

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

That's a fair point, but there is a certain amount of original content produced on Reddit (hell, virtually everything on Buzzfeed is cannibalized Reddit threads from AmItheAsshole or other popular subs).

Similarly, before it was captured, Twitter often functioned as an aggregator of on the ground first hand reports from bystanders or volunteers.

So it's not impossible to imagine other models of viable journalism along those lines. Deeply flawed and problematic in many ways, sure, but checking the threshold boxes of minimally viable and minimally journalistic.

Again the test threshold posited for the thread is "viable" not "good."

I think journalism consists more than just passing along first degree accounts from people claiming to be witnesses to a particular event

The other problem I see (and I"m sure you do too) is that the twitter/reddit model involves a lot of unpaid volunteer work. Good example would be the OSINT community who publishes their content on twitter: very few of whom are paid. Which means a lot of people contributing value are not being compensated for the work they put in. Whatever you say about a journalist working for CNN or NYT or RT, at very least they are drawing a paycheque that pays rent.

The utimate profiteers of said unpaid work are owners of platforms, or people who copy/paste their work, in the form of views/ad revenue.

Typo fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jan 4, 2024

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:01

Kavros: May 18, 2011; sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

Chomsky has done some of that transition to 'historical figure' rather than valued for his present day public commentary or intellectual analysis, mostly from his taking on (or having ascribed to him as a simplification of his views) some pretty unfortunate takes that just aren't going to do well historically, but will probably be asterisked as "well, you know, he was like in his mid 90s by then"

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:13

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

I like this one quote which basically goes "Aristotle was one of the greatest scientists in human history, he was wrong about almost everything, but that doesn't stop making him a great scientist"

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Kavros posted:

Chomsky has done some of that transition to 'historical figure' rather than valued for his present day public commentary or intellectual analysis, mostly from his taking on (or having ascribed to him as a simplification of his views) some pretty unfortunate takes that just aren't going to do well historically, but will probably be asterisked as "well, you know, he was like in his mid 90s by then"

The Cambodian genocide denial was contemporaneous and he was in his 50s.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:18

Kavros: May 18, 2011; sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

Discendo Vox posted:

The Cambodian genocide denial was contemporaneous and he was in his 50s.

Yeah, and he rode that out, ultimately, so I wouldn't call that what I'm talking about. Whether from a changed media environment or from the vulnerability of his recent advocacy and commentary to withering critique (his 'russia realism' reads, in particular, had an incredibly short turnaround to having been repudiated by history) the transition came about recently. The cambodian genocide denial sounds at this point more like an argument that that transition was wholly overdue.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:45

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Campism is the mirror reflection of the way that overall liberal consensus is enforced. Chomsky was right in describing the way that consensus is formed and forced. There's a trap, however, in thinking that a consensus that is enforced must be unsupportable without that force. That's the logic of a Holocaust denier, in the most extreme case. The enforcement isn't a product of absolute truth, nor the strict need to cover up lies.

Instead, you need to be able to identify that consensus and identify how it is being enforced, as preconditions to finding out the truth. And part of the enforcement of that consensus is that being wrong but in agreement is generally held blameless in your lifetime. There's a bleak humor in Chomsky (fairly!) being criticized for "but you gently caress one pig..." WRT Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge while nobody at all faces any approbation at all for saying that Palestine isn't genocide, merely a very complicated subject.

A perfect model of journalism would still require that enforcement, though. At some point, you do actually have to kick out tendentious arguers, your Holocaust deniers and your race realists and your flat earthers. As we do not have access to truth uncorrupted by observation, we are left with trust in authorities, consensus building, some combination of the two, or some not-yet-invented new way of doing things.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 00:58

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

Main Paineframe posted:

This is confusing the hell out of me. You're saying that when some Western media figures express one position, some other Western media figures express a different position? I thought you were expressing complaints about Western media as a whole.

In fact, you were! You were talking about "when North Korea is discussed in American media", and went so far to suggest that following up any pro-diplomacy talk with "prolonged questions about North Korea's civil rights record" was mandatory in the Western media environment.

If you think Stephen Colbert is a hypocrite, sure, you've provided enough evidence that you could reasonably accuse Stephen Colbert of being a hypocrite. If you're going to issue a sweeping condemnation of the entire American media as a whole, you need more than two clips from a political satire talk show.

