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The constant fear mongering over RT that's completely absent from Western sources who are just as propagandists is just xenophobia, unless you want to argue Brian Williams talking about the beauty of our weaponry is objective analysis. Almost like the objection is not to impartiality but who the impartiality is for.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:47
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socialsecurity posted:Do you have any sources that the US has even close to as much control over the media as Russia has over RT? Or a quote of someone who thinks RT is untrustworthy but blindly believes Western sources? The first mistake you're making is assuming propaganda can only be dispersed through a nationalist versus non-nationalist actor. Do I believe America media is controlled by America capital? Yes. Because it's owned across the board by American capital. The second mistake is more a deliberate tactic to reframe the argument. RT isn't being singled out as un-objective, which no one would argue it is, but actively worthless and harmful. By singling it out, by implication, one frames American media as not that "except Fox News," which shows the real biases at play. MSNBC is more objective than Fox News? Is that why they gave the current president's press secretary a show on their network?
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Jan 2, 2024 19:24
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WarpedLichen posted:I mean, there's no such thing as perfect objectivity and everything has a bias. Is there somewhere you would like to go with this? Who even knows, I get my slop from the same trough as anyone, but I think invoking nationalistic tropes under the guise of integrity is gross. In any case, I'm reminded of AlJazeera America a decade back interviewing a CCP official on the South China Sea, and he just gave a canned response, and the interviewer moved on. It's not a nuanced perspective, but it did give a glimpse on the Chinese state's view more directly than the New York Times pretending they're a neutral party as they call a blatant genocide an "Israel-Hamas War." National agencies like RT, BBC, NHK, etc. have more my respect than Western televised media theater, even if they very much don't have my trust. I wish there was clearer national media in America for other independent agencies to compete against instead of this nebulous reframing of the state capital PoV doing cosplay as independent journalism.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:51
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Typo posted:I don't think RT or BBC are calling it a genocide either That misses the point. I don't trust or care what RT or BBC say, it's about knowing their respective state sponsors think. That can then be analyzed. With Fox News or MSNBC or CNN, you have to get through their cultural signaling first before reaching the state or capital's true messaging.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:59
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Phone posting, so sorry for breaking up posting, but for instance: If RT's coverage of Israel goes from positive to negative, you know that signifies a shift in Russia's feelings about expanding access to Israel. They will lie about the reasons behind that shift, give a nonsensical moral argument as to why, act like Russia is anti-imperial when that's a joke, but you get a glimpse of Moscow's personal stance. If Fox News goes from rabid hawks under Republicans to isolationist under Dems though, that means nothing because Fox will just turn hawk when the Republicans reassure power, and throughout this, will continue to invite State Department freaks for softball interviews. And same with MSNBC and war. It means nothing, it's just part of the campaigning mechanism even though the general state/capital/media's thesis stays the same, which is Raytheon Stocks Up Is Good.
