3 ms·

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news a

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news and propaganda. Yet they call for the censorship of others for deeds that pale in comparison.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Newsmedia positions themselves as the defenders of democracy but in reality they're just a business. And this idea that you need "the press" to tell you the truth is the result of very successful branding.
52-6F-62 6y ago
Sorry, but this comment betrays a lack of understanding about the very functioning of North American media. There is no real world scenario in which they can be lumped as one group. Even individual outlets carry such a variety of voices that you cannot pin one on any given outlet. The organizations that are lumped into the "MSM" branding opponents to a free press like to throw around are just large organizations. Remember, "the medium is the message": you cannot extricate one article from the entirety of content published by a given outlet any more than you can exalt one article as being the sum of any outlet on its own. For example, a muffin recipe[0] is as much the New York Times as an opinion commentary on the potential problematic nature of social media, yet you cannot say that the NYT is only one or the other. Because an outlet published an article that one might contend is responsible for a situation (rather than commentary on a situation), and that content has commonalities with content from other outlets does not mean there is any other practical association—only thematic. Secondly, calling it all "fake news and propaganda" really belies any rational discussion of the subject... it's like saying all computers are killing machines because they've been used in war. [0] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2868-jordan-marshs-blueberry-muffins https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2868-jordan-marshs-blueb...
- 3princip 6y ago
  Just because the media has cooking articles doesn't mean it isn't propaganda. At the time of the Iraq war everyone who cared to look into it knew the whole thing was absolutely fake news. If I knew it was fake, and all the people involved in the massive anti-war movement (in the UK at the time) knew it was fake then it wasn't much of a stretch for educated in the know journalists of the NY Times or other major media outlets to know. WMD, yellowcake, links to 9/11 etc. Completely fabricated propaganda was spread and promoted by the MSM.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    Your issues with opinion columns from 15 to 20 years ago does not render the entire medium of 21st century journalism "fake news". I'm certain if you read the entirety of the New York Times (and many other outlets) published articles on the subject you would find a range of perspectives, not just the ones that you're purporting sum up journalism of the past 20 years. I was reading the same outlets you were at that time. Those large outlets based in the cities were where I (living in rural SW Ontario) gained my understanding of what was going on with the United States response to 9/11. I'm not making this up. They maintain well-organized archives and it's easy to search, filter by date range, section, and sort. For example, "Bush WMD" search between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2011 returns a wide variety of perspectives and types of journalism: some straight reporting of the news, some press releases, and some opinion columns from varying perspectives—some in line with what you're claiming is the entire stance of North American media, and some not. Those sections are not all equal in their "truthiness" (another fun term from those times, if you recall). https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231&query=Bush%20WMD&sections=World%7Cnyt%3A%2F%2Fsection%2F70e865b6-cc70-5181-84c9-8368b3a5c34b&sort=oldest&startDate=20010101 https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231...
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      I’m glad that you were able to extricate enough material in order for you to exalt this type of medium. :) Their lack of understanding and unfounded purpoting has been betrayed.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...? Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested. And they’re not crackpot theories.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    I wasn't responding to long form critique. I was responding to several disjointed, self-righteous platitudes strung together. Not to single out the commenter above, as it's a common phenomenon. There was nothing muddying about my comment. If someone has an issue to take up with a particular writer and their treatment of a subject in an opinion column that is one thing, but that's not what was happening. What I was pointing out and opposing is the treatment of "MSM" as "fake news" and "propaganda"[0] as a whole. So, unless recipes, arts columns, news reporting, and travel writing are also all "fake news", the NYT is not "fake news". Media literacy always has been of severe importance, and it really begins with a base level literacy and handling of the language and context the writing comes from. Picking out a couple of opinion columns and using them to brand an entire field of work and study as "fake news" is problematic. Frankly, the problem seems to stem with many people misreading Orwell (or not at all before raising his name as a moral objection), and not even taking a moment to read that they're browsing the opinion section before they've decided to take off with outrage. I never argued with their opinions. I countered their understanding of the functioning of North American media with illustrations. [0] When this word is pegged in next to "fake news", one tends to understand, given the context, that the meaning was idiomatic in the anti-journalism sense and not the larger meaning of the word.
halfjoking 6y ago
What's surprising to me is that people seem to think that the PsyOps stopped after the Iraq war. That the Pentagon just decided "oh we're done with wars now, let's stop telling CNN/FOX/NYT what editorial content to push." Anytime the mainstream media tries to drum up outrage I'm skeptical. That includes the narrative that Facebook/Twitter is the cause for social unrest and not the NYT/CNN/FOX. The 2000s and were about manufacturing consent. The 2020s are about manufacturing outrage. You can say it's all about click-bait and getting eyeballs, but I'm skeptical this isn't the same people that started the Iraq war. They want civil unrest on purpose. People didn't want to live in a fascist society just because of Al Qaeda, so they needed a new enemy. So they tried to radicalize your gun-loving neighbor, dressed him up as QAnon Shaman, and now we have to live like 1984 because of him. It's absurd.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

Newsmedia positions themselves as the defenders of democracy but in reality they're just a business. And this idea that you need "the press" to tell you the truth is the result of very successful branding.

