8 ms·

Soviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA. In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false. How

Soviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA. In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false. However, if you simply believed the opposite of what Izvestia said on a given issue you would always have the truth.

lstodd 5y ago
This is a dangerous oversimplification. What people learned in between 1963-ish to 1985-ish there is that mass media shovels shit wholesale, and so cannot be taken at face value under any circuimstances and that if you style yourself as a connoseiur of shit, you're free to join the field of kremlinology. This approach is sorely lacking nowadays.
- simplestats 5y ago
  I think it was a joke.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  You have encountered Russian humor, congratulations. It's very dry.
  - sriram_sun 5y ago
    "They pretended to pay us and we pretended to work." - From my ~68 yo ex-colleague from USSR who lived through the times. Despite that wry comment, he was brilliant and had a Phd. in optics from Moscow University and for whatever reason had to reboot his career as a level 1 technician when he came over to the US. Also, was promoted 5-6 levels up within a year (at Seagate I believe).
- lmilcin 5y ago
  You haven't lived through communism so you are forgiven for not getting the joke even if it was pretty obvious one.
freshpots 5y ago
So for both sources, as your description goes, is it 50:50, correct? Or was, most of the time, the Russian source the most inaccurate?
- lstodd 5y ago
  Like I said, Russian sources weren't inaccurate per se. It was a sort of reality distortion field. Though people learned to cope with that. It's just more of the same nowadays, but worldwide.
- stavros 5y ago
  It was a joke, the funny part is that the US newspapers would lie 50% of the time so you'd never know what to believe (because the newspaper and the truth were uncorrelated), but the Russian newspaper lied 100% of the time so it was perfectly correlated with the truth.
  - coolso 5y ago
    > would lie 50% of the time If only we could go back to such simpler times.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fortuna86 5y ago
> In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false. What is one example of something the NYTs reported, that has since been proven false but hasn't been retracted? (Not Iraq was examples, that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info).
- adolph 5y ago
  > that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info That’s a pretty amazing get out of jail free card.
  - Fezzik 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, the flaws in the reporting related to the pre/post invasion involvement with Iraq were acknowledged: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-coverage https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov... There are many more related articles… The NYT has, to my knowledge, never avoided correcting fact-based inaccuracies or misreporting.
  - fortuna86 5y ago
    No i've asked this question before, and that's always the response. NYT has come to terms with this mistakes in reporting on the build up to the war, that's not the same as publishing false information and refusing to acknowledge it. My attempt to get out in front of that common but misguided response failed, apparently. I guess i'll ask again, has the NYT ever published something false they have refused to correct once proven wrong?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      They don't need to report anything false. It suffices to fail to report what is relevant and true. To their credit, they did report UN investigator Hans Blix's well-supported conclusion that there were no WMDs. On page 18. The NYT's preference for GWB in both elections was always front and center, and shameless. That the right wing imagined NYT was against them tells a lot about them.
deanCommie 5y ago
"Everything they told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about Capitalism was true." - Common joke across the former Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the wall and the reopening of information access. Soviet Propaganda didn't need to lie about the west - they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. Good Propaganda does this even to this day. When the Russians hack both the RNC and the DNC, but only leak the Democratic National Convention secret files to WikiLeaks, it's the same thing.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. As an Israeli, I see this method used to disparage my nation very often. You might be interested in this Writing.SE question which addresses this tactic: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/54002/how-to-effectively-demonstrate-the-incorrectness-of-a-factual-yet-biased-work https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/54002/how-to-eff...
  - helge9210 5y ago
    As an Israeli I must point out that the very same method is used by us. "Our freedom fighters protecting the land of our fathers from their terrorists" can be used by both sides without any modifications.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      I do not recall any major Israeli news outlets obviously cherry-picking facts to present to our 7 million Jewish citizens. Other than Haaretz, which would be presenting events in a fashion designed to embarrass us - quite the opposite of your claim. However, examples abound of international news agencies presenting cherry-picked facts to disparage Israel in international news.
      - guiriduro 5y ago
        Having a sprawling extraterritorial landtheft entity you call a country with concentration camps and constituted by dispossession and apartheid is rather hard to hide or spin.
skinkestek 5y ago
Here is what I heard from my Dad who grew up in a country next to Sovjet: - "Russia took a good second place while the Americans came second last!" (i.e. Americans won) - "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!" Can't say if this is Western propaganda or not but this is what was joked about across the border.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  > - "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!" Substitute "America" for "now" and "Russia" for "USSR", and you'll still hear this sentiment to this day. At least I do.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Finland perhaps?
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    No more hints will be given I think, I have my own reasons to be somewhat careful ;-) That said I have Finnish friends and I like Finnish people and their attitude.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Political doctrine teacher: "Define capitalism." Student: "Capitalism is exploitation of man by man." Teacher: "... and socialism?" Student: "Socialism is exactly the opposite."
  - kamaal 5y ago
    Man's exploitation of Capitalism for man?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Exploitation by man of man.
paganel 5y ago
My parents have a “propaganda” book written about the US by the Soviets back in the ‘70s (it’s a Romanian translation, I’m from Romania) which was quite spot on, meaning it was quite on point when it came to the Vietnam War, the condition of the black population in the States, the homelessness issue (this last one scared me the most, as we didn’t really have homelessness on this side of the Wall back then). All this to say that from time to time they were on point, but, I agree, when it came to internal stuff pretty much all of it was besides the truth.
- DicIfTEx 5y ago
  This comment reminded me of the film Propaganda,[0] which purported to be a North Korean documentary about Western propaganda before being revealed to have been made by a pair of Kiwis.[1] Nonetheless, it managed (and still manages) to dupe a lot of people.[2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI [1] https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/so-what-happens-when-you-make-a-fake-north-korean-propaganda-film/ https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/so-what-happens-when-you... [2] https://www.nknews.org/2013/02/truth-lies-and-propaganda-the-hoax-that-backfired/ https://www.nknews.org/2013/02/truth-lies-and-propaganda-the...
lr1970 5y ago
> Soviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA. This is simply false. Soviet news was an official and pure propaganda. For example, Cuban missile crisis was totally ignored by the Soviet media. While the world was balancing at the brink of nuclear war the Soviet population was blissfully ignorant. Another good examples of how Soviet propaganda lied were coverage of Prague Spring in 1968 and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979--1988. Source: lived there, remember those lies.

