7 ms·

Pot, kettle, etc. 'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propag

Pot, kettle, etc. 'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles. The Times received $50,000 in 2018 to place the propaganda on its website, presumably a small fraction of the revenue it made selling print space to China Daily. The new disclosures also showed that China Daily paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and other large regional newspapers to print copies of the China Daily for local distribution.' https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-propaganda/ https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-prop...

justanotherguy0 5y ago
Roasted. Media is broken.
antattack 5y ago
Article does not claim that it did not exist, only that they are loosing the monopoly status :)
Aperocky 5y ago
What is the said propaganda? The article does not articulate but I do remember one of which came up in an earlier discussion being a tourist promotion.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. I don't think 100k a month can break NYT journalism integrity (their revenue is 1.7 billions), but not because it's too cheap, they became a propaganda mouthpiece anyway. A high quality one, that makes you believe they're not actually propaganda, which makes it so much more effective. It's easy to see Fox as propaganda, so much harder to see NYT; and they are at roughly the same levels.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    That's the thing with CNN and Fox, they don't even try to hide it. They know their money makers are their opinion shows that do nothing but grind axes.
    - eplanit 5y ago
      Which makes them more honest, in that regard.
      - merpnderp 5y ago
        I would think so. No one watches either one without being cognizant which team they're shilling for.
  - widowlark 5y ago
    A spurious claim backed only by evidence from equally biased sources
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. Have you actually read the NYT's coverage of China? They're probably pissing it off more than almost any other English-language outlet.
  - edavison1 5y ago
    This has to be bait to some extent, but we're going to fight disinformation might as well start in the HN comments section. To that end, two brief things. Journalists doing investigative reporting have ZERO interaction with advertising, so the idea that an individual ad bank would have any influence on the work you see from reporters in the paper is really out there. Editors at big papers like that are looking for stories that go hard... the crimes of autocratic regimes are pretty high on the list of shit you want to cover. You might not believe that! But the other thing is that even if ads directed coverage and could buy press silence (they don't) NYT makes the lion's share of its revenue through subscriptions. Their ad business is cratering. So on an economic level it also makes zero sense.
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Traditional print is over, jobs are disapppearing faster than coal miners. It is not by chance that media is getting more partisan - it is a way to boost subscription numbers, but I don't think it is sustainable. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of their slow-motion suicide. I really hope substack will get bigger, there are incredible authors with a quality of writing that I have never witnessed even in the heyday of traditional print media.
- xenophonf 5y ago
  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-scam-worked-so https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca...
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    Interesting, wasn't aware. As long as I can still pick individual authors and pay them directly, I don't care much who Substack chooses to editorialize. Just because someone writes full-time doesn't mean I'm interested in their POV. The authors I follow have built up their own audience over years on Twitter. They suceed because of their unique insights and erudition, not because some Medicis decide to push a narrative.
  - twicetwice 5y ago
    I've been convinced this complaint is BS. Substack wasn't trying to push particular points of view; it was simply making a deal that was economically beneficial to them. They also extended that deal to a number of left-leaning/leftist writers, some of whom silently declined—and some of whom took it!
cirgue 5y ago
> Pot, kettle, etc. Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 21st century. Why no one took them seriously is beyond me. What this didn’t touch on was the availability of likes/interactions for money. This seems to be the much more pernicious attack vector, because you don’t need to write fake content and risk exposure to any serious extent. There are already plenty of people saying antivax (or insert your favorite conspiracy theory) things, and it’s much easier to just hand them a megaphone instead of creating your own content. Any possible message you would want to spread as a state actor is almost certainly out there, and it’s better to find natural occurrences of it and simply amplify those voices.
- dboreham 5y ago
  > already plenty Apparently it only took 12.
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  I mean, Kojima did in Metal Gear Solid 2. > The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books... > But not all the information was inherited by the later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is. But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading. Always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think our plan is one of censorship. > The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than those of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" > "You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed! But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... > All this rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and VALVe systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulged in 'truth'. > And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. > We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. I think no one took it seriously because it's always hard to take a threat seriously until it has caused some damage. Nuclear power seemed safe and environmentally friendly until a lot of nuclear disasters happened. With a world where we seem to be facing new existential threats every day, it makes sense that people hit the attention saturation point some time ago, walled themselves into their internal social networks, and landed us here today.
paul7986 5y ago
And this the reason i pay no mind to all world news, politics, etc media. Money driven trash in which you have no idea what's the truth, the bent truth for money or outright lies for money/power...
uses 5y ago
Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article? Like yeah I guess we can dismiss the entire investigative and reporting output of the nytimes because of a troll post from a dumpster tier brietbart wannabe about how the nytimes cleaned up its advertising business? The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is secondary. The main goal is to convince you that nobody knows the facts. They want to diminish your belief in institutions, like journalism, education, medicine, and democracy.
- no-dr-onboard 5y ago
  To be fair, just because you've noticed this user posting the same fact in various places doesn't imply that it isn't useful to _someone_. This is my first time seeing OPs post on this. I found it to be useful.
  - txtx7 5y ago
    Yeah, I knew Free Beacon was a far-right tabloid but didn't know it was founded by John McCain's 2008 deputy communications director, so it's useful to see it pasted again. Their editor in chief is a former Fox New producer too!
- kenjackson 5y ago
  100% this. There is this push, which seems mostly from the right, to say, "do your own research. you can't trust mainstream news media!". Yet they'll then push tweets from random people as facts. Even this example of news reporting doesn't point to a single article/advertisement? Were these articles denying facts about the Uyghurs or were they about the rising popularity of cruises available on the eastern seaboard of China? The article tells me virtually nothing and provides little in the way of actual proof (although I'm inclined to believe they did stop state sponsored editorial advertising). And reading a bunch of sources and forming your own opinion is hardly an improvement when you read Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and the NY Post and feel like you've done your due diligence.
  - 5y ago
gorwell 5y ago
It's useful, at this point, to carry a default assumption that reporting is propaganda or otherwise misrepresented. This arguably extends even into research; Richard Smith, who edited BMJ for 13 years, on the state of health research: "It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary." https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1417695524883296257 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1417695524883296257
- loopz 5y ago
  You ask to rely on evidence, and then quote a Twitter post. It's true journalists often get things wrong. Anybody who has been part of something newsworthy, will learn that what is written is hard to recognize after the fact. Reporting "as it were" is exceptionally hard and requires in-depth research, time and efforts. But that doesn't mean pure speculation and wishful thinking weighs heavier than consensus among experts. By all means take things with grains of salt, but don't fall for con-artists and bullshitters in the name of "skepticism".
md_ 5y ago
Is your point that running ads is equivalent to the deceptive practices described in the original article? If so, can you make that a little more explicitly than your three-word argument ending in "etc"? It seems to me, on its face, that this argument is laughable. The entire premise of concerns about disinfo is that disinfo is (by definition) deliberately deceptive, typically--as in the cases mentioned in the article--deceptive in posture (claiming to be opinion rather than paid propaganda) and origin (claiming to be from organic sources, like real voters, rather than sock-puppets controlled by political actors). This criticism is, of course, not applicable to paid advertisements that disclose their source.

