It certainly seems like when the de facto government has an agenda (eg attacking Iraq), they all broadcast that message simultaneously. It certainly seems like they choose which presidential candidates are "electable" and then downplay the others (Sanders, Paul, Dean). It certainly seems like they suppress narratives that are unfavorable to the shared business interests of their owners. It certainly seems like they all cooperate with the government to get easy access (embedded reporters, etc) rather than doing the hard work of adversarial investigation.
There are differences of course, like how we get to hear two similar options and pick between them. And how this simple act of choosing makes the population absorb the propaganda better. But I'd call those internal differences in structure, with the overall result being similar.
If you're happy within the Overton window, then of course it looks like Wikileaks is some crazy actor that came out of nowhere. But if you see mainstream media repeatedly acting in concert, then Wikileaks is a predictable reaction.
So maybe we should all just tone down the colorful language a bit and use a bit less extreme rhetoric to make our points.
Obviously, you can dispute the indictment --- the veracity of the indictment isn't my point. But I contend: any argument you make about my summary of that portion of the indictment is going to illustrate exactly what I mean by the difference between a colorable argument and the mind 'mindslight made upthread.
The language used by the justice department uses less harsh rhetoric to describe its own indictment than your summery. The difference between providing a list of targets in a communication with a group leader, and literally dispatching a group against a list of targets, is two different statements. The later is more colorful and implies relationships which is not found. Asking and dispatching also have a very different implied tone, one being a request and the later being an order.
* Assange had direct contact with some Lulzsec members.
* Assange recruited "Teenager" to liaise with the computer underground.
* "Teenager" represented themselves as an agent of Wikileaks reporting directly to Assange.
* "Teenager" arranged for Lulzsec to take target lists from Wikileaks.
* The transactions in which those target lists were communicated were overseen by Julian Assange; in at least one case, there's video evidence of that occurring.
If your argument is that members of Lulzsec were free to disregard Wikileaks directives, that's a distinction without a difference, at least legally. The same fact pattern is true of most criminal conspiracies.
I used the term "winged monkeys" to describe Lulzsec, which might have been part of what set you off, because, like, Topiary was not literally a simian thrall to Assange. My point there was simply that the law, and the DOJ, and, probably, juries will look at Lulzsec as an purely criminal element of the case; there will be no regard to any larger political goals Lulzsec might have had.
I feel at this point like, unless I got the indictment completely, dramatically wrong, my point about "colorable argument" versus "bullshit rhetoric" has been made.
Sure, my original comment was too general. I've come to that pattern over many specific occurrences, and it keeps my headspace clear by tying mainstream media to a powerful other. But I understand that stating it head-on won't convince anyone.
Narrowing down that heuristic to what is pertinent here:
The mainstream reporting on Iraq from 2003-2007 by (NYT, WSJ, WaPO, FOX, CNN, etc) all overwhelmingly marketed the war to the population. Referring to an alternative of some noble vibrant "free press" is ridiculous when they all were pushing the same government-friendly narrative. Wikileaks was an inevitable response to the lack of investigative journalism opposing the unilateral war, and thus had to function independently with much fewer resources. If anybody from the traditional institution had been doing their purported job, they would have easily scooped Wikileaks and could have spent effort scrubbing the sources. In fact, we saw a lot less of Wikileaks when the mainstream media actually bothered to report on the Snowden revelations.
If the press needs to function like a series of warring contrarian subreddits to validate itself for you, we're operating from incompatible premises.
The press certainly can agree organically about things. We generally talk in terms of causality, but feedback cycles mean that things act mutually on each other - including the population being preached to (eg choosing to promote those fucking yellow ribbons). But exploring this way leads us deeper into handwaving territory, which is a lot easier to shoot down with a dismissive blunt response, as you did to my initial comment.
For the Iraq war specifically, I do agree that many journalists were likely in agreement to begin with. But the ones that were not were filtered out by management and ownership (cf Clear Channel's list of songs to censor), resulting in the unified presentation. I'm not claiming grand conspiracy, but rather emergent behavior with the net effect of squashing big-business-inconvenient narratives.
Also, I'd be thankful to anybody who leaked information that punched holes in the COVID-19 narrative. I don't think that will happen, because I think it is a very real crisis, but I would welcome being wrong. That's another huge difference between your points of comparison - COVID-19 analysis survives open discussion, while the pro-war camp relied on silencing dissent.
You'll try, of course, to recover the irretrievably bad position of your argument comparing the NYT to Pravda by trying to get me to defend the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo's 2003 Iraq coverage. But of course, I don't have to do that. My case is not that journalism is faultless; it's called the "first draft" of history for a reason. Rather, the burden is on you to support the extraordinary claim that the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo are effectively equivalent to state-run media, the claim you stated plainly upthread.
So no, I have not been arguing that the two are "effectively equivalent" or "just like", nor that the government (whatever that may be) has an iron grip on the press - just that the press successfully propagandizes the people with the desires of the ruling power structure. Stating it a different way, one cannot rely on mainstream news outlets and consider themselves informed.
FWIW there is a more direct mechanism of action put forth by Moldbug, but I figure you'll be even less receptive to something of the opposite political flavor.
(Although at this point in our present catastrophe I admit I'm missing the days of competent leadership, even if it was somewhat exploitative of the plebs)
No doubt Yarvin himself could contribute a pointless 5,000 words to this already pointless thread explaining how I've summarized his beliefs poorly. I'm happy to tie it off here, though.
FWIW reading Moldbug's analysis of left versus right is what made me return to self-identifying as liberal.
What specifically are you invoking here as the "free press" ? There is very little free press in the United States. The overwhelming majority of what is called the press consists of mouthpieces for the ruling power structure, analogous to state media in the USSR.
I agree it would have been better for documents to be reviewed before publication rather than dumped. But I just don't see how that was possible given the limited resources of the non-corrupt press, and the tendency of the government to go after anyone in possession of leaks. Assange being considered a journalist has much to do with the rot of the institution itself.