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Jan 2, 2024 20:08
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Cease to Hope posted:However, this lack of consonance means the state doesn't get to edit the news. In a liberal democratic state like the US, news agencies are setting their own agenda, according to their interests. This includes sucking up to the government, but it's a slack leash; independence means they're hard to micromanage. The control is softer and comes more in the form of censorious chilling pressure rather than an actual censor office, so there's more possibility for things to be too minor to merit leaning on the press or too enticing to not report on, even if the state would rather not. This makes Kremlinology-style breakdowns of what a news story says about an outlet's POV significantly harder, but also makes them generally more useful for finding out what's going on. Even if it is through a glass darkly. This may have been true in the middle of last century, but the current media climate has led to a much stiffer leash done under the guise of "preventing misinformation." The only outcome of the Facebook hearings didn't seem to be an actual stuffing of leaks of personal information to corporations, it was Facebook suddenly priding itself as a "news agency" (it is not) that needed to "fact check" and correct what was posted on it (which it wasn't able to do without having the Washington Examiner as part of its overreach, ha). Similarly, tones of objectivity were given up by more centrist liberal media like CNN in favor of naked partisanship I think for a variety of factors that had little to do with truth. What's more, the idea that Chris Hedges was taking his talking points directly from Putin while Jen Psaki is coming up with ideas herself seems kind of ridiculous to me, unless we just want to argue that Hedges was talking head there and not part of RT's broader reporting, which I'd be more than willing to acquiesce on. The other part being, documentaries like Control Room from during the Iraq War showed the extent that chilling could go, down to completely freezing out the liberal media at the time from military press conferences and the like, which could be an argument that there's legit independence going on with the liberal media at the time except their response to that was to fire anti-war voices and stay on message with the administration up until the war went sour and it became acceptable to field dissenting voices. (And the dissenting voice was a loving ex-Sportscenter guy, so that tells you how serious it was for them.) Differentiating between that level of passive control versus the supposedly more active control of RT feels pointless to me because it leads to the same result, a hegemony of narrative. But you got me on Fox News, I don't know what the gently caress they're talking about over there these days. Or RT for that matter. CNN is more than enough to drive me insane.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:03
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Discendo Vox posted:I agree here, with the caveat that internal inconsistency is also believed to be a part of the Russian model not because it obscures their actual position, but because it a) expands their reach to a larger set of audiences, b) drives them to adopt a cynical and instrumental relationship with reality which itself benefits anchoring and, c) drives conflicting viewpoints that deteriorate civic participation. Notably this discusses both multichannel (e.g. multi-angle proxy social media entities) and within-channel (RT) source claim variation, as well as individual source (Putin statement) inconsistencies. The original Rand report that's the source of the firehose of falsehoods concept discusses this a bit. This is not unique to RT though, as this same level of "throwing poo poo against the wall" has been used several times by Israel in the current genocidal campaign to explain away their war crimes, with the United States general media organs (can't believe I have to be this specific, I'd rather we didn't just constantly resort to pedantry) picking through the lies to find which one they like. This became the narrative with both "sides' major American media, and this process, at least to someone relatively young like me, makes me wonder if a similar process of "editing lies" was used in the lead-up to the Gulf War with the lies about Iraqis unplugging Kuwaiti incubators and such. We do know a method like this was used by the Bush Jr. state department in drumming up reasons to go to war. One could say that the "cultural divide" between "liberal" and "conservative" media is just an expanded scope of this discombobulation process, that inundating the public with two narratives, both with internally inconsistent logic, leads to large-scale disconnection from civic participation. This is why I find it important not to keep focus exclusively on RT because that enables a blindness to similar processes in work in our own media. It's an exotification of media manipulation.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:38
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Generally do not think Russia is a pioneer of "lying their rear end off until something sticks," pretty sure that can be credited to every two-year-old ever. The exotification I was discussing. 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. Now, when military officials, even officials directly connected to warcrimes such as the Iraq War, are in those same outlets, they are not pounced on and demanded to answer for that catastrophe. It's not seen as a must-discuss. However, occasionally, occasionally discussion of American malfeasances are allowed to occur. It is not mandated the same way North Korea's are. Now, would one have to be an advocate of Korea, a believer in their propaganda or anything of the like, to see a huge disparity in reactions to coverage of Korea in American media compared to coverage of itself? "But American sins are mentioned!" But not to nearly the same extent as sins of designated enemies. So this whole differentiation of RT as a unique bogeymen while not nearly leaning into portraying American media as a similar bogeyman is also an obvious disparity. Anyway, Discendo Vox posted:The US is not. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin/ quote:It’s worth recalling that the Bush administration appeared determined to attack Iraq for any number of reasons beyond suspicions of WMDs; officials simply seized on WMDs because they concluded that that represented the strongest case for an invasion. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in 2003. Seems like the definition of throwing poo poo against the wall to me. This would become the ongoing narrative from major media for the next two years to the point where Phil Donahue was fired from his job for objecting to it despite ostensibly being the voice on a station that opposed the ruling party.
