CarawouThe people who call media "propaganda" are even more propagandized than the people they call brainwashed
Yeah, sorry to say, but it’s sort of been an open “secret” for a couple centuries that newspapers are propaganda.
Lenin once quipped that, under capitalism, “freedom of the press” means the ability of the rich to buy newspapers and print things that serve their interests.
This was after the Opium Wars. Do you know about the role of newspapers in the Opium Wars? Well, the newspapers were owned by the rich. Also, the opium trade was run by the rich. And when China decided to stop the opium trade because it was killing Chinese society, the rich used their newspapers to print article after article about how the Chinese were violating the crown’s sovereignty and that it was a violent backwards tyranny and that the crown must save the British from the tyrannical violence of the Chinese. So Britain launched the opium wars.
Yellow journalism is not a mistake that the papers have corrected. It’s literally a key aspect of their function in society. From the Opium Wars to Vietnam to Cuba to Iraqi WMDs and beyond. The papers lie for the government, for the military, and for big business. It’s built in to what they do.
Yes they have journalists. Yes some of them are good. Most of the good ones who also have a sense of justice don’t survive, because they get pushed out for not writing along the paper’s “line”.
And then there’s Operation Mockingbird
And then there’s the agreement between news organizations and the government that they will toe the government line in exchange for access to newsworthy information and presence in press briefings, etc. These agreements are both implicit/unwritten and explicit/literal contracts.
And then there’s the literal pay-to-publish news industry where news organizations will publish articles written by outside interests for a fee. These pieces can be ghostwritten, or sometimes rewritten by a “journalist” but in the end it’s just a manipulative story in the interest of the highest bidder.
I hate to break it to you, but if you ONLY get your news from newspapers, you are getting an intensely biased, compromised, and manipulative perspective on the world. And that’s the essence of propaganda. It propagates ideas in a deliberate, systemic way, and it propagates a specific subset of ideas, the subset that most benefits the ruling class.
Always has been, always will be.
schmorpSocial media is HELLA compromised and manipulative!
That doesn’t mean that you can choose to just read papers, or just read social media. You have to have a broad spectrum news consumption habit which includes MSM, official channels of governments, social media, discourse with allies, discourse with opponents, deep analysis from independent analysts with consistent integrity, AND the discipline to avoid fixing your beliefs about the world based on what you consume.
Once you recognize that all of it is problematic, you also realize you can’t actually find out what’s happening on the otherside of the world in ways that are important, fast, and easy. The more important something is, the longer you have to wait. For example, I have a habit of listening to podcast episodes about conflict 3 - 12 months after they are published. I grab a bunch of episodes from a bunch of different analysts published in the same month and binge them all. Then I check their sources. That time delay gives me a chance to hear a lot of different things and for the reality of the situation to change and become clearer. It also gives a bunch of episodes on the same topic to accumulate. And then I listen for similaritiesa dn discrepancies, and to check sources back then against sources now. This process delays my process of fixing a belief but it also helps me filter out who’s lying a lot, who’s regurgitating lies, who is trying to manipulate, who will openly contradict their prior statements without acknowledgement, etc.
It also allows me to see patterns of information, disinformation, and change, which ultimately gives me a much clearer picture of reality than building my picture of reality from the latest reporting from known and unrepentant liars.
DevolutionAs a millennial, it’s maddening to see how stupid the boomers and Gen Z are.
Propaganda isn’t strictly a negative term. I’m a propagandist for unions, as an example. News, especially corporate news, is class-based propaganda. Propaganda is the dissemination of a particular viewpoint. News media disseminates the viewpoint of the ruling class. It’s all propaganda.