6 ms·

I don't doubt that RT has a pro-Russian slant, but is there any objective evidence that the traditional sources are any less biased? It was only last decade whe

by whack 9y ago

I don't doubt that RT has a pro-Russian slant, but is there any objective evidence that the traditional sources are any less biased? It was only last decade when American media proved itself to be frighteningly biased in favor of the US government's agenda[1]. By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives. Is it any surprise that foreign countries, including our allies in the EU, are becoming increasingly distrustful of American technology platforms? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War#Criticisms_of_pro-invasion_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War...

grandalf 9y ago
> By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives. This is precisely Schmidt's goal, and has been for a long time. He wants to weaponize Google and sell it to Government as if it were a defense contractor. It's totally shameful. Schmidt is one of the enablers of villains like GW Bush. History will judge him harshly.
meowface 9y ago
Most of the popular US media is very biased towards the US, but that's not what's spurring this action from Google. It's not just that RT is owned by a foreign state or that RT is biased or even propaganda. It's that it's owned by a foreign state which attempted to interfere in US elections, partially using RT, and partially with the help of Google search results showing RT stories. Google, being an American company, needs to draw a line somewhere, and that seems like a reasonable place. American state-owned or private outlets deliberately attempting to influence other countries' elections (as they undoubtedly do) are also right to be de-ranked by those countries' search engines and aggregators.
- grandalf 9y ago
  Aside from the accusations made by US intelligence agencies there has not been any data presented that links the Russian government with the stuff you mention. Surely there has been lots of mischief on both sides, but it's absurd to think that anything Russia did altered the outcome of the election. If you look into the details the evidence is not there. The reason Russia is being blamed is because the US has lost the chess game in the middle east with Russia and will need to do something more aggressive to fight back, but can't do that unless Americans start hating Russians again. Let's not buy into the hype.
  - meowface 9y ago
    I agree it's unlikely Russia altered the outcome of the election; Trump likely would've won with or without their influence. But intent matters more than results here. If a country tries to affect your country's election through deceit, even if they're not really that successful, it still deserves a response. I'm not sure what "if you look into the details the evidence is not there" is supposed to mean but in terms of intentions, the Russian government did intend to help Trump win (or at least help Clinton lose) and did intend to achieve this goal in part through spreading misleading information. The evidence is pretty damning.
    - grandalf 9y ago
      What information was misleading or false? There were lots of emails leaked. The FBI investigation was concerned with the legality of using the private server, but none of the potential campaign finance or ethics violations revealed by the contents of the emails has received any attention at all. As an American citizen who is not aligned with either major party, I'm pleased when one of the power mongers from either party is destroyed. What should have happened is that a panel of experts should have reviewed the troubling aspects of the emails and issued a statement. But the partisans wanted to pretend the issue was either a) automatically damning or b) a complete non-issue. The truth was likely somewhere in the middle. RT did nothing at all wrong by reporting on those things, and surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. I think that what people miss is that the intention of RT was simply to reveal unflattering truths to help make Americans unhappy with their leaders. This is not a bad thing. If our leaders have committed crimes or ethics violations I want to know about it so that it can appropriately impact my vote. The most peculiar implication of the criticism of RT is the idea that somehow Americans should not know these things or should remain blissfully naive of embarrassing things about our leaders. It's almost too patronizing to believe.
psergeant 9y ago
