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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.
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Jan 3, 2024 08:09
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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"
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Jan 4, 2024 00:13
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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.
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Jan 4, 2024 00:45
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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.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:39
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Probably Magic posted: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. I'm also not really seeing this, but I can't say for sure given the extent of a potentially argumentatively undefinable nature of "anything north korea is viewed as relevant information" – it creates untestability. But more importantly, one of the inescapable issues with attempting to use this sort of thing as a demonstration – when comparing coverage of north korea to most other countries – is that north korea is going to categorically act as one of the worst possible comparators because of materially vital, essentially non-ignorable conditions regarding it and its current government that are not meaningfully equivalent to conditions in many other countries. A nation that has a 0.02 on the vdem human rights index with an essentially imprisoned population and a far narrower profile of internationally noteworthy engagements on the world stage means that the matter of human rights concerns is extremely likely to come up as a considerably prominent, reasonably significant-enough-to-highlight feature of the country and whatever internationally newsworthy events come about to us halfway across the world. You could expect the same from articles about sudan or myanmar – unsurprisingly, human rights concerns are deeply entangled with most of the stories coming out about them, and become relevant to many news stories for them as well.
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Jan 4, 2024 09:42
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