7 ms·

It's clear that everything from NPR to Fox News is a propaganda machine - plain and simple. Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly fin

It's clear that everything from NPR to Fox News is a propaganda machine - plain and simple. Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly find the truth. Take the Capital's mostly peaceful protest on January 6 (sarcasm), where the 7 people who died. Did you know the only two who died violently that day were protestors and many news agencies retracted the death of the police officer "hit with a fire extinguisher"? https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politifact-finally-admits-brian-sicknick-not-killed-by-fire-extinguisher/ https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politif... Two people died from "medial emergencies" and don't appear to have done anything besides attend trumps rally: https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-the-dc-protest-at-the-capitol/ https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-t... Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day and there have been arrests, supposedly he died of a stroke, but to-date no medical report has been released: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-charges/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capit... Estimates vary, but based on reporting on the ground, it appears there were at least 500,000 people there, so it's not super surprising that there would be quite a few natural deaths. Further, it has to be the only armed insurrection in history where the insurrectionists primarily left their weapons at home. Not saying what was done was moral, correct, etc (it wasn't), but after watching my own city burn in the BLM "mostly peaceful protests" I can't help but recognize the unadulterated falsehoods being propagated. https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s=20 https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s... Both are bad, both were riots, and all you have to do is look to see how bad it is. We don't need to make the death count worse or ignore other riots / crimes. The general point, if the media would focus on reporting as opposed to pandering it would have trust. As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. However, as soon as people realize they're being sold something, they forever lose that viewer. I tend to trust journalists a bit more, such as Glenn Greenwald: https://twitter.com/GGreenwald https://twitter.com/GGreenwald They appear to be truly investigating.