52-6F-62 6y ago

Sorry, but this comment betrays a lack of understanding about the very functioning of North American media. There is no real world scenario in which they can be lumped as one group. Even individual outlets carry such a variety of voices that you cannot pin one on any given outlet. The organizations that are lumped into the "MSM" branding opponents to a free press like to throw around are just large organizations. Remember, "the medium is the message": you cannot extricate one article from the entirety of content published by a given outlet any more than you can exalt one article as being the sum of any outlet on its own. For example, a muffin recipe[0] is as much the New York Times as an opinion commentary on the potential problematic nature of social media, yet you cannot say that the NYT is only one or the other. Because an outlet published an article that one might contend is responsible for a situation (rather than commentary on a situation), and that content has commonalities with content from other outlets does not mean there is any other practical association—only thematic. Secondly, calling it all "fake news and propaganda" really belies any rational discussion of the subject... it's like saying all computers are killing machines because they've been used in war. [0] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2868-jordan-marshs-blueberry-muffins https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2868-jordan-marshs-blueb...

3princip 6y ago
Just because the media has cooking articles doesn't mean it isn't propaganda. At the time of the Iraq war everyone who cared to look into it knew the whole thing was absolutely fake news. If I knew it was fake, and all the people involved in the massive anti-war movement (in the UK at the time) knew it was fake then it wasn't much of a stretch for educated in the know journalists of the NY Times or other major media outlets to know. WMD, yellowcake, links to 9/11 etc. Completely fabricated propaganda was spread and promoted by the MSM.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  Your issues with opinion columns from 15 to 20 years ago does not render the entire medium of 21st century journalism "fake news". I'm certain if you read the entirety of the New York Times (and many other outlets) published articles on the subject you would find a range of perspectives, not just the ones that you're purporting sum up journalism of the past 20 years. I was reading the same outlets you were at that time. Those large outlets based in the cities were where I (living in rural SW Ontario) gained my understanding of what was going on with the United States response to 9/11. I'm not making this up. They maintain well-organized archives and it's easy to search, filter by date range, section, and sort. For example, "Bush WMD" search between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2011 returns a wide variety of perspectives and types of journalism: some straight reporting of the news, some press releases, and some opinion columns from varying perspectives—some in line with what you're claiming is the entire stance of North American media, and some not. Those sections are not all equal in their "truthiness" (another fun term from those times, if you recall). https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231&query=Bush%20WMD&sections=World%7Cnyt%3A%2F%2Fsection%2F70e865b6-cc70-5181-84c9-8368b3a5c34b&sort=oldest&startDate=20010101 https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231...
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    I’m glad that you were able to extricate enough material in order for you to exalt this type of medium. :) Their lack of understanding and unfounded purpoting has been betrayed.
yrimaxi 6y ago
This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...? Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested. And they’re not crackpot theories.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I wasn't responding to long form critique. I was responding to several disjointed, self-righteous platitudes strung together. Not to single out the commenter above, as it's a common phenomenon. There was nothing muddying about my comment. If someone has an issue to take up with a particular writer and their treatment of a subject in an opinion column that is one thing, but that's not what was happening. What I was pointing out and opposing is the treatment of "MSM" as "fake news" and "propaganda"[0] as a whole. So, unless recipes, arts columns, news reporting, and travel writing are also all "fake news", the NYT is not "fake news". Media literacy always has been of severe importance, and it really begins with a base level literacy and handling of the language and context the writing comes from. Picking out a couple of opinion columns and using them to brand an entire field of work and study as "fake news" is problematic. Frankly, the problem seems to stem with many people misreading Orwell (or not at all before raising his name as a moral objection), and not even taking a moment to read that they're browsing the opinion section before they've decided to take off with outrage. I never argued with their opinions. I countered their understanding of the functioning of North American media with illustrations. [0] When this word is pegged in next to "fake news", one tends to understand, given the context, that the meaning was idiomatic in the anti-journalism sense and not the larger meaning of the word.

halfjoking 6y ago

What's surprising to me is that people seem to think that the PsyOps stopped after the Iraq war. That the Pentagon just decided "oh we're done with wars now, let's stop telling CNN/FOX/NYT what editorial content to push." Anytime the mainstream media tries to drum up outrage I'm skeptical. That includes the narrative that Facebook/Twitter is the cause for social unrest and not the NYT/CNN/FOX. The 2000s and were about manufacturing consent. The 2020s are about manufacturing outrage. You can say it's all about click-bait and getting eyeballs, but I'm skeptical this isn't the same people that started the Iraq war. They want civil unrest on purpose. People didn't want to live in a fascist society just because of Al Qaeda, so they needed a new enemy. So they tried to radicalize your gun-loving neighbor, dressed him up as QAnon Shaman, and now we have to live like 1984 because of him. It's absurd.