4 ms·

Someone living in a dictatorship (I dunno which) told me there is one advantage to it: No one believes the official news. He got the impression people in the we

Someone living in a dictatorship (I dunno which) told me there is one advantage to it: No one believes the official news. He got the impression people in the west really believe everything they read while in reality our western news is as propagandized as theirs if not more.[sic] I don't know how gullible the Chinese are but I assume they find the official narrative pretty suspicious.

simonh 7y ago
At least in the west you get to choose your propaganda. There is no single party line all the media have to toe, and different media outlets frequently disagree vigorously with each other.
- kingludite 7y ago
  It's not what they say it is that they dance around the same narrow narrative. How many billions of news worthy topics would there be? We both come to HN in our search for something interesting to read or talk about. After the limited, carefully designed scope has been injected into the collective here too people cant resist pumping it to the front page. If there are specially hot topics that everyone must talk about and everyone is looking at the left hand the right hand is doing all kinds of highly news worthy malicious things that no one talks about.
  - simonh 7y ago
    If you think you can do a better job than the mainstream media, go ahead and do it. Nobody will stop you, but you don't get to tell people what to be interested in or care about, any more than the Chinese authorities should.
    - kingludite 7y ago
      Not sure what you mean with better. However great the content is doesn't matter. Producing great content consistently is already going to cost money. Buying readers is going to cost even more. How much would it cost to take on say newscorp? But say for sake of argument you happen upon a pile of money at the end of some rainbow. If you then chose to publish rebellious unflattering articles about the status quo there will be infinite funds available to silence you. Not that you will ever get to that point. I look at things like facebook likes and youtube views for US presidential candidates. There are lots of candidates! The amount of attention they get drops to 200 views per video at the green party. Slightly further down they don't have the likes or views to account for direct friends and relatives.The numbers are so incredibly low that we can see non of the journalists around the world even took notice. The system is perfect, you cant do better than this.

simonh 7y ago

At least in the west you get to choose your propaganda. There is no single party line all the media have to toe, and different media outlets frequently disagree vigorously with each other.

kingludite 7y ago
It's not what they say it is that they dance around the same narrow narrative. How many billions of news worthy topics would there be? We both come to HN in our search for something interesting to read or talk about. After the limited, carefully designed scope has been injected into the collective here too people cant resist pumping it to the front page. If there are specially hot topics that everyone must talk about and everyone is looking at the left hand the right hand is doing all kinds of highly news worthy malicious things that no one talks about.
- simonh 7y ago
  If you think you can do a better job than the mainstream media, go ahead and do it. Nobody will stop you, but you don't get to tell people what to be interested in or care about, any more than the Chinese authorities should.
  - kingludite 7y ago
    Not sure what you mean with better. However great the content is doesn't matter. Producing great content consistently is already going to cost money. Buying readers is going to cost even more. How much would it cost to take on say newscorp? But say for sake of argument you happen upon a pile of money at the end of some rainbow. If you then chose to publish rebellious unflattering articles about the status quo there will be infinite funds available to silence you. Not that you will ever get to that point. I look at things like facebook likes and youtube views for US presidential candidates. There are lots of candidates! The amount of attention they get drops to 200 views per video at the green party. Slightly further down they don't have the likes or views to account for direct friends and relatives.The numbers are so incredibly low that we can see non of the journalists around the world even took notice. The system is perfect, you cant do better than this.