Itsdijital 6y ago
>Calls NPR and Fox news propaganda machines >Talks about finding the truth >Links to Breitbart. C'mon man...
- colordrops 6y ago
  There may be problems with the OP's argument, but your response is fallacious itself and does not address them. Linking to Breitbart isn't a great idea, but doesn't invalidate everything else that was said.
  - lettergram 6y ago
    If people can't click the link and read, there's no hope. The breitbart article was just the first thing to pop-up in google. Here's the web archive link to the politifact website (from the first sentence of the Breitbart article): https://web.archive.org/web/20210222190401/https:/www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/22/what-we-know-about-capitol-police-officer-brian-si/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210222190401/https:/www.politi...
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    And what did they say exactly? That the news lied about the January 6 event and also lied about the black lives matter protests? In their own words 50,000 people were at the capital so they said it would be statistically likely for people to die. That is ridiculous otherwise large concerts would have deaths associated with it. But they don't apply their logic to the BLM protests where estimates of 15 to 26 million people protested [1]. They don't think that of those millions it would be a very small group causing trouble. Also. Breitbart is a "news" outlet which has a "black crime" section. They are objectively a racist publication and it's laughable to use that as a source when calling out bias in NPR and Fox news. It's a transparent if they say "oh it was the first article I saw when I searched" they don't think that it's indicative of it being untrustworthy reporting but instead some truth the "MSM" don't want to tell. Likewise the Nypost is very much a outlet that spins facts to suit their narrative. That isn't a secret. So OP's argument is just that they prefer when people tell them what they want to hear. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-flo...
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      These are reasons why it is extremely sad that the larger and more consumed outlets are collectively deciding to not report on stories, or on each other. If Breitbart is the only major outlet reporting on a factually correct story, that's a failure of the institution of journalism, not a success for Breitbart.
luxuryballs 6y ago
I was thinking about Glenn’s piece on this topic as I read, I have more respect for that guy than ever especially after what happened with the Intercept and his Joe Biden article. I subscribed to his Substack immediately and intend to continue to support him directly.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Yup. Thanks for collecting the links. Pelosi will go down in history as the worst of demagogues.
chillwaves 6y ago
How is literally counting the deaths "making the death count worse"?
- lettergram 6y ago
  Because they're counting deaths that weren't directly related to anything. There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot" and yet two were suicides days-to-weeks later, three were heart attacks / strokes from physical assertions (or gas/spray, we aren't sure) and one died from falling / being trampled and one was shot in front of police. The "7 people died in an armed insurrection" is a lie. The most accurate statement is: "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot", "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", "two people died in march to capital after trump's speech", "two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" ^ These are all more accurate, but probably reduces viewership. The statement was "how did the US news media lose their viewers trust". I simply summarized one event which highlights it.
  - jeremysalwen 6y ago
    > "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot" i.e. one rioter died in the riot. > "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", i.e. one officer died in the riot. >"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech" i.e. two people died in the riot >"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" i.e. two officers died in connection with the riot > "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot >"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot I'm very confused as to where the media claimed that "7 people died" as the result of being gunned down in the street. Obviously if 7 people died by being gunned down in the street, the media headline would be "7 PEOPLE GUNNED DOWN BY INSURRECTIONISTS", not "7 PEOPLE DIED IN THE INSURRECTION".
    - pessimizer 6y ago
jeremysalwen 6y ago
Perfect example of false equivalency. Setting aside the issue of how the protestors were treated differently by capital police (many of whom supported Trump), one protest was against police brutality, and the other was an attempt to overthrow the result of a free and fair democratic election on the basis of a lie. If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?
- yesco 6y ago
  It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process. The hope was that such protest would give Trump the political power to do one of the following: 1. Pressure Congress to delay counting the elector's votes and perform a proper investigation (which they felt hadn't happened) 2. Pressure Congress to count the votes of the "alternate" electors sent by some of the disputed states by the losing party (who instead supported Trump). I'll stress that this was predicated on the idea that, since the election was "stolen", these were the "rightful" electors. 3. Some Q-Anon bullshit I don't care to remember too deeply, just that it was something to do with Trump doing some kind of secret investigation behind the scenes or something All of the above (including a few I didn't list since I forget the details), were precipitated on the the idea that /someone else/ was going to be fixing this. Many left-wing people don't seem to understand this, but most modern conservatives are not activists at heart, they just roll over and let things happen. To be clear this isn't really a "right-wing" thing but a "conservative" one, they generally don't, at scale, rock the boat. The truth is the even if there was 100% undeniable evidence that the election was blatantly stolen, conservatives would do absolutely nothing (unless you include complaining), and frankly that's kinda what happened. Looking at it another way: to many conservatives, the election really was stolen from them, and they aren't doing anything about it. A small subset of them loitering around in the capitol was the best they had. > If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence? You said it best yourself, why wouldn't you resort to violence? The answers is less exciting: because they are afraid and unmotivated.
01100011 6y ago
500,000 people? Source? https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossible-to-estimate-the-size-of-the-crowd-that-stormed-capitol-hill-152889 https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossibl...
- lettergram 6y ago
  Can't find the exact segment, but these guys who provided the videos to multiple news sources claim minimum over 500k https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488 https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488 "For sure hundreds of thousands" Those who went to the Capital are probably less, I'm not sure anyone has estimated that. I'm sure many people left after Trump's speech.
  - titzer 6y ago
    Sorry, but a link to a video of two dudes on a podcast saying "for sure hundreds of thousands" is not evidence. Not even a picture of these hundreds of thousands? Absurd.
    - lettergram 6y ago
      Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6. Edit: registered White House press core Edit: they had their cameras, that’s most of what you see on CNN if you saw police scenes of fighting
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        "Registered" with whom?
      - titzer 6y ago
        And they what? Forgot their cameras that day?
      - gruez 6y ago
        >Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6. >Edit: registered White House press core Isn't this just appeal to authority? It's not even a good authority. If he was a crowd counting expert, and was doing a count from a helicopter, I'd be more inclined to believe him. As it stands it's still some guy making a casual estimate from his very limited viewpoint.
pessimizer 6y ago
> As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have. The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support. They're public thinktanks, not carnival barkers.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Regarding coverage of the Capitol riots - All Sides called out the bias in coverage compared to numerous past riots at the Capitol, just two days after the incident: https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-coverage-demonstrates-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover... The choice of language is also important. Lots of people are using terms like “coup” or “insurrection” causally. The experts meanwhile note why this is not appropriate, with careful comparisons to historical incidents: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-capitol-2020-election-trump/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-c... Does this matter to anyone? No. After constant amplification of a hyperbolic take on the Capitol riot, the truth seemingly doesn’t matter anymore and instead its derivative stories are the new battleground (for example “should social media increase censorship of moderates and conservatives”). In short, the damage has already been done, seemingly permanently. We saw bias in the other direction last year, with underreporting of criminal political activity. Like you, my city has experienced a constant stream of riots from BLM activists. In 2020 we literally had daily blockades of highways, autonomous zones resulting in deaths (CHAZ), widespread destruction of businesses, and more. Seemingly all of news media, social media, and even academic research studying BLM-associated rioting inaccurately portrays what actually happened. It’s scary to see how widespread and unchallenged those prevailing narratives are. I think a lot of people forget that “propaganda” doesn’t have to come just from scary foreign state actors - in practice it is much more likely to come from domestic sources, such as masses of activists blindly repeating falsehoods in unison. The journalism industry is supposed to protect against that but it’s actually part of the same machine. The only way to counter the effect is to read and listen to many different sources with different biases.
jeffbee 6y ago
I think readers of your comment should visit your profile, click through to your blog and Twitter where you spent most of the past half-year repeating conspiracy theories about dead people voting in Michigan, then come back here and give you a hearty downvote.
- dang 6y ago
  Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Your good comments are great, but you unfortunately have a habit of crossing into badness regularly. Going after another user like this is not cool on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. The damage it does outweighs the benefit it brings, even in the case when you have a good underlying point. No more of this please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    dang, as always I appreciate your curation of this place, but there has to be a channel to push back on people who just come here to lie. If we just let it slide that people are going to post here that we can't trust the media because they aren't reporting on the shocking story of all those dead voters in Milwaukee, then we are inevitably accepting the end of civil society.
    - dang 6y ago
      "People who just come here to lie" is flamewar/battle language. So is "push back on people", in fact. What I've noticed is that when internet commenters use such phrases, they're coming across as far more aggressive than they think they are. Everyone feels like they're just playing defense while others are committing outrages. That kind of thing just inflames the problem further and take us into deeper circles of hell. You can respectfully provide correct information without doing that. Your arguments will be more effective too.

