Herman and Chomsky effectively disproved the notion that mainstream media gives "balanced" perspectives on news in Manufacturing Consent. The trouble is that media has a massive reliance on government institutions for sourcing information and advertisers for revenue. The way that information is withheld from government sources in the case of dissent from doctrine, or money is held back from corporations in the case of dissent from their interests creates patterns and frameworks of self-censorship and framing that twist information. None of this means our news networks are evil, but they are subject to the rules of the game and the only reason they are still going today is because they learned to play ball.

You can question the lack of a perspective in reporting, or doubt the framing of provable information without losing faith in the system. It should almost be seen as your job as a responsible news-reader to look past the propaganda (i.e. systemic limits on information conveying) as best you can, while not becoming entirely jaded or entirely untrusting.

Chomsky is/was a regular on Al Jazeera and RT, but his appearances on domestic news networks are extremely rare (he was a regular on PBS in the 80’s and 90’s).

But I ignore him since the enlightened here told me it’s all propaganda.

To be fair, if the best endorsement you can provide for the Economist is that they tend to be fairly accurate, then it doubles my resolve to be skeptical and vigilant of any claims made by media.

This article sounds reasonable, even logical - and it may be, but I was manipulated by so much propaganda in the past weeks about the Ukraine situation that I no longer trust any source without verification from multiple sources that I seek out.

Propaganda is by far most effective on those who believe themselves immune to its effects. The first casualty of war is the truth.

For example, how many of you believe you are not manipulated by Ads and yet companies spent billions and billions to advertise to you. Why would they do that if it had no impact?

I used some weaselly words there, mostly because I agree with your broader point that it’s important to question sources, question the information. There is media that tends to do a decent job on fact checking sources, etc.

At the end of the day, all I can do is go off the track record of those sources, and that’s why for pretty much any media source the best we can say is tend and fairly accurate because even if they are telling the truth most of the time, there is a question on if it contains all the context and nuance.

What made media outlets questionable and untrustworthy is their blatant agenda, not outside misinformation. I don't even need them to be accurate, balanced, or some other high quality, but they have turned into straight-up propaganda and present almost fact-free moralistic view of the world.

Are you suggesting that free speech is responsible for misinformation?

The first amendment is absolutely not a double-edged sword. The alternative is STRICTLY worse. You end up with governments, like China's, who lie and challenging that lie is punishable.

It fits a pretty strong definition of a double edged sword. It protects the rights of people say false statements as equally as true statements. The false statements are dangerous as it makes it difficult to make good decisions with it because those are based off of bad information.

Calling it a double-edged sword is not meant to say it’s not valuable. It absolutely is. It’s the bedrock of our democracy in the US. The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?

I understand how you're invoking the idea of a double-edged sword. I just don't usually hear it in a context where the alternative is living in dystopia.

> The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?

Listen to alternative perspectives. Engage with ideas you don't agree with. Be aware of your biases, and other peoples' biases. Defend your perspectives using reason and evidence, not emotion or moral values (note: reason and evidence are the only things we can somewhat objectively agree on; though we still have to be aware of people doing shady stuff with studies and using statistics to misrepresent real-world phenomena).

The trend I'm starting to see is that a lot of disconnects stem from ignorance.

Censorship has always been a thing in authoritarian regimes. My concern is that it increasingly an issue in traditional western liberal democracies.

Whether it is by state decree (see Covid), state-subsidized media self-censorship (see Canada), de-platforming (see Google/Twitter/Facebook), or cancel culture - the effects of censorship are equally chilling.

Free speech is only legally protected from government intervention - and only in the US. Canada for example imposes strict limits on allowable speech.

I stand with Elon Musk as a free speech absolutist so I think it is high time we revisit free speech protections beyond their current boundaries. I struggle to call our current system truly free.

Another alternative is Canada, where free speech isn't an absolute right but somehow the whole country hasn't descended into a totalitarian dictatorship.