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Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by jariel on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @05:27PM (#25663512)
No - they are not.

'The News' - which is mostly credible, is mostly not a form of state propaganda.

'The News' in the US, is a 'reasonable' form of credible information.

'Facebook' is generally not a good source of truthful information. It's a very open and free place to communicate, which is wonderful, but it's just not a good truthiness signal.

Enough with this idea that anything but 'everyone on a soapbox' is somehow fascist. Every community has sources that are more legitimately authoritative than others.

Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by aksss on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @06:13PM (#25664041)
When you have a revolving door from the intelligence agencies into the news commentariat, along with speech writers/communications staff for politicians, I think that it's safe to eye "The News" as being at best an unwitting tool of state propaganda, if not an open-eyed broker/distributor of it. I could maybe cut them some slack for eagerly and uncritically repeating the feeds from "unnamed intelligence sources", but when you're paying the nominally "retired" members of the community to help craft the narrative, it's hard to view them as "mostly credible".
Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by jariel on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @06:23PM (#25664168)
It is completely false to suggest that 'political speech writers' and some influence of 'narrative' by state bureaucracies entirely discredits the free press.

'The problem with the press' are their own internal narratives and biases, not any external influence.

The press are generally free to report on what they see, and they do that. It's their opinion that gets in the way.

And ironically, if there are bits they're afraid to report it's definitely not political, it's corporate, for fear of losing advertising revenue.