Itsdijital 6y ago

>Calls NPR and Fox news propaganda machines >Talks about finding the truth >Links to Breitbart. C'mon man...

colordrops 6y ago
There may be problems with the OP's argument, but your response is fallacious itself and does not address them. Linking to Breitbart isn't a great idea, but doesn't invalidate everything else that was said.
- lettergram 6y ago
  If people can't click the link and read, there's no hope. The breitbart article was just the first thing to pop-up in google. Here's the web archive link to the politifact website (from the first sentence of the Breitbart article): https://web.archive.org/web/20210222190401/https:/www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/22/what-we-know-about-capitol-police-officer-brian-si/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210222190401/https:/www.politi...
- Jonnax 6y ago
  And what did they say exactly? That the news lied about the January 6 event and also lied about the black lives matter protests? In their own words 50,000 people were at the capital so they said it would be statistically likely for people to die. That is ridiculous otherwise large concerts would have deaths associated with it. But they don't apply their logic to the BLM protests where estimates of 15 to 26 million people protested [1]. They don't think that of those millions it would be a very small group causing trouble. Also. Breitbart is a "news" outlet which has a "black crime" section. They are objectively a racist publication and it's laughable to use that as a source when calling out bias in NPR and Fox news. It's a transparent if they say "oh it was the first article I saw when I searched" they don't think that it's indicative of it being untrustworthy reporting but instead some truth the "MSM" don't want to tell. Likewise the Nypost is very much a outlet that spins facts to suit their narrative. That isn't a secret. So OP's argument is just that they prefer when people tell them what they want to hear. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-flo...
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    These are reasons why it is extremely sad that the larger and more consumed outlets are collectively deciding to not report on stories, or on each other. If Breitbart is the only major outlet reporting on a factually correct story, that's a failure of the institution of journalism, not a success for Breitbart.

luxuryballs 6y ago

I was thinking about Glenn’s piece on this topic as I read, I have more respect for that guy than ever especially after what happened with the Intercept and his Joe Biden article. I subscribed to his Substack immediately and intend to continue to support him directly.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Yup. Thanks for collecting the links. Pelosi will go down in history as the worst of demagogues.

chillwaves 6y ago

How is literally counting the deaths "making the death count worse"?

lettergram 6y ago
Because they're counting deaths that weren't directly related to anything. There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot" and yet two were suicides days-to-weeks later, three were heart attacks / strokes from physical assertions (or gas/spray, we aren't sure) and one died from falling / being trampled and one was shot in front of police. The "7 people died in an armed insurrection" is a lie. The most accurate statement is: "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot", "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", "two people died in march to capital after trump's speech", "two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" ^ These are all more accurate, but probably reduces viewership. The statement was "how did the US news media lose their viewers trust". I simply summarized one event which highlights it.
- jeremysalwen 6y ago
  > "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot" i.e. one rioter died in the riot. > "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", i.e. one officer died in the riot. >"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech" i.e. two people died in the riot >"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" i.e. two officers died in connection with the riot > "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot >"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot I'm very confused as to where the media claimed that "7 people died" as the result of being gunned down in the street. Obviously if 7 people died by being gunned down in the street, the media headline would be "7 PEOPLE GUNNED DOWN BY INSURRECTIONISTS", not "7 PEOPLE DIED IN THE INSURRECTION".
  - pessimizer 6y ago

jeremysalwen 6y ago

Perfect example of false equivalency. Setting aside the issue of how the protestors were treated differently by capital police (many of whom supported Trump), one protest was against police brutality, and the other was an attempt to overthrow the result of a free and fair democratic election on the basis of a lie. If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?

