I know quite a few people in the U.S. who watch RT, a Russian state-controlled media operation. The pivot from backing the left fringe to the Trumpist right has been quite interesting.

Not affiliated with the bug tracker RT, in case you were wondering.

Russia Today was created as a child company of RIA Novosti. RIA Novosti itself was created as Sovinformbureau in July 1941 so the propaganda is in it's core.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK's far-left Labour party was quite a fan of Russia Today.

Please, the Labour Party is centre-left not far-left by U.K. standards.

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...

When you watch FoxNews they call everything that’s not in line with them “far left”. It’s a cool trick to mark anybody only slightly left from them as extremist. And judging from conversations with FoxNews viewers it works like a charm.

A tactic that's backfiring on them now, as they get accused by the President of "pandering to the left".

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-nuclear-agains...

Allying with Trump is a dangerous path because his only ideology is himself.

A similar phenomenon is the mainstream media (and its believers) with the term "conspiracy theory".

I would argue that there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there at the moment that should be labeled as such.

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.

> I would argue that there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there at the moment that should be labeled as such.

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.

Cory Doctorow's written a lot about conspiracy theories. Or you could look at https://www.everythingisaremix.info/.

"CONSTANTLY WRONG: THE CASE AGAINST CONSPIRACY THEORIES"

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.

Sorry; I linked the blog. You can watch it here: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series

Corbyn is on the left of most Labour MPs for sure, but I don't know if it'd be fair to call him "far left" when there are groups to his left.

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.

These seem fairly comprehensible:

https://www.cgtn.com

https://english.cctv.com

http://en.cncnews.cn

Their US equivalents would be

https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/

https://www.voachinese.com/

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).

All those sites are blocked in China. Even hackersnews is blocked.

Check: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com

I know, just like https://cn.ft.com/ and https://cn.nytimes.com/ (which are more likely to be worth reading, although not at the same level as the English originals), but the blocks can be circumvented by sufficiently motivated individuals. And I think there are more of those in China than there are sufficiently motivated individuals in the US circumventing the language barrier to read https://www.caixin.com/ or any of the magazines published by http://boyamedia.com/ . (Of course those aren't representative of "Chinese news" either, most of which probably consists of clickbait blogspam.)

So Chinese people can watch foreign news, if they are willing to break Chinese law?

> ...but the blocks can be circumvented by sufficiently motivated individuals.

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.

Marijuana is illegal as well, that doesn't change the fact that lots of people are smoking it anyway.

Sure, the web sites are blocked, but radio waves couldn't be. And traditionally there were always enough radio stations carefully built and sufficiently financed to cover the target areas.

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...

> Those are government-sponsored, explicitly foreign-facing (the language is a big hint) mouthpieces

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.

RFA is the mouthpiece of the CIA.