lstodd 5y ago

This is a dangerous oversimplification. What people learned in between 1963-ish to 1985-ish there is that mass media shovels shit wholesale, and so cannot be taken at face value under any circuimstances and that if you style yourself as a connoseiur of shit, you're free to join the field of kremlinology. This approach is sorely lacking nowadays.

simplestats 5y ago
I think it was a joke.
rpmisms 5y ago
You have encountered Russian humor, congratulations. It's very dry.
- sriram_sun 5y ago
  "They pretended to pay us and we pretended to work." - From my ~68 yo ex-colleague from USSR who lived through the times. Despite that wry comment, he was brilliant and had a Phd. in optics from Moscow University and for whatever reason had to reboot his career as a level 1 technician when he came over to the US. Also, was promoted 5-6 levels up within a year (at Seagate I believe).
lmilcin 5y ago
You haven't lived through communism so you are forgiven for not getting the joke even if it was pretty obvious one.

freshpots 5y ago

So for both sources, as your description goes, is it 50:50, correct? Or was, most of the time, the Russian source the most inaccurate?

lstodd 5y ago
Like I said, Russian sources weren't inaccurate per se. It was a sort of reality distortion field. Though people learned to cope with that. It's just more of the same nowadays, but worldwide.
stavros 5y ago
It was a joke, the funny part is that the US newspapers would lie 50% of the time so you'd never know what to believe (because the newspaper and the truth were uncorrelated), but the Russian newspaper lied 100% of the time so it was perfectly correlated with the truth.
- coolso 5y ago
  > would lie 50% of the time If only we could go back to such simpler times.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fortuna86 5y ago

> In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false. What is one example of something the NYTs reported, that has since been proven false but hasn't been retracted? (Not Iraq was examples, that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info).

