> [2] "A lot of them are PRC students who migrated to Australia or come here to study. I think they are quite ambivalent about Australia, and China. Culturally and emotionally they still identify with China, but they don't like the corruption, pollution, propaganda or the regime. So they migrate here and they have some perception about this country, that it's beautiful, clean, prosperous, there is press freedom and the media is objective, not like the propaganda in China. "Here they expect the media to do a lot better than the media they're used to back there. When they realise that the media here is just as one-track mind about these things as the Chinese side but exactly the opposite, they find it really hard to reconcile with what they're experiencing."
Personally, I find that even more worrying. People here seem to think they are free-thinkers not subject to propaganda when really, the more "oppressed" people have way more understanding of what's going on in the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2] http://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-media-a-threat-to-soc...
Is this thread attempting to argue that either means of propagating propaganda is more beneficial than the other for a people?
> "..CNN, Fox, Huffpo, Brietbart everyone is telling you different angles it is up to you to decide."
2 parties OR state-ran -- and no other option for news consumption. Modern media, eh?
HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, and political argument—especially the flamewar kind, which it inexorably degrades to—is destructive of that.
I generally only comment on issues I know about. Outside of technology, history and civics is a focus of mine, hence the comments.
Perhaps deleting comments like the parent (made on a throwaway account, apparently) would be a good idea. It would stop folks like me who feel compelled to reply to perceived propaganda from doing so.
The alternative is for everyone who feels strongly about political issues to create throwaways for such HN discussions (see parent), to avoid retribution on their main accounts. I doubt that's a world you'd want to moderate, or that I'd want to live in. (Not suggesting I'd go in for such sock-puppet account shenanigans, but it's the limiting case that comes to mind.)
Anyway, I suspect political stories will always provoke political discussion. If you'd prefer not to have this on the site, I'd humbly suggest flagging and removing such stories.
EDIT: Your point about flame wars is well-taken, however. I could certainly have highlighted the history and facts of American press freedom in a more constructive way here.
Far superior for manufacturing consent? Sure. The western system of propaganda is far more competitive, innovative, or you can call it distributed in the way it hides its agenda in a network of proxies of capital instruments, which is exactly what it would evolve into with the free market. But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda.
Self determinism and free choice thwart state run propaganda. Manufactured consent is not controlled by the government but by a whole bunch of competing sources that can be defeated. I can think of no more effective system aside from ours in which all the knowledge is free and accessible. Aside from new technology that lessons the effects, increase of critical thinking and knowledge are the only solutions. In this country anyone is free to provide this through news, education or whatever other medium they devise.
Your own or inspired by some book ?
> The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction.
Recently I found Slavoj Zizek had even better criticism:
> The US doesn't treat prisoners as brutally – because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the openly brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). But this is why the US is an even more dangerous threat to our freedom than China: its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed. In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms.
That which needs force outside is achieved via self censorship in the US. This is a fact. A sampling of NyT/WaPo pieces on wars US has fought published right before they were begun shows this quite well.
Then there is racist stereotyping of Asian cultures which often gets a pass under various high sounding titles ending with '-rights'.
Yes. When I got access to the internet, 25 years ago or so (only a few years after we got rid of communism in Romania), I was shocked to discover this about the US. In Romania, we had state propaganda and we knew it about what it was. It was everywhere and nobody believed it.
In the US, state propaganda is also everywhere, but everyone accepts it as fact. ("America is the greatest country in the world", "the US government would never do something like that", "we leave nobody behind", "we defend freedom"... I could probably come up with dozens of obviously false things that all Americans believe.)