I think the trick isn't in making people believe the press is free - the trick is in misleading people about what it means.
The press is mostly free in the US, meaning the government isn't going to explicitly censor or micromanage it. By the same token, the press is also free to do whatever it wants - like, optimize for profits, like a good private sector entity does. Some good ways for an ad-funded news publisher to optimize profits are:
- writing things that get people to read/watch the content (and thus, ads), regardless of whether these things are true, accurate, or appropriate in a civilized society;
- getting paid for delivering more ads, e.g. as sponsored (officially or not) content;
- ensuring ongoing access to freshest news by not burning the sources, particularly government or corporate ones, by e.g. publishing things said sources don't want to see published
This way, a fully free press walks into censorship and bias anyway, of its own volition[0].
Freedom of press is important, but I think we talk too much about ideas and principles, and too little about actual system dynamics in play.
--
[0] - Well, as much volition as you can have in a highly competitive industry, where if you don't sacrifice your values, your competitor will, and then you'll run out of money and die.
All the time. It's fucked and Russia fucked it.
The wonderful thing about being in a free nation is the access to the news of other countries. It helps you see which ones are the outliers. It's not yours.
> In the last three years the New York Times hasn’t reported a single positive story on Russia
Gee, I wonder why that might be? Nobody is going to write anything positive when a nation has expelled independent journalists, assassinated people in foreign nations, caused wars in others, been aggressively attacking fishing vessels, attempted assassinations of their own politicans, attacking their own citizens for their religion.
Who is going to care about human interest stories from such a nation?
What would be a positive story you'd like to see printed in that time frame? Name one.
Man it's time that you grow up out of "manifest destiny".
EDIT: I am distinguishing Russia from the Soviet Union here.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/
They're seriously critical of the government, but they don't make the mistake of thinking all there is to report is misery.
Context: I'm not pro-Russia, I think Putin is a wholesale scumbag, for all their faults I greatly prefer the US and the West to any of the alternatives, and I deeply distrust knee-jerk anti-Western leftists.
hahahah case in point right here folks
It is trivial for the US to allow foreign media on US grounds if noone watches it.
If the foreign media becomes popular, the pipe will soon play a different tune.
Case in point: TikTok.
https://rsf.org/en/news/whistleblowing-doctor-missing-after-...
This is how "independent media" work in most countries that have such a thing: different outlets are controlled by different people, resulting in some diversity of opinion, but not every idea gets the same airtime. Of course the definition of "going wild" is different in a Chinese context.
Also, from the article you linked:
> 04/13/2020 UPDATE RSF has taken note of the video published on the Weibo account of the whistleblower Ai Fen, which suggests that she is free to move, and hopes that it was not staged by the Chinese regime.
That depends on what you mean by "freedom of anything". Are people allowed to do everything they want to? No. Are they doing it anyway? Yes.
More concretely with regards to freedom of speech: Are independent media allowed? No. Do they exist anyway? Yes.
> Their government is attempting to govern their lives with a mandatory government issued social media account.
What? That part makes me wonder whether all my knowledge is outdated because I haven't been to China this year and nobody told me about this or whether it's you who's been away for too long.
Likely true, but irrelevant.
(FWIW, there are more English speakers in China than America. Also, historically, at one time there were more Christians in Asia than in Europe. There was a Bishop of Beijing. I read up on the history of the old Silk Road a while back.)
The point is that you don't get thrown in jail if the authorities notice you watching the other fellow's broadcasts.
No one in the West is going to jail for watching TikTok, eh?
They could, but they don't, because they wouldn't understand a thing. So in practice, I think the situation is reversed: there are more people in China who watch US news than people in the US who watch Chinese news.
Not affiliated with the bug tracker RT, in case you were wondering.
Corbyn himself is far-left (again by U.K. standards), but the Parliamentary Labour Party itself gave him 172-40 against in a vote of no confidence in 2016, only for the public members to vote for him 313,209-193,229 in the subsequent leadership contest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-nuclear-agains...
A better example would be the tendency of the left to mark anyone they disagree with as “racist”. Same strategy. Mark your opponents as something that’s so bad that no further discussion can be allowed.
You can attach whatever label you would like to something, it has no effect on whether it is objectively true (in shared, physical reality), it only affects people's perceptions of its truth (virtual reality). This applies both to conspiracy theories, as well as mainstream news theories. There is surely a difference between which class of theories has larger epistemic variance between physical and virtual reality, but this variance exists on a per story basis, and should therefore be analyzed at that level. No one has ever done such a comparative analysis (as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong), despite what mainstream news theorists would have the public believe.