RT does not have a “pro-Russian slant”, RT is a literal propaganda outlet for the Kremlin, disingenuously passing itself off as a news agency.
- grandalf 9y ago
  please cite five articles that illustrate your point.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    One of the most despicable examples was Malaysian Flight 17: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17#Russian_media_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17#Ru...
    - grandalf 9y ago
      This has to do with Russia's official PR aimed at its own people. RT can't contradict that any more than NPR can call for the imprisonment of high level officials due to Gitmo.
      - threeseed 9y ago
        What ? It literally discussed how RT firstly was unique in criticising Ukraine then changed their position multiple times.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        This is actually a bad example, as NPR has criticized plenty of U.S. government officials. It was especially inflammatory about the NSA. I think you should instead use the Voice of America news agency instead, it is overtly an American propaganda arm, used for the same purpose as Sputnik, and as RT is used de-facto.
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    1: http://archives.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php http://archives.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php 2: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9256.12097 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9256.12097 3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/20/rt-wants-to-spread-moscows-propaganda-here-lets-treat-it-that-way/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... 4: http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/russia-network-rt-propaganda/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/russia-network-rt-propaganda/ 5: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505751335/-rt-america-the-one-news-outlet-for-which-trump-retains-an-unexpected-affinity https://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505751335/-rt-america-the-one...
jcranmer 9y ago
It's not that RT is biased. Fox News is clearly biased, but I wouldn't treat it the same way. It's that RT utterly doesn't care to report the facts. To show you what I mean, I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC. The article had several flaws: * It miscounted the number of people in the city. While I understand there's definitely some room to come up with different values (having two cities and a general not-in-city suburban area), I couldn't come up with a combination of reasonable values that was close to their estimate. * It misidentifies the NCSA as the NSA. * There was an odd bit about how it's "suspicious" that the area has so many IP addresses, which is a) nonsensical, b) I've no idea how to actually come up with a number here (I'm quite sure it was made up for the article), and c) not so surprising if you understand historical IP address allocation policies. * It also identifies the small town as having three major airports. There is in fact only one airport served by one airline (now two) that serves two destinations (Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth) with 5 flights a day. There is a second, 4000 ft airstrip. I don't know what they think the third airport is--best guess is the decommissioned Air Force base in the next town over. After reading that article, I have decided to never again grace RT with even ad revenue.
- nkurz 9y ago
  I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC I presume you are avoiding a direct link to the article so that you don't publicize it further, but ironically, when I searched on Google for "estonia uiuc hacking rt" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+hacking+rt https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+hacking+rt) I found that Google choose to ignore "uiuc" and "rt" in the first two results, and "estonia" and "rt" from the third. Any other day, I would have assumed this is just Google's relatively recent policy of assuming essential search terms are typos, but now I have to wonder if they are c̶e̶n̶s̶o̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ de-ranking results! Still, while I may just be lacking Google-fu, even when I search for "estonia uiuc site:rt.com" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+site:rt.com https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+site:rt.com) I get nothing. Maybe you could provide a link?
  - jcranmer 9y ago