yesco 6y ago
It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process. The hope was that such protest would give Trump the political power to do one of the following: 1. Pressure Congress to delay counting the elector's votes and perform a proper investigation (which they felt hadn't happened) 2. Pressure Congress to count the votes of the "alternate" electors sent by some of the disputed states by the losing party (who instead supported Trump). I'll stress that this was predicated on the idea that, since the election was "stolen", these were the "rightful" electors. 3. Some Q-Anon bullshit I don't care to remember too deeply, just that it was something to do with Trump doing some kind of secret investigation behind the scenes or something All of the above (including a few I didn't list since I forget the details), were precipitated on the the idea that /someone else/ was going to be fixing this. Many left-wing people don't seem to understand this, but most modern conservatives are not activists at heart, they just roll over and let things happen. To be clear this isn't really a "right-wing" thing but a "conservative" one, they generally don't, at scale, rock the boat. The truth is the even if there was 100% undeniable evidence that the election was blatantly stolen, conservatives would do absolutely nothing (unless you include complaining), and frankly that's kinda what happened. Looking at it another way: to many conservatives, the election really was stolen from them, and they aren't doing anything about it. A small subset of them loitering around in the capitol was the best they had. > If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence? You said it best yourself, why wouldn't you resort to violence? The answers is less exciting: because they are afraid and unmotivated.

01100011 6y ago

500,000 people? Source? https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossible-to-estimate-the-size-of-the-crowd-that-stormed-capitol-hill-152889 https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossibl...

lettergram 6y ago
Can't find the exact segment, but these guys who provided the videos to multiple news sources claim minimum over 500k https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488 https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488 "For sure hundreds of thousands" Those who went to the Capital are probably less, I'm not sure anyone has estimated that. I'm sure many people left after Trump's speech.
- titzer 6y ago
  Sorry, but a link to a video of two dudes on a podcast saying "for sure hundreds of thousands" is not evidence. Not even a picture of these hundreds of thousands? Absurd.
  - lettergram 6y ago
    Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6. Edit: registered White House press core Edit: they had their cameras, that’s most of what you see on CNN if you saw police scenes of fighting
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      "Registered" with whom?
    - titzer 6y ago
      And they what? Forgot their cameras that day?
    - gruez 6y ago
      >Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6. >Edit: registered White House press core Isn't this just appeal to authority? It's not even a good authority. If he was a crowd counting expert, and was doing a count from a helicopter, I'd be more inclined to believe him. As it stands it's still some guy making a casual estimate from his very limited viewpoint.

pessimizer 6y ago

> As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have. The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support. They're public thinktanks, not carnival barkers.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Regarding coverage of the Capitol riots - All Sides called out the bias in coverage compared to numerous past riots at the Capitol, just two days after the incident: https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-coverage-demonstrates-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover... The choice of language is also important. Lots of people are using terms like “coup” or “insurrection” causally. The experts meanwhile note why this is not appropriate, with careful comparisons to historical incidents: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-capitol-2020-election-trump/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-c... Does this matter to anyone? No. After constant amplification of a hyperbolic take on the Capitol riot, the truth seemingly doesn’t matter anymore and instead its derivative stories are the new battleground (for example “should social media increase censorship of moderates and conservatives”). In short, the damage has already been done, seemingly permanently. We saw bias in the other direction last year, with underreporting of criminal political activity. Like you, my city has experienced a constant stream of riots from BLM activists. In 2020 we literally had daily blockades of highways, autonomous zones resulting in deaths (CHAZ), widespread destruction of businesses, and more. Seemingly all of news media, social media, and even academic research studying BLM-associated rioting inaccurately portrays what actually happened. It’s scary to see how widespread and unchallenged those prevailing narratives are. I think a lot of people forget that “propaganda” doesn’t have to come just from scary foreign state actors - in practice it is much more likely to come from domestic sources, such as masses of activists blindly repeating falsehoods in unison. The journalism industry is supposed to protect against that but it’s actually part of the same machine. The only way to counter the effect is to read and listen to many different sources with different biases.

jeffbee 6y ago

I think readers of your comment should visit your profile, click through to your blog and Twitter where you spent most of the past half-year repeating conspiracy theories about dead people voting in Michigan, then come back here and give you a hearty downvote.

dang 6y ago
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Your good comments are great, but you unfortunately have a habit of crossing into badness regularly. Going after another user like this is not cool on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. The damage it does outweighs the benefit it brings, even in the case when you have a good underlying point. No more of this please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jeffbee 6y ago
  dang, as always I appreciate your curation of this place, but there has to be a channel to push back on people who just come here to lie. If we just let it slide that people are going to post here that we can't trust the media because they aren't reporting on the shocking story of all those dead voters in Milwaukee, then we are inevitably accepting the end of civil society.
  - dang 6y ago
    "People who just come here to lie" is flamewar/battle language. So is "push back on people", in fact. What I've noticed is that when internet commenters use such phrases, they're coming across as far more aggressive than they think they are. Everyone feels like they're just playing defense while others are committing outrages. That kind of thing just inflames the problem further and take us into deeper circles of hell. You can respectfully provide correct information without doing that. Your arguments will be more effective too.