> A better example would be the tendency of the left to mark anyone they disagree with as “racist”. Same strategy. Mark your opponents as something that’s so bad that no further discussion can be allowed.
An excellent example indeed.
This seems like a less than promising title for those of us who are interested in what is objectively true. A quick skim of the first three strawman-filled minutes of the video does not make me feel any better.
It's true, one can indeed find plenty of batshit insane ideas within the conspiracy world. Similarly, one can find plenty of dark-complexioned people engaged in fisticuffs on /r/fightporn. What speculative conclusions one should form based on these two facts is a matter of opinion.
There is an actual far left in the UK though, primarily represented by the Communist Party of Britain. There are other smaller groups too, mostly linked to the wider trade union movement.
Those are government-sponsored, explicitly foreign-facing (the language is a big hint) mouthpieces that are about as representative of "US news" as the sites you link are representative of "Chinese news" (i.e. barely).
As I understand it, using a VPN to get past the firewall is a crime for Chinese nationals. And the govt is constantly blocking them anyway as they find them.
RFA:
https://www.rfa.org/about/info/frequencies.html
VOA:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A nice example of what one U.S. journalist knew regarding the coverage of North Korea in 2013:
https://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/11/us-wants-voa-rfa-t...
Of course they are. Can you point to any mainland Chinese news outlets which are not effectively controlled by the CCP?
If not, it follows that a foreigner reading or watching this stuff gets a pretty good idea of what mainland Chinese are being fed by their news media.
Nope, most news outlets were very critical about the iraqi WMD story with some notable exceptions like the aforementioned NYT and there never was one with afghanistan. Just because there are no/few positive stories about russia does not necessarily mean that the media is biased.
A military in a democratic, sovereign nation should have oversight from civilian authority. If people knew that their sons and daughters were effectively raiding another country as a belligerent force - why did they not stop it. The fear comes not in that they didn't, but that they couldn't
Human nature should be feared, especially when you have a loose cannon firing at will, and only grateful that the barrel is facing away from you. If it were to turn towards you, how do would you stop it?
We never truly learn from history as much as we think we do.
Would it not be fair to say that in a representative government those elected representatives are the civilian authority? The US Congress approved using military force in Iraq, by quite large majorities in both bodies.
That is not to say the war was good or the reasons true, just that the second paragraph of your critique seems unfounded as there was oversight by the republic’s civilian authority.
Absolutely. But those office bearers have constituencies I presume? If office bearer xan make their own decisions regardless of what the people who put them in power say - we would be stretching the idea of a democratic republic to the extreme, don't you think? The taxpayers should have the ability to veto decisions if in large enough numbers.
This isn't really accurate. Most news outlets repeatedly published the government's agenda without much critical examination of what they meant. This study on the issue details events well.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268330903_Media_Cov...
"This study supports four major findings about the media’s coverage of WMD during the three periods: 1. Most media outlets represented WMD as a monolithic menace, failing to adequately distinguish between weapons programs and actual weapons or to address the real differences among chemi-cal, biological, nuclear, and radiological weapons. 2. Most journalists accepted the Bush administration’s formulation of the “War on Terror” as a campaign against WMD, in contrast to coverage during the Clinton era, when many journalists made careful distinctions between acts of terrorism and the acquisition and use of WMD. 3. Many stories stenographically reported the incumbent administration’s perspective on WMD, giving too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy options. 4. Too few stories proffered alternative perspectives to official line, a problem exacerbated by the journalistic prioritizing of breaking-news stories and the “inverted pyramid” style of storytelling. "
Which is fair, I guess. But still, most news outlets internationally were doubtful that Iraq had WMDs and were vindicated after the war.
Iraq probably was a mistake, now that we look back on it through clearer lens of history.
The Iraq War was a definite mistake. The only argument that might stand, which is completely absurd if actually analyzed, is that of humanitarian intervention (against Saddam and his Ba'athist party). Even that humanitarian intervention angle, however, is very suspect due to the human cost of severe sanctions imposed on on Iraq after the first Gulf War, which the US maintained and pressured allies to do as well.
As we saw, once no WMDs were found, the US government switched to a different argument - the humanitarian one. And when that was shown to be BS due to thousands of civilians dying monthly at the hands of The Coalition of the Willing, they switched the argument to "bringing Democracy" to the country. It's the biggest fuck up and biggest moral stain on this country since I have been living here (mid 90s).
