Propoganda Wars

[Makers!*]

A while ago I made the mistake of subscribing to Time magazine, which, recently, has only redeemed its value through the comical transparency of its article’s authors, who despite they’re every attempt to remain credible journalists, do nothing but support systems of power. I.E. writing full-length profiles of the owner of Starbucks (will he run for president?) and Jeb Bush, with the latter proclaimed in bold print “NEXT IN LINE.” Seriously, what the fuck?

Anyway, it gets better, or worse. I don’t even know anymore. It’s terrible. The latest installment contains “Putin’s on Air Army,” a completely un-ironic look into Russia’s YouTube propaganda machine (Russian times or RT), which, don’t get me wrong, is not a good thing. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to read some of the article's quotations without both wanting to laugh, and at the same time, throw the magazine at the wall.

Look for yourself:

“No one shows objective reality. The Western Media are not objective, reality-based news,” says RT’s vilified Editor and Chief. …. Basically, she just comes right and goes, “yea, Im connected to the Kremlin, so fucking what? Don’t act like you’re any better,” and the whole article the correspondent reels trying to wrestle with this.

Later, the reader is supposed to scoff at West Germans siding with the Russians. The one, from the “right wing fringe,” they quote says, “We like Russians here. For a stable Europe, you need a friendship with Russia. If we are getting into a war with Russian in Europe, you in the states will laugh about it because you are far away, while we get destroyed cities.” Is he off, really? I can’t imagine too far off, and yet his remark is followed by the authors, ‘It was a line that could have come straight from RT’s talk shows.” And the author states this, again, completely un-ironically. My head spins.

And finally, we get the authors ending remark, “For now, the west seems likely to stick to it’s journalistic traditions—and trust the viewers to decide.”

Well, I know what I’ve decided. The U.S. media is obviously struggling with how to deal with online platforms. RT has 1.466 million subscribers by the way, almost double that of the CNN or five times more than the BBC. And it seems that while the U.S. has been all along denying their platforms ever were propaganda, the Russians have been perfecting it to an upsetting degree. How this plays out, I do not know. But I think it’s a phenomenon worth watching.

[C.J.Woolf]

The notion of objective media may turn out to be a quaint historical anomaly. In the past, all media had a slant, and mostly they were up front about it. I remember seeing the front page of a US newspaper from the late 1800s; at the top it proudly claimed: "The leading Republican newspaper in the Northeast." In those days every big city had a Republican and a Democratic paper.

[Roger Mexico]

The notion of objective media may turn out to be a quaint historical anomaly. In the past, all media had a slant, and mostly they were up front about it. I remember seeing the front page of a US newspaper from the late 1800s; at the top it proudly claimed: "The leading Republican newspaper in the Northeast." In those days every big city had a Republican and a Democratic paper.

Indeed, and it should be noted that the word "propaganda" technically just means "information which is distributed to a mass audience"--the information doesn't actually have to be false or misleading to qualify as propaganda.

The word has come to have that connotation mainly because the technological and social infrastructure needed to keep a mass population living on a steady drip of information from a central source didn't really come into its own until the 20th century, when famous totalitarian governments were quick to realize the political importance of doing this and invested in building their own such systems accordingly.

It's not like there was some golden age of mass media in which Truthful, Objective News was widely available, before everything turned into "Propaganda." 'The News' has always been Propaganda.

Before propaganda the idea of being regularly updated about events happening somewhere that wasn't your immediate, local community just wasn't a thing. The reason you can flip on the computer or TV and quickly find out what's up halfway around the world from you is that someone invested a lot of time, labor and money into making that possible--and there's always a reason for that 'someone' to want you to have the information they're choosing to share with you that way.

[OrionzRevenge]

...
Later, the reader is supposed to scoff at West Germans siding with the Russians. The one, from the “right wing fringe,” they quote says, “We like Russians here. For a stable Europe