justanotherguy0 5y ago

Roasted. Media is broken.

antattack 5y ago

Article does not claim that it did not exist, only that they are loosing the monopoly status :)

Aperocky 5y ago

What is the said propaganda? The article does not articulate but I do remember one of which came up in an earlier discussion being a tourist promotion.

flavius29663 5y ago
A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. I don't think 100k a month can break NYT journalism integrity (their revenue is 1.7 billions), but not because it's too cheap, they became a propaganda mouthpiece anyway. A high quality one, that makes you believe they're not actually propaganda, which makes it so much more effective. It's easy to see Fox as propaganda, so much harder to see NYT; and they are at roughly the same levels.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  That's the thing with CNN and Fox, they don't even try to hide it. They know their money makers are their opinion shows that do nothing but grind axes.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    Which makes them more honest, in that regard.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      I would think so. No one watches either one without being cognizant which team they're shilling for.
- widowlark 5y ago
  A spurious claim backed only by evidence from equally biased sources
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. Have you actually read the NYT's coverage of China? They're probably pissing it off more than almost any other English-language outlet.
- edavison1 5y ago
  This has to be bait to some extent, but we're going to fight disinformation might as well start in the HN comments section. To that end, two brief things. Journalists doing investigative reporting have ZERO interaction with advertising, so the idea that an individual ad bank would have any influence on the work you see from reporters in the paper is really out there. Editors at big papers like that are looking for stories that go hard... the crimes of autocratic regimes are pretty high on the list of shit you want to cover. You might not believe that! But the other thing is that even if ads directed coverage and could buy press silence (they don't) NYT makes the lion's share of its revenue through subscriptions. Their ad business is cratering. So on an economic level it also makes zero sense.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

Traditional print is over, jobs are disapppearing faster than coal miners. It is not by chance that media is getting more partisan - it is a way to boost subscription numbers, but I don't think it is sustainable. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of their slow-motion suicide. I really hope substack will get bigger, there are incredible authors with a quality of writing that I have never witnessed even in the heyday of traditional print media.

