There's certain ways to effectively critically read newspaper articles that I was taught at a young age and it's definitely a learned skill that I wish the US education system did better with.
I’m often surprised that people who denounce the Mainstream Media as biased and under the thumb of vested interests are quite happy to uncritically absorb any old crap from obviously biased and frequently insane “independent” sources they happen to agree with.
It doesn't take high intelligence to spot lies in the former, whereas it often takes significant intelligence and a long history of following the news from a broad selection of sources to spot lies in the latter. One group are hobbyists, the other are professionals.
The more worrying part is the orders of magnitude larger group that essentially considers ~everything that the MSM prints is true, at least to the best of their ability. For most people (including smart people on sites like HN), the mere suggestion that this may not be the case will typically get you categorized as a member of the former group, regardless of the facts of the individual point of disagreement.
This seems to be simply the default nature of human psychology that is independent to some degree from intelligence. Changing it would require a significant organized effort of teaching people critical thinking skills, and the state seems uninterested in anything of the kind, despite their stated concerns about the crisis of fake news.
People conspire all the time, so shouldn't any sane person suspect some conspiracies?
Hijacking the word "conspiracy theorist" to mean nut job seems like exactly the twisting of reality you are advocating to avoid.
Thus (not having read it myself), Manufacturing Consent could show how emergent properties of mass media might lead to them pushing a certain incorrect world view, rather than proposing a theory that requires the teams behind them to all agree to conspire and none of them to make that public knowledge.
That is right. Chomsky proposes 5 filters through which this process happens. These filters operate, according to Chomsky, not just in media, but in all of society. From kindergarten to our deadbeds.
I think this was best illustrated with Chomsky's 1996 interview in "The Big Idea" on BBC by Andrew Marr. Chomsky is outlining how the filters make sure certain viewpoints are popularized, and Andrew Marr asks "How can you know that I'm self-censoring?". To which Chomsky replies "I'm not saying you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
The 30 minute episode[1] is well worth a watch, but the three minute clip of the above exchange is also available[2].
[1]: https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow [2]: https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU
Nope it is Comcast who has earned that distinction. The same one who while technically a rival to them advertises heavily with them. The same one whose past actions have made net neutrality not a theoretical matter. Nothing illegal but their actions are flagrantly self-interested.
The term "conspiracy theory" has always always been derogatory[1]
[1] https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_alwa...
The big agencies are pretty well versed on this, look at the system approach they take on this one: https://jfkfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Countering-W...
It is not the details of this specific conspiracy that is interesting, but the systematic approach to tackling it.
Let’s build toilets. If traditionally a locality has no toilets and you come in and want to do good and bring sanitation you’re still manufacturing consent, albeit for the good. Grassroots also manufactures consent if you have a main outside driver.
And it's not as much about the individual power structures, but how they influence the media to do it. The new players since the last publication are the tech companies and how they have tremendous power to selectively give voice or silence to push a certain narrative. They are slowly replacing the traditional media companies as primary player that manufacture consent. It seems there is a current battle between the two and I think the tech companies are winning so far.
The propaganda model does account for other non-governmental and non-media influences. This is talked about in the animation Al-Jazeera made.
I think in the past some of the news outlets sort of pretended to be unbiased. They could fool more people into believing that. Sure Fox News was mostly a one-party outlet, but others kept their bias behind the curtain. Since about 5-7 years ago, they stopped pretending as much.
At the same time, I think there is a perception that traditional media companies have failed to manufacture consent properly. There was this void created in that space and tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others rushed in to fill that void. Their message is "come to us, we'll manufacture consent better than these old crusty companies". Then you can see some of the traditional media hitting back at Facebook and others. And there is this sort of a battle between them as to who is a better player at manufacturing and controlling "truth".
I edited a technical subject [some 10+ years ago], and within minutes(!!) it had been changed again to a variant of what was originally there, I presume by a bot. Some further research taught me that the technical issue was actually a sensitive one for various new age groups. Since there is no way I could ever hope to manually compete with a team of scripted adversaries, I gave up.
Taught me something about Wikipedia.
Note: I have other edits that have been up for years, so not at all absolute.
Please elaborate!
People have great difficulty operating in low-trust environments. It takes a lot of work and is mentally draining to check everything, to distrust your co-workers and family and correct them when they start talking about the flat earth. Far better to stop the falsehoods being dripped into the public sphere in the first place.
My brother and I went to high school in different states. The obvious differences in the education we got about politically charged topics was disgusting. The state I went to school in basically omitted anything that could lead one to question the government's decision making the way religious schools sometimes "forget" to teach evolution.