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Jan 2, 2024 23:13
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By the way, Discendo Vox, if you're going to continue to accuse me of being imprecise as not to be falsifiable, I'm going to return that argument right back at you and ask what you mean when you say RT. Do you mean Ed Schultz? Chris Hedges? Jesse Ventura? Rick Sanchez? Lee Camp? All part of RT America. You're really going to have to be more specific in order for your argument to be considered falsifiable or not. (Or you can agree there's commonly held definitions and stop being pedantic, because I've kept my references to MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like, as opposed to something niche like a blog.)
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Jan 2, 2024 23:22
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I suppose "middle of last" I would mean more like "Watergate exposure," but also that censor board never really went away, just found more colorful labels to use than "communist." I do see an abrupt shift in tone from even the Bush years where the faux neutrality of statements has given away to a much more propagandistic structure, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, but perhaps that is a change in personal perspective that allows for such charged statements to be seen more for what they are. I do think the news is driven more than just by public interest, that there is vested interest in a state, specifically military, narrative. One could hardly forget that Van Jones claimed Trump had "finally become presidential" or however it went over drone striking Libya, while the liberal press's coverage of his clumsy overtures to Korea were met with huge derision. It's clear that the only way Trump could win mainstream approval from more than just his niche base was to become more of a hawk, and seeing a bunch of generals drone on about what missiles they used in such and such strike on the news really hammered that perspective for me. And I'd argue the media specifically didn't highlight certain news stories during the campaign that they would have in the past to ease the transition to a president who was friendlier with the military who so frequently guested on their programs. MSNBC and CNN couldn't help yapping about Reverend Wright during Obama's ascendancy because, yes, they want the views. When it came to Hunter Biden, complete silence. What changed? I think state directive played a part. "Don't turn this into a horserace, we need to get rid of the guy who keeps napping through our powerpoint presentations to gently caress up Iran." But didn't Fox News cover the Hunter stuff? Sure, but they practically treated Pizzagate as real. It serves as this dance of giving fodder to the masses but never trumping up a real narrative. Everyone talked about e. bola in 2014 and that was a non-story. There's a loose leach, but it tightens fast when it knows what it wants. Like NBA owners all bickering with each other until it's time to throw someone out and suddenly they remember class loyalty and keep the ranks rigid. But there's more speculation in that than necessarily authoritative statement. As for Psaki, I think that's more to my point, that such proxification should be made official instead of the blurred line.
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Jan 2, 2024 23:46
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Discendo Vox posted:They're mediated through RT, the entity explicitly controlling the scope and content of their output. It's not complicated. You've still avoided any definitions and are still dodging into "and the like". So to be clear, when Larry King had a show on RT, you think he was engaged in a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Russian government? Okay.
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Jan 2, 2024 23:47
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Discendo Vox posted:edit: okay, you may have wanted to be clearer that King's show was purchased and re-aired by RT. In practice, then, the goal of the show was to draw more viewers to the channel with "normal" programming to onboard them to other material. It was, at a minimum, a stupid move; by 2016 few people with a choice or a conscience touched RT, and it looks like the show was still airing for a while after. No, it's on you to be more clear about what you're talking about if you're going to lecture everyone on being obtuse. We're unclear on what Zoeb meant when he said "RT," he could've just meant Chris Hedges segments, you know, ones where criticized Russia's imperialism and the like, something he'd been doing when he was with American press as well before they dislodged him. As it is, going to need you to define "choice or conscience" when discussing RT too while we're at it, because that doesn't seem falsifiable or particularly concrete either but a very generalized statement. (I would not work for RT, but I wouldn't work for MSNBC or the like either.) WarpedLichen posted:My understanding of what you're saying is that because the execution of free speech isn't perfectly separate from influence, we should just do away with the notion of it entirely and just call all US news organizations the equivalent of state mouthpieces because at least its honest. While I would argue that that's not the case and that our media is actually still a giant step up from state mouthpieces. What I'm saying is that a better way to understand the influence of state entities would be to let them have an official-official mouthpiece which would also allow for other US News organizations to act as separate actors. If those actors parrot the mouthpiece, we know what they are. But I'm not and never would argue for entirely forsaking the fourth estate to the state. Basically, Public Option for Media. Probably Magic fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 00:03