xenophonf 5y ago
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-scam-worked-so https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  Interesting, wasn't aware. As long as I can still pick individual authors and pay them directly, I don't care much who Substack chooses to editorialize. Just because someone writes full-time doesn't mean I'm interested in their POV. The authors I follow have built up their own audience over years on Twitter. They suceed because of their unique insights and erudition, not because some Medicis decide to push a narrative.
- twicetwice 5y ago
  I've been convinced this complaint is BS. Substack wasn't trying to push particular points of view; it was simply making a deal that was economically beneficial to them. They also extended that deal to a number of left-leaning/leftist writers, some of whom silently declined—and some of whom took it!

cirgue 5y ago

> Pot, kettle, etc. Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 21st century. Why no one took them seriously is beyond me. What this didn’t touch on was the availability of likes/interactions for money. This seems to be the much more pernicious attack vector, because you don’t need to write fake content and risk exposure to any serious extent. There are already plenty of people saying antivax (or insert your favorite conspiracy theory) things, and it’s much easier to just hand them a megaphone instead of creating your own content. Any possible message you would want to spread as a state actor is almost certainly out there, and it’s better to find natural occurrences of it and simply amplify those voices.

dboreham 5y ago
> already plenty Apparently it only took 12.
f38zf5vdt 5y ago
I mean, Kojima did in Metal Gear Solid 2. > The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books... > But not all the information was inherited by the later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is. But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading. Always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think our plan is one of censorship. > The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than those of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" > "You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed! But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... > All this rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and VALVe systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulged in 'truth'. > And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. > We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. I think no one took it seriously because it's always hard to take a threat seriously until it has caused some damage. Nuclear power seemed safe and environmentally friendly until a lot of nuclear disasters happened. With a world where we seem to be facing new existential threats every day, it makes sense that people hit the attention saturation point some time ago, walled themselves into their internal social networks, and landed us here today.

paul7986 5y ago

And this the reason i pay no mind to all world news, politics, etc media. Money driven trash in which you have no idea what's the truth, the bent truth for money or outright lies for money/power...

uses 5y ago

Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article? Like yeah I guess we can dismiss the entire investigative and reporting output of the nytimes because of a troll post from a dumpster tier brietbart wannabe about how the nytimes cleaned up its advertising business? The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is secondary. The main goal is to convince you that nobody knows the facts. They want to diminish your belief in institutions, like journalism, education, medicine, and democracy.

no-dr-onboard 5y ago
To be fair, just because you've noticed this user posting the same fact in various places doesn't imply that it isn't useful to _someone_. This is my first time seeing OPs post on this. I found it to be useful.
- txtx7 5y ago
  Yeah, I knew Free Beacon was a far-right tabloid but didn't know it was founded by John McCain's 2008 deputy communications director, so it's useful to see it pasted again. Their editor in chief is a former Fox New producer too!
kenjackson 5y ago
100% this. There is this push, which seems mostly from the right, to say, "do your own research. you can't trust mainstream news media!". Yet they'll then push tweets from random people as facts. Even this example of news reporting doesn't point to a single article/advertisement? Were these articles denying facts about the Uyghurs or were they about the rising popularity of cruises available on the eastern seaboard of China? The article tells me virtually nothing and provides little in the way of actual proof (although I'm inclined to believe they did stop state sponsored editorial advertising). And reading a bunch of sources and forming your own opinion is hardly an improvement when you read Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and the NY Post and feel like you've done your due diligence.
- 5y ago

gorwell 5y ago

It's useful, at this point, to carry a default assumption that reporting is propaganda or otherwise misrepresented. This arguably extends even into research; Richard Smith, who edited BMJ for 13 years, on the state of health research: "It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary." https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1417695524883296257 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1417695524883296257

loopz 5y ago
You ask to rely on evidence, and then quote a Twitter post. It's true journalists often get things wrong. Anybody who has been part of something newsworthy, will learn that what is written is hard to recognize after the fact. Reporting "as it were" is exceptionally hard and requires in-depth research, time and efforts. But that doesn't mean pure speculation and wishful thinking weighs heavier than consensus among experts. By all means take things with grains of salt, but don't fall for con-artists and bullshitters in the name of "skepticism".

md_ 5y ago

Is your point that running ads is equivalent to the deceptive practices described in the original article? If so, can you make that a little more explicitly than your three-word argument ending in "etc"? It seems to me, on its face, that this argument is laughable. The entire premise of concerns about disinfo is that disinfo is (by definition) deliberately deceptive, typically--as in the cases mentioned in the article--deceptive in posture (claiming to be opinion rather than paid propaganda) and origin (claiming to be from organic sources, like real voters, rather than sock-puppets controlled by political actors). This criticism is, of course, not applicable to paid advertisements that disclose their source.