As WarpedLichen said, your criticism feels very based on "vibes", where individual instances of coverage from individual figures or outlets appear to have colored your views toward American media as a whole.

You posted op-eds, I think context clues can be used that I'm talking about interviews or conversations, that interviewers will feel it necessary to bring up NK crimes as "necessary information," the same way even style magazines will mention Kanye West's antisemitism even if they're just talking about his recent marriage. You're not going to see similar disclaimers about articles on American military operations as "the country that famously invaded Iraq on false pretenses" because it isn't tagged as essential information. It's more the omission of disclaimers that ends up being the problem than addition of them, the same way RT got tagged as "state media" on Twitter for awhile until they started doing it with BBC and NPR which promptly lead to freakouts despite it being an honest tag.

But maybe the fault lies with me and I should just limit my discussion to televised media, where I definitely perceive that mandate. Of course, television media is one of the lowest common denominators of communication, so I can understand if that just inspires an eye roll and dismissal. But I still feel like that misses my central point, which is of exotification. The ratio of reaction to North Korea's crimes compared to America's crimes is going to be lopsided, and that's a, "Yeah, no duh, America has its own cultural perspective" moment, but those culturally internal biases should be recognized instead of assumed as natural.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 04:53

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

it would be helpful to have some examples, in any case. not because of some imaginary standard of sources cited to make a Good Post, but because it's kind of hard to tell what point you're trying to make sometimes

# ? Jan 4, 2024 06:42

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Probably Magic posted:

You posted op-eds, I think context clues can be used that I'm talking about interviews or conversations, that interviewers will feel it necessary to bring up NK crimes as "necessary information," the same way even style magazines will mention Kanye West's antisemitism even if they're just talking about his recent marriage. You're not going to see similar disclaimers about articles on American military operations as "the country that famously invaded Iraq on false pretenses" because it isn't tagged as essential information. It's more the omission of disclaimers that ends up being the problem than addition of them, the same way RT got tagged as "state media" on Twitter for awhile until they started doing it with BBC and NPR which promptly lead to freakouts despite it being an honest tag.

But maybe the fault lies with me and I should just limit my discussion to televised media, where I definitely perceive that mandate. Of course, television media is one of the lowest common denominators of communication, so I can understand if that just inspires an eye roll and dismissal. But I still feel like that misses my central point, which is of exotification. The ratio of reaction to North Korea's crimes compared to America's crimes is going to be lopsided, and that's a, "Yeah, no duh, America has its own cultural perspective" moment, but those culturally internal biases should be recognized instead of assumed as natural.

I'm sorry, but I can't keep up with how fast these goalposts are moving. In the post I originally responded to, you were definitely not just talking about "interviews or conversations". To recap where our conversation started, here's what I was originally responding to:

Probably Magic posted:

This is a common rhetorical tactic, though, in terms of hiding a clear bias, usually found in discussions of, for instance, North Korea. When North Korea is discussed in American media, ranging from major cable news television to newspapers with major reading bases to even late night shows that are generally doing softball interviews, then the immediate response to any advocacy for diplomacy is immediately met with prolonged questions about North Korea's civil rights record.

To me, that looks like it covers a lot more than just "interviews or conversations", whatever that means. Only when you were challenged on the original claim did you start whittling it down, shaving off any portion that was challenged until you'd cut it down from "in American media, ranging from major cable news television to newspapers with major reading bases to even late night shows" to just merely "interviews or conversations".

And aside from that, we've pretty much gone nowhere. You're just restating your initial claim with some exceptions added, and so far, literally the only evidence you've posted is a seven-minute clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing a basketball player who's declared himself to be Kim Jong-un's "friend for life". I don't think you've really given a meaningful response to this:

Main Paineframe posted:

And that really cuts to the heart of my problem with your arguments in general: you're making huge sweeping claims about Western media, but those claims you're making aren't actually true. They range from "dubious at best" to "provably false", and I imagine the only reason they haven't been seriously challenged like this yet is because you're throwing around so many super vague and broad claims that it's honestly kind of a pain in the rear end for people to go digging through Google searching for contradictory evidence to challenge them all.