It wasn't like they neglected to mention the Indian wars or Japanese internment in the 3rd grade because those are heavy topics for 3rd graders, they just gave those sort of things got a quick mention and no assigned work specific to them or serious discussion. They repeatedly failed to mention (early grades) or downplayed any legitimacy (later grades) of any grievance with the government. In retrospect they conspicuously skipped the 14th amendment (you know, the one that protects people from state encroachment on rights) because there's a very short path from it to some tough questions.
Edit: Come to think of it the one history teacher I had who actually promoted critical thinking grew up out of state.
My issue is not so much with the typical left-ish ideology determining what we did and didn't focus our coverage on. My complaint is with the all that coverage having undertone of government doing no wrong, ever. I believe this to be somewhat particular to the state I grew up in, not necessarily left wing ideology (of the time).
We covered civil rights yet it was covered as though government was some savior implementing reform over the objection of backwards southerners. We got to see videos from the period but none of them had police dogs attacking protestors. We covered the civil war but not the failure of reconstruction. We discussed Jim Crow not in that context but in the context of the interwar period. I don't recall the KKK even being mentioned in discussion of the 1800s. The trail of tears, the Indian wars. That was all blamed on settlers encroaching on Indian land never any government involvement other than "protecting settlers". I never heard of Custer, Sitting bull, Wounded knee, etc was skipped. Discussion of the post-civil war US was all about industrialization.
It definitely goes both ways. I'm not sure "progressive" whitewashing of the past is any better or worse than "conservative" (in quotes because who knows what these words mean anymore) whitewashing but they're both not good. I wouldn't even say the particular whitewashing my education was subject to followed and particular mainstream ideology, it just religiously avoided mentioning anything that would lead one to one being skeptical of government.
I simply meant to expand on the GP's point that education does in fact have a large impact on ideology but that effect is delayed until that group start voting en-masse.
If people actually learn it that is.
> It takes a lot of work and is mentally draining to check everything
Very true. However, it's far less taxing to learn how to read articles critically and detect possible half-truth telling, one example being spotting where the author is using carefully chosen words to project an idea without saying it outright. In my experience most articles on the topic of politics fall into this category, so it's best to read several versions of a story from various publications and see what kind of spin each one puts on it, which facts they include/exclude, etc.
> Far better to stop the falsehoods being dripped into the public sphere in the first place.
The first problem with this is, you'd first you have to get people to agree on what's false. I'd wager there's quite a bit you and I disagree on outside of whether the earth is flat, and I'm assuming you're probably a fairly reasonable person.
Secondly, taken literally this could mean (or gradually and eventually lead to a situation where) you can't print any speculative/inconclusive articles, and could only publish things that have been "proven" by "respectable", "right-thinking" organizations.
My commentary:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...
Source:
https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1...
The power to define narrative has always been immense.
I'm interested in how the centuries-old debate about protectionism and free trade has reignited over the past few years, and I'm also concerned about how Wikipedia's editorial community and processes are evolving. It was a surprise to see the two subjects combined like this, but given what you say about the power to define narrative, I suppose it shouldn't have been.
The whole notion of narrative and its power, especially contrasted with discrete facts and fact-checking, is another area I've been exploring, arguably under the sscope of my blog's purview (intentionally both broad and vague, a blessing and curse).
Douglas Ruskoff's "Team Human" blog explores this with George Monbiot here, quite well.
Ep. 89 George Monbiot "Beyond Salvation and Disaster". Episode: https://shows.pippa.io/teamhuman/ep-89-george-monbiot-beyond...
Media: https://feed.pippa.io/public/streams/58ad887a1608b1752663b04...
The theme shows up both in the intro, at 4m30s, and in the conversation, starting at 11m30s, andcontinuing through the rest of the episode.
Lets say I pump a state's aquifers dry to bottle water and there is a scandal about it. If I remove that information from the common information repository about my company is that ok?
I wouldn't be so sure about that. SLS (the upcoming government funded rocket) is mostly a product of politics and lobbying and as such a very political subject. Quantum physics seems like an objective field until we start discussing funding for the next particle accelerator. Discussions about PHP have never been sane, even without Facebook having vested interest one way or the other. The laws of thermodynamics seem largely undisputed until the perpetual motion crowd starts another edit war.
It's easier to determine facts in technical subjects, making the work of good Wikipedia mods easier. But that doesn't mean they are free of agendas or that those agendas don't influence Wikipedia
Education is still the way to go, obviously.
biases has nothing to do with education but one may be more aware of them but i think thats more of a understanding of self or the human condition the scientific method tries to promote undiased results though but they do of course seep in.