Ultimately, the worldwide opposition was palpable. The WMD inspectors from the UN were kicked out by the US. Scott Ritter, the head of the UN group, decried the invasion and did in fact predict the US would achieve nothing and leave "with their tail between their legs". It should have never happened.
My recollection was that the Taliban asked for evidence of Osama Bin Laden's involvement in the September 11th attacks. The US didn't provide it and subsequently invaded.
Not arguing you, to be clear. I appreciate the clarification.
If they weren't, then the US military wouldn't still be in Afghanistan dealing with them nearly 20 years later.
EDIT: I'm not defending the US and any coalition troops staying there. I'm interpreting the current situation. Best thing we can do at this point (and 10 years ago) is to cut our losses and GTFO.
It's not enough to claim the enlightened viewpoint in hindsight. You have to be on the right side of history while it's happening.
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[1] https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-serie...
[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
If they don't want something published, it will never be seen by most people.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-long-forgotten-cia-docume...
Obama was used to sell war to the American public - and Western Europe. That is going to take a lot of work to undo.
the single most important thing that defines good propaganda is that it's invisible to those under its influence.. It used to be a lot "worse" back in the pre-Internet days when people generally watched a couple of channels and more or less got their info from news-papers. In a sense all these information bubbles are illustrating how much we are being targeted because we realize that we're not actually agreeing on anything - but again we only see how the targeting works on "the other camp" rarely on us.
the rift going across (Western) society can largely be attributed to how propaganda has changed (forced to be more targeted and aggressive) and how the old forms of white/black info-ops which had massive reach no longer do their job. companies can now play too - no need to be a nation state to get disrupted by a guy in a Max Headroom mask. everyone can be both actor and spectator
It's so strange to me as a non-American when I see a flag wielding citizen somewhere in the news, or normal people display their pride for their home country by talking about "taking a knee", or when they say "he/she is un-American" etc ... or somebody on LinkedIn who considers themselves "patriot" and mentions this in their profile. This "pride" is unheard of where I come from and if such a person would be transported into my home country suddenly speaking my language but with that behavior they would look very out of place.
various names of great thinkers on propaganda float around but Jacques Ellul is by far the most articulate. He also has a section on Propaganda in his other (earlier) "The Technological Society"[2] which is his magnun opus IMO. Both the most underrated books I've had the pleasure to read in this past decade. (I think it was reading Ellul what ultimately radicalized Ted Kaczinsky e.g. helped him come to the conclusion that society is borked beyond repair).
[1] Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
[2] https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
c.f.: socialism as a blanket assertion of something being bad without evidence.
edit because I forgot this story...not long ago I ended up in an online argument with someone that I really shouldn't have been about what communism is and isn't (yeah...). Their literal claim was that 'communism is a form of socialism' and they claimed that was evidence that communism is bad, because socialism is inherently bad.
An elite is a group of people who are distinguished from their peers in some way. In common parlance "some way" usually means influence, power, seniority, respect from peers, performance, or wealth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_po...
Even in large organizations where the owners still do play a semi-active role, most of the day-to-day decision making is (necessarily) is made by the managers. And frequently, even when there is an active disagreement between management and ownership, management wins out.
As a suggestive example, who benefits from mergers? Upper management usually becomes much wealthier, but 50-80% of mergers fail to add value to the company. [1] That is, capitalists lose out 50-80% of the time, but they still happen anyway. Consider the increasing complaints about skyrocketing executive management pay divorced from company performance, golden parachutes, or companies being almost seemingly deliberately run into the ground while the people responsible walk off richer and with a new job.
The power of the managerial class does not just extend to the corporate world either - government has been largely infiltrated by managerialists. Conservatives talk about the Deep State, liberals talk about the revolving door. Both are talking about the same phenomenon.
[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-do-so-many-m...
Nothing is changed by the bourgeoisie holding state power despite the veneer of democracy, that’s also part of how capitalism works. Just because the haute bourgeoisie don’t risk personal involvement doesn’t mean they aren’t in control. Lenin’s slightly less scientific work talks about that too https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
> The fact that they let their managers take a cut doesn’t change the power dynamic.
The managers are not simply taking a cut, they are exerting power over capitalists and winning.
While it’s true that within the bounds of national markets the old haute bourgeoisie is no longer as dominant, imperialist exploitation is the main source of profits for the bourgeoisie as a whole. This American national bourgeoisie (which might be called “managers”) benefit from imperialism too, even though they may not be its primary instigators.