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This is a kinda controversial stance, but I think foreign propaganda has some utility. I don't trust Chinese or Russian state media to report on internal Chines

• badcede 8y ago
  The best propaganda is whatever truth the other side is avoiding.
• iscro 8y ago
  That's an excellent point. Strange enough, you described the original ethos of google news. Google news was created in the mid 2000s to give a broad and counterbalancing view of news. It was intended to show not only what "we" were saying about an event, but also what "they" were saying about it. This naturally didn't sit well with our news industry and it didn't well with their news industry and they pressured google to curate and localize the news. For a brief period of time, when idealists ran google, google news offered a broad view of the world. Sadly, now everything is localized, even search.
• anon_d 8y ago
  Yes, exactly. It's not like the US media hasn't been successfully spreading it's own global propaganda for ages. An end to the US's media/academic monopoly on truth-setting is a very welcome change. We need real competition here.
  • stupidcar 8y ago
    I agree that competition of some kind could be welcome, but welcoming the state sponsored propaganda of autocratic, corrupt and repressive states just because their own hegemonic desires conflict with those of the US strikes me as being the most politically facile stance imaginable.
    • thiagoharry 8y ago
      I suspect that any competition would always be portrayed as autocratic, corrupt and repressive, as we are influenced by the other side of the propaganda. Not that this is a lie. I really think that you will find some degree of repression, autocratism and corruption in any state seeking to attain or trying to keep some degree of global power and facing some opposition.
      • elefanten 8y ago
        Maybe hypothetically. But in this case we know that we're talking about China so there's no need to speculate about relative autocracy, corruption and repression.
      • losteric 8y ago
        The degree and ends do matter. Chinese autocratic actions are not equivalent to the shaping of American discourse by for-profit institutions. I will trust the one that has codified free speech - however flawed.
      • glenstein 8y ago
        I don't think whataboutism is automatically wrong. But in the context of hn threads on China, I feel it often adds an unhelpful layer of abstraction. It's never clear if people doing the whatabouting actually dispute the negative characterization of China, or whether they agree with it but also want to change the subject to a broader topic in way the unfocuses the lense of the conversation. The moral condemnation of what China is doing is not information I want to be lost from the conversation, and that seems to always be an effect of the whatabouting.
        • dingoegret 8y ago
          I'm curious what it is about what about it not ism, that is so bad. I hear it flung around so much by westerners like some kind of slogan. Is there a purpose? Is pointing out hypocrisy bad?
    • dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  • PavlovsCat 8y ago
    When you already have a bunch of fires burning setting more fires makes them compete for oxygen, but that doesn't help living things. I would say the proper reaction to bullshit is critical thinking. Take someone like James Randi, and imagine instead of disproving deceptions he had just pretended to receive a message from spirits that this or that person was faking something. That's "competition" alright, but it's not helping, and it just helps normalizes something that has greater potential for abuse than use.
    • limist 8y ago
      James Randi has been caught outright lying and is not to be relied on: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/James-Randi-debunking-the-king-of-the-debunkers.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/... http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/04/randis-involvement-with-identity-theft.html http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/04/randis-involvem...
      • PavlovsCat 8y ago
        Thanks, I had no idea, but that was really just an example I made up on the spot. In some cases, you can fight wildfires with fire, but that's also besides the point, which isn't about James Randi or fire but propaganda and deception, and how best to counter it.
    • anon_d 8y ago
      Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals. The result of this system is not truth. The result of this system is propaganda successful disguised as objectivity... which is exactly what you need in order to effectively manipulate a democracy.
      • PavlovsCat 8y ago
        > Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals. Yes, and it makes it all the more damning, because it kinda shows we know how logic works, what standards or principles are, but for "social reasons" we can suspend that. > Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. [..] Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. -- George Orwell This now split up into more echo chambers, little "orthodoxies", but the sum of that is not truth either.
• xiphias2 8y ago
  RT is great Russian international competition, but I haven't seen China to do something similar. Do you know a good one?