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Cease to Hope posted:yeah they have a ton of these, what are you even talking about It's like the old "what's the difference between an opinion segment on Fox versus a regular news segment on Fox," but in this case, the proxies like Psaki and Hannity are placed alongside Chris Wallace, whichever channel he's on, can't even keep track anymore, which kinda firms up my point lol. Basically, an American BBC. That's what I want. But unlike the BBC, doesn't hold a monopoly.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:21
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Discendo Vox posted:https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/how-the-truth-is-made-at-russia-today quote:"They were way ahead of the WikiLeaks story," a former employee said. "But not because they believed in the free flow of information — but because it looked terrible for the U.S." loving lol. I'm reminded of America's attempts to frame the United States civil rights as Kremlin propaganda in the 60s. This isn't to defend RT, mind you, it's a bad news agency, but also, spoiler alert, interviews get edited and mandated in America too. One particular example is Melissa Harris-Perry leaving MSNBC because they wanted to pivot so much to Trump coverage over any minority perspectives. https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...13e8_story.html Speaking of, guess which news station downgraded their Muslim correspondents once the Israel-Palestine stuff kicked off?
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Jan 3, 2024 00:32
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Silver2195 posted:I’m not sure how the BBC is supposed to be fundamentally different from NPR. According to themselves when they got hit with "state-sponsored media," they're extremely not! Which lol. (But yeah, give NPR a station.) WarpedLichen posted:Edit: I think what you might actually want is some form of stronger disclosure and transparency requirements when it comes to news? Like the platonic ideal for this might be the wikipedia page edit history? Possibly, but it's easy to manipulate, as can be seen with American media where there's a bunch of plausible deniability. Similar to Hillary Clinton taking money for speeches but those "aren't campaign donations," so too is "having a guest with the government" when it comes to not having influence later on. (Not to say any time a state voice is on a channel is an exchange of influence, obviously not, but I also think exchange of influence is definitely in America's current media environment.) Versus listening to some person on NHK freaking out about the South China Sea like it's the most important thing in the world and chuckling about it or BBC trying to go bat for BP after an oil spill and chuckling about it. Much more relaxing experience. As for actual information... yeah, we probably don't know anything about anything until twenty years after the fact. Which I don't love, but I'm not sure how you stuff the genie back into the bottle that is narrative saturation.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:42
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Discendo Vox posted:I don't think that's close to what the Rand report says. The claim in question was about the use of different contradictory positions, which is a part of the Russian strategy in disinformation across multiple channels, not just RT. Russia does have an explicit practice of promoting and controlling divergent fringe positions in countries they target. Very few of these efforts work very well, but when they do work, they tend to stick around because through the mediated entities, they produce a self-sustaining source of civic conflict that is detached from reality. The example brought up in your article was Occupy Wall Street. Do you think Occupy Wall Street was a "civic conflict that is detached from reality?"
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Jan 3, 2024 00:47
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Discendo Vox posted:I literally linked the sources I was referring to in my post, and discussed and cited discussion of other such examples earlier. I also gave you a definition of disinformation that specifically discusses this sort of coverage and its use. Answer the question directly, please.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:52
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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.
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Jan 3, 2024 01:14
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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.
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Jan 3, 2024 01:23
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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."
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Jan 3, 2024 02:13
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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."
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Jan 3, 2024 05:55
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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.
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Jan 3, 2024 07:13
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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. 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.
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Jan 4, 2024 04:53
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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.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:35
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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.
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Jan 4, 2024 08:01
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Probably best just to leave it there simply because this whole conversation has strayed very far from the OP's thesis, and I'll take responsibility for that, I just bristle at double standards I see in evaluations of foreign media versus domestic one.
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Jan 4, 2024 08:35
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