adolph 5y ago
> that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info That’s a pretty amazing get out of jail free card.
- Fezzik 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, the flaws in the reporting related to the pre/post invasion involvement with Iraq were acknowledged: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-coverage https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov... There are many more related articles… The NYT has, to my knowledge, never avoided correcting fact-based inaccuracies or misreporting.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  No i've asked this question before, and that's always the response. NYT has come to terms with this mistakes in reporting on the build up to the war, that's not the same as publishing false information and refusing to acknowledge it. My attempt to get out in front of that common but misguided response failed, apparently. I guess i'll ask again, has the NYT ever published something false they have refused to correct once proven wrong?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    They don't need to report anything false. It suffices to fail to report what is relevant and true. To their credit, they did report UN investigator Hans Blix's well-supported conclusion that there were no WMDs. On page 18. The NYT's preference for GWB in both elections was always front and center, and shameless. That the right wing imagined NYT was against them tells a lot about them.

deanCommie 5y ago

"Everything they told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about Capitalism was true." - Common joke across the former Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the wall and the reopening of information access. Soviet Propaganda didn't need to lie about the west - they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. Good Propaganda does this even to this day. When the Russians hack both the RNC and the DNC, but only leak the Democratic National Convention secret files to WikiLeaks, it's the same thing.

dotancohen 5y ago
> they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. As an Israeli, I see this method used to disparage my nation very often. You might be interested in this Writing.SE question which addresses this tactic: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/54002/how-to-effectively-demonstrate-the-incorrectness-of-a-factual-yet-biased-work https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/54002/how-to-eff...
- helge9210 5y ago
  As an Israeli I must point out that the very same method is used by us. "Our freedom fighters protecting the land of our fathers from their terrorists" can be used by both sides without any modifications.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    I do not recall any major Israeli news outlets obviously cherry-picking facts to present to our 7 million Jewish citizens. Other than Haaretz, which would be presenting events in a fashion designed to embarrass us - quite the opposite of your claim. However, examples abound of international news agencies presenting cherry-picked facts to disparage Israel in international news.
    - guiriduro 5y ago
      Having a sprawling extraterritorial landtheft entity you call a country with concentration camps and constituted by dispossession and apartheid is rather hard to hide or spin.

skinkestek 5y ago

Here is what I heard from my Dad who grew up in a country next to Sovjet: - "Russia took a good second place while the Americans came second last!" (i.e. Americans won) - "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!" Can't say if this is Western propaganda or not but this is what was joked about across the border.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
> - "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!" Substitute "America" for "now" and "Russia" for "USSR", and you'll still hear this sentiment to this day. At least I do.
dotancohen 5y ago
Finland perhaps?
- skinkestek 5y ago
  No more hints will be given I think, I have my own reasons to be somewhat careful ;-) That said I have Finnish friends and I like Finnish people and their attitude.
ncmncm 5y ago
Political doctrine teacher: "Define capitalism." Student: "Capitalism is exploitation of man by man." Teacher: "... and socialism?" Student: "Socialism is exactly the opposite."
- kamaal 5y ago
  Man's exploitation of Capitalism for man?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Exploitation by man of man.

paganel 5y ago

My parents have a “propaganda” book written about the US by the Soviets back in the ‘70s (it’s a Romanian translation, I’m from Romania) which was quite spot on, meaning it was quite on point when it came to the Vietnam War, the condition of the black population in the States, the homelessness issue (this last one scared me the most, as we didn’t really have homelessness on this side of the Wall back then). All this to say that from time to time they were on point, but, I agree, when it came to internal stuff pretty much all of it was besides the truth.

DicIfTEx 5y ago
This comment reminded me of the film Propaganda,[0] which purported to be a North Korean documentary about Western propaganda before being revealed to have been made by a pair of Kiwis.[1] Nonetheless, it managed (and still manages) to dupe a lot of people.[2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI [1] https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/so-what-happens-when-you-make-a-fake-north-korean-propaganda-film/ https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/so-what-happens-when-you... [2] https://www.nknews.org/2013/02/truth-lies-and-propaganda-the-hoax-that-backfired/ https://www.nknews.org/2013/02/truth-lies-and-propaganda-the...

lr1970 5y ago

> Soviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA. This is simply false. Soviet news was an official and pure propaganda. For example, Cuban missile crisis was totally ignored by the Soviet media. While the world was balancing at the brink of nuclear war the Soviet population was blissfully ignorant. Another good examples of how Soviet propaganda lied were coverage of Prague Spring in 1968 and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979--1988. Source: lived there, remember those lies.