  • soohyung 8y ago
    SCMP
  • bane 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/user/CCTVNEWSbeijing https://www.youtube.com/user/CCTVNEWSbeijing
• xster 8y ago
  Outside of small scale independent journalists who are always at the risk of getting de-platformed, non-NATO/petrodollar-aligned foreign news are the only place I can find Americans talking about American stances like leftism (in the economic sense), anti-war, etc.
  • makomk 8y ago
    Yeah. The downside of this is that it gives countries like Russia an outlet to slip in pro-Russian propaganda through outlets that people come to trust based on their other reporting. There are basically two responses the US mainstream media could've taken to this - open up local platforms for those non-aligned views so that Russia can no longer leverage them, or use it to claim that non-approved views are just Russian propaganda - and they've gone with the latter.
    • xster 8y ago
      Oh ya, I was perhaps vague but don't get me wrong, I would of course prefer that American discourses could happen on American platforms and even if RT is letting proper non-corporate-aligned journalism run unfettered, it's just a means to an end and we can't count of their altruism. I think it's just the world responding with a higher profile countermeasure to a systemic problem that could be handled more 'naturally' but isn't.
  • forapurpose 8y ago
    > Outside of small scale independent journalists who are always at the risk of getting de-platformed, non-NATO/petrodollar-aligned foreign news are the only place I can find Americans talking about American stances like leftism (in the economic sense), anti-war, etc. The good news is that there are many opportunities in the U.S. and West: The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Nation, Mother Jones, Common Dreams, Tom Paine, Democracy Now, and many more. The Guardian generally supports those positions too; Le Monde does, last I knew, as well as Der Spiegel. You could read that kind of thing all day and never run out of content.
    • 8y ago
• onetimemanytime 8y ago
  True, if you know it's a state sponsored TV you can look at it with objectivity glasses. But not all think about putting two and two together--and honestly some can't...hook, line, and sinker.
• walrus66 8y ago
  ... I wouldn't really call RT a foreign propaganda site. Frankly, and perhaps I'm myself biased, they provide less propagandic of an assessment of Western events than nearly every one of our mainstream media outlets that I can think of. Regarding what the article is referring to, things like the Washington Post allowing China to buy ads or China funding lobbyists who speak to congressman who likely have no idea, I can't see anybody justifying that, unless they hate the US, which okay, that's your prerogative. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the average person is at least two orders of magnitude less endowed with information than the people you might speak with on HN, whether or not any of our opinions are correct, so even a tiny bit of propaganda reaching enough people can change minds against the interest of the country. I think this should've been illegal 50 years ago, and I think the people abetting this should be tried for treason, almost by the very definition.
  • jnurmine 8y ago
    It is not good to confuse what RT and Ruptly etc. are meant to be. Their purpose is to pretend to be serious news outlets to amplify various social media phenomena by selectively reporting about them and repeating this over and over again, with the purpose of legitimizing the phenomenae. The message that comes out is aligned to the goals of the Russian Federation. The messages that are repeated are chosen for political purposes. The point is to not speak to Russians but to the "disgruntled people" of the West. The main idea seems to be to amplify divisions, whatever those may be. For instance, just look at what is coming now out related to the "Yellow Vests" in France. These sites are not a channel for presenting facts or a "counterbalance to Western media". They are simpleton propaganda outlets, news theater that is one part of the media influence mechanism that the Russian leadership wields. The narrative in the prominent articles is always quite predictable: NATO equals bad, USA equals culture imperialism, Europe equals falling apart, Ukrainians equals fascists, Russia the underdog does nothing wrong, and so on. Once RT starts running articles detailing the corruption in Russia and why there is an opposition movement in the first place (hint: not due to foreign involvement) it might start gaining plausibility as an outlet for high quality fact-based journalism.
    • walrus66 8y ago
• jryle70 8y ago
  Can you give example of dissident voices in the US? why do they need RT when they already have Intercept, Medium, BuzzFeed; Fox News or CNBC; Drudge Report or Mother Jones; Breitbart or Daily Kos, etc?