by whack 9y ago

grandalf 9y ago

> By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives. This is precisely Schmidt's goal, and has been for a long time. He wants to weaponize Google and sell it to Government as if it were a defense contractor. It's totally shameful. Schmidt is one of the enablers of villains like GW Bush. History will judge him harshly.

meowface 9y ago

Most of the popular US media is very biased towards the US, but that's not what's spurring this action from Google. It's not just that RT is owned by a foreign state or that RT is biased or even propaganda. It's that it's owned by a foreign state which attempted to interfere in US elections, partially using RT, and partially with the help of Google search results showing RT stories. Google, being an American company, needs to draw a line somewhere, and that seems like a reasonable place. American state-owned or private outlets deliberately attempting to influence other countries' elections (as they undoubtedly do) are also right to be de-ranked by those countries' search engines and aggregators.

grandalf 9y ago
Aside from the accusations made by US intelligence agencies there has not been any data presented that links the Russian government with the stuff you mention. Surely there has been lots of mischief on both sides, but it's absurd to think that anything Russia did altered the outcome of the election. If you look into the details the evidence is not there. The reason Russia is being blamed is because the US has lost the chess game in the middle east with Russia and will need to do something more aggressive to fight back, but can't do that unless Americans start hating Russians again. Let's not buy into the hype.
- meowface 9y ago
  I agree it's unlikely Russia altered the outcome of the election; Trump likely would've won with or without their influence. But intent matters more than results here. If a country tries to affect your country's election through deceit, even if they're not really that successful, it still deserves a response. I'm not sure what "if you look into the details the evidence is not there" is supposed to mean but in terms of intentions, the Russian government did intend to help Trump win (or at least help Clinton lose) and did intend to achieve this goal in part through spreading misleading information. The evidence is pretty damning.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    What information was misleading or false? There were lots of emails leaked. The FBI investigation was concerned with the legality of using the private server, but none of the potential campaign finance or ethics violations revealed by the contents of the emails has received any attention at all. As an American citizen who is not aligned with either major party, I'm pleased when one of the power mongers from either party is destroyed. What should have happened is that a panel of experts should have reviewed the troubling aspects of the emails and issued a statement. But the partisans wanted to pretend the issue was either a) automatically damning or b) a complete non-issue. The truth was likely somewhere in the middle. RT did nothing at all wrong by reporting on those things, and surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. I think that what people miss is that the intention of RT was simply to reveal unflattering truths to help make Americans unhappy with their leaders. This is not a bad thing. If our leaders have committed crimes or ethics violations I want to know about it so that it can appropriately impact my vote. The most peculiar implication of the criticism of RT is the idea that somehow Americans should not know these things or should remain blissfully naive of embarrassing things about our leaders. It's almost too patronizing to believe.

psergeant 9y ago

RT does not have a “pro-Russian slant”, RT is a literal propaganda outlet for the Kremlin, disingenuously passing itself off as a news agency.

grandalf 9y ago
please cite five articles that illustrate your point.
- threeseed 9y ago
  One of the most despicable examples was Malaysian Flight 17: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17#Russian_media_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17#Ru...
  - grandalf 9y ago
    This has to do with Russia's official PR aimed at its own people. RT can't contradict that any more than NPR can call for the imprisonment of high level officials due to Gitmo.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      What ? It literally discussed how RT firstly was unique in criticising Ukraine then changed their position multiple times.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      This is actually a bad example, as NPR has criticized plenty of U.S. government officials. It was especially inflammatory about the NSA. I think you should instead use the Voice of America news agency instead, it is overtly an American propaganda arm, used for the same purpose as Sputnik, and as RT is used de-facto.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  1: http://archives.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php http://archives.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php 2: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9256.12097 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9256.12097 3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/20/rt-wants-to-spread-moscows-propaganda-here-lets-treat-it-that-way/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... 4: http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/russia-network-rt-propaganda/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/russia-network-rt-propaganda/ 5: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505751335/-rt-america-the-one-news-outlet-for-which-trump-retains-an-unexpected-affinity https://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505751335/-rt-america-the-one...

jcranmer 9y ago

It's not that RT is biased. Fox News is clearly biased, but I wouldn't treat it the same way. It's that RT utterly doesn't care to report the facts. To show you what I mean, I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC. The article had several flaws: * It miscounted the number of people in the city. While I understand there's definitely some room to come up with different values (having two cities and a general not-in-city suburban area), I couldn't come up with a combination of reasonable values that was close to their estimate. * It misidentifies the NCSA as the NSA. * There was an odd bit about how it's "suspicious" that the area has so many IP addresses, which is a) nonsensical, b) I've no idea how to actually come up with a number here (I'm quite sure it was made up for the article), and c) not so surprising if you understand historical IP address allocation policies. * It also identifies the small town as having three major airports. There is in fact only one airport served by one airline (now two) that serves two destinations (Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth) with 5 flights a day. There is a second, 4000 ft airstrip. I don't know what they think the third airport is--best guess is the decommissioned Air Force base in the next town over. After reading that article, I have decided to never again grace RT with even ad revenue.

nkurz 9y ago
I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC I presume you are avoiding a direct link to the article so that you don't publicize it further, but ironically, when I searched on Google for "estonia uiuc hacking rt" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+hacking+rt https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+hacking+rt) I found that Google choose to ignore "uiuc" and "rt" in the first two results, and "estonia" and "rt" from the third. Any other day, I would have assumed this is just Google's relatively recent policy of assuming essential search terms are typos, but now I have to wonder if they are c̶e̶n̶s̶o̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ de-ranking results! Still, while I may just be lacking Google-fu, even when I search for "estonia uiuc site:rt.com" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+site:rt.com https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+site:rt.com) I get nothing. Maybe you could provide a link?
- jcranmer 9y ago