I think it would be nice if you could rein in these vast hyperbolic stories and instead focus on more specific and limited claims that you can back up with actual evidence, so that we can keep this conversation tethered to actual reality. Otherwise, I don't see how this conversation can do anything but fruitlessly go in circles.

I'm not just being pedantic for the hell of it or to make your life miserable here. I'm seriously trying to establish a very important point: whether the things you're saying are actually objectively true, or just biased perception and opinion. You've made some enormously broad and extremely radical claims about American media as a whole, and actually backing up those claims about the entirety of the American media industry requires a bit more backing than posting a couple of Daily Show clips and calling Stephen Colbert a hypocrite. It's annoying to have to go dig for evidence that contradicts your statements when you don't provide any evidence supporting your statements in the first place, and even moreso when you just respond to the evidence by changing your statements and claiming you were never saying the thing that was contradicted.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 06:57

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

Main Paineframe posted:

I'm sorry, but I can't keep up with how fast these goalposts are moving. In the post I originally responded to, you were definitely not just talking about "interviews or conversations". To recap where our conversation started, here's what I was originally responding to:

come on man.

Main Paineframe posted:

I think it would be nice if you could rein in these vast hyperbolic stories and instead focus on more specific and limited claims that you can back up with actual evidence

my brother in christ, you asked for him to narrow and clarify.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 07:05

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

Do I... really need sources for "the United States media is much harsher when talking about North Korea than when they talk about their own media?" That seemed like common knowledge, but there's much harsher examples than even what I was alluding to:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/5/6/why-the-western-media-keeps-getting-north-korea-wrong

This is a bit more fluffier of a piece, but it's literally mirroring what I'm saying, something that is apparently completely insubstantial and contrived. https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/columns/on-western-medias-coverage-of-north-korea/

quote:

Western media often focuses on negative news and events in North Korea, including human rights abuses, nuclear threats and missile tests, while ignoring positive developments or avoiding the coverage of other topics altogether. When topics such as the culture of the country or the plight of North Korean defectors are overlooked and unaddressed, North Korea will not be understood in a comprehensive, rational manner. A lack of sufficient context and historical background of a nation-state can be extremely harmful, as it can lead to a distorted understanding of the country and its political situation.

It's... not a perspective that came out of thin air.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 07:35

Kavros: May 18, 2011; sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

For what its worth, as someone who has constant exposure to both American and international news about north korea either from my newsfeeds or anything forwarded over from family and friends, the initial claim of "the immediate response to any advocacy for diplomacy is immediately met with prolonged questions about North Korea's civil rights record" is fairly straightforwardly false. Best you can stretch it is as follows:

1. if the primary source of the news story is official declarations by the governments that are in negotiations or running feelers for diplomatic overtures, then the article will discuss the conditions and concerns relevant to the diplomatic efforts, which usually (incredibly, incredibly, incredibly unsurprisingly) involve declarations involving north korea's human rights issues and how they are potentially conditional to diplomatic solutions.

2. Especially if it is a neutral newswire article and/or if the primary source, if the popular or official calls for diplomacy is prompted by concern about economic pressures currently faced in the country, you are likely to have attached to the story, explanatory run-throughs of nk's status as a heavily sanctioned country, and can detail reasons given for sanctions which often (again, unsurprisingly) include human rights issues.

But nothing resembling what was initially claimed.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 07:39

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 16:34

Probably Magic: Oct 9, 2012; Looking cute, feeling cute.

For the record, my original argument wasn't that negative coverage of North Korea wasn't warranted, it's that America covers itself far softer than it does North Korea. I can find any article discussing American plans of military action in, say, the Middle East, that do not find America's larger role in the area worthy of note. Here's an example: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/26/politics/us-troops-deploying-middle-east/index.html Nothing is brought up about America's historical antagonist of Iran, their assassination of their generals, their support of Iraq in attacking Iran, breaking of nuclear treaties with Iran, etc., because that's not viewed as "relevant information," even though anything North Korea is viewed as relevant information. This is the essence of my argument, and if I've resorted to categorical imperative when it comes to mandates of addressal, I apologize, but as I've already stated, that is not a concern or a generalized dissatisfaction that is isolated to me.

# ? Jan 4, 2024 08:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Toward a viable model of journalism

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