  • iamnothere 8y ago
    > Can you give example of dissident voices in the US? Really? How about: Occupy Wall Street, BLM, Anonymous, sovereign citizen/militia groups, pipeline protesters, anti factory farm agitators, union activists, socialists, alt-righters, Antifa, straight up Nazis, Nation of Islam, the list goes on. I don't agree with the positions of the vast majority of these groups, but I do think that it's important that we understand what they try to do and why they are trying to do it. Existing media outlets (even so-called "alt media") provide grossly distorted views of events associated with these groups, if they report on them at all.
    • lostmsu 8y ago
      Which of them are not covered by either of the above sources?
      • throwaway5tre 8y ago
        They are covered with a pro-government slant.
      • poilcn 8y ago
        He doesn't mean that these platforms ignores existence of these groups, he says that they cannot provide place and sufficient time for these groups to express their positions in their own words, not distorted opinions and distorted facts in a way suitable for media corporations and their owners.
  • echevil 8y ago
    Anything that may not be considered politically correct?
• gaoshan 8y ago
  One thing to keep in mind, as biased as it can be the media in the West is based on a journalistic tradition that lets it operate free from government interference. The media in authoritarian countries like China and Russia has no such tradition and has, from inception, existed to advance the government's positions. This does not mean the West is free from bias but no one really is. So while Western journalistic outlets may be far from perfect, you have the opportunity with them to get less politically biased information. The best of them are actually quite good at providing factual, less biased information. The same is not true of China and Russia. One tradition offers more truthful and factual reporting than the other (which in reality offers nothing less than full on governmental propaganda... especially in the case of the Chinese media. They provide a counter narrative in the same way that the Saudis have provided a counter narrative to the Khashoggi murder).
  • Viliam1234 8y ago
    Also, nothing prevents China and Russia from having their own newspapers in the West... and they are going to have them... so it's not like reading Chinese or Russian propaganda gives anyone info they couldn't access otherwise.
  • yorwba 8y ago
    Yes, if you had to choose between Western and other sources of journalism, you'd probably have a higher chance of getting reliable facts from Western sources. But there's no need to make that choice. You can read a diverse selection of sources and compare their reporting to not only get a more accurate approximation of the truth, but also to notice what various sides focus on. The latter means that even if one side only publishes complete lies, the things they choose to lie about still tell you something.
  • dingoegret 8y ago
    This is just false. Western journalists are plutocratic and rely on their relationship with their governments to compete for access to information and reports. Information that their governments are the gatekeepers of. It's the reason Aljazeera was so heavily penalized during the Iraq and Libyan war by being cutoff by American and Nato governments to officials and reports from those sources. Journalists in the west also tend to be hyper nationalistic and partisan. They tow their political party's line just like any state run media. Western journalists are invited to government parties and meetings, enjoy gifts and interviews from officials. Journalists in all parts of the world are extremely biased and all news outlets act as propaganda outlets for the people in power in their country. Western media has the added danger that is its touted as being more credible than other media.
• forapurpose 8y ago
  > foreign propaganda has some utility. I don't trust Chinese or Russian state media to report on internal Chinese/Russian affairs honestly, but they can provide a worthwhile counter narrative to the West on certain international issues A bit bizarre, to attempt to legitimize lies and manipulation, but I guess I'm not surprised to see that kind of comment these days. Authoritarian governments' interest in manipulating foreign audiences is as strong as their interest in manipulating domestic audiences. The article describes massive Chinese investment in it, and Russia's investment in it is well known; as we know, both operate even on the micro-level, such as on social media and in Internet forums. In the comment below I linked to a study that describes it as a massive and effective campaign "political warfare": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18638027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18638027 Lies are not a counter-narrative; they don't improve your understanding; they are just lies.
• pergadad 8y ago
  But RT openly lies and misleads. So it's not a narrative you can actually consider useful. Chinese propaganda is a bit more honest but omits a lot and is focused on diverting/misleading on key policy issues, see Uighur camps