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As a kid growing up through the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, I can tell you BBC played a crucial role. We use to gather an listen to Farsi BBC broadcast in short

As a kid growing up through the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, I can tell you BBC played a crucial role. We use to gather an listen to Farsi BBC broadcast in short-wave radio. That experience has made me to be distrustful of any major media outlet.

ealexhudson 10y ago
Absolutely; UK Govt still funds the BBC directly. I do believe it's substantially independent and certainly not direct Govt propaganda, but there's no denying that it pushes a very UK-centric view.
eternalban 10y ago
I remember it. They used to announce demonstration schedules. And the line from the Foreign Office was "BBC is independent". What a crock of shit. And the New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint". (Let that sink in.) https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-praised-as-a-moderate-by-the-new-york-times/ https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-pr... RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away? The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Well then, the issue is to establish good journalistic sources, which publish the important stories, while remaining independent of propaganda motivations, including corporate ones. How do we do that?
  - eternalban 10y ago
    I don't have the answer to that question. The obvious answer is that democratic societies need to take education very seriously and provide the necessary cognitive tools for the populace, but that is not a short term remedy.
  - jwtadvice 10y ago
    Thank you for asking the right questions! This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"? My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Yeah that's gonna run about as effectively as the UN, which is to say barely at all. I do have a scheme I'm developing for this problem but I'm not sure how practical it is.
      - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        Go ahead and contact me personally. We need to do something about this, and if algorithms can, algorithms must.
        eternalban 10y ago
        Train it on this - a great resource: http://www.gdeltproject.org/ http://www.gdeltproject.org/ I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue. Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools. There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.
- areyousure 10y ago
  To save effort on fact-checking the claim that 'New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint"': I believe the source of this claim is that the New York Times ran an article on February 8, 1979 with the headline "Young Praises Islam as ‘Vibrant’ And Calls the Ayatollah ‘a Saint’". You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-islam-as-vibrant-and-calls-the-ayatollah-a-saint.html http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-isl... Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."
- rustyPipe 10y ago
  I haven't heard of the NY Times calling Khomeini a saint. Also, I thought the BBC is a fairly good journalistic source.
  - pas 10y ago
    The BBC being a good source doesn't necessarily mean that they are and always were super-duper 120% objective in everything.

ealexhudson 10y ago

Absolutely; UK Govt still funds the BBC directly. I do believe it's substantially independent and certainly not direct Govt propaganda, but there's no denying that it pushes a very UK-centric view.

eternalban 10y ago

I remember it. They used to announce demonstration schedules. And the line from the Foreign Office was "BBC is independent". What a crock of shit. And the New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint". (Let that sink in.) https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-praised-as-a-moderate-by-the-new-york-times/ https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-pr... RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away? The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Well then, the issue is to establish good journalistic sources, which publish the important stories, while remaining independent of propaganda motivations, including corporate ones. How do we do that?
- eternalban 10y ago
  I don't have the answer to that question. The obvious answer is that democratic societies need to take education very seriously and provide the necessary cognitive tools for the populace, but that is not a short term remedy.
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  Thank you for asking the right questions! This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"? My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Yeah that's gonna run about as effectively as the UN, which is to say barely at all. I do have a scheme I'm developing for this problem but I'm not sure how practical it is.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Go ahead and contact me personally. We need to do something about this, and if algorithms can, algorithms must.
      - eternalban 10y ago
        Train it on this - a great resource: http://www.gdeltproject.org/ http://www.gdeltproject.org/ I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue. Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools. There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.
areyousure 10y ago
To save effort on fact-checking the claim that 'New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint"': I believe the source of this claim is that the New York Times ran an article on February 8, 1979 with the headline "Young Praises Islam as ‘Vibrant’ And Calls the Ayatollah ‘a Saint’". You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-islam-as-vibrant-and-calls-the-ayatollah-a-saint.html http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-isl... Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."
rustyPipe 10y ago
I haven't heard of the NY Times calling Khomeini a saint. Also, I thought the BBC is a fairly good journalistic source.
- pas 10y ago
  The BBC being a good source doesn't necessarily mean that they are and always were super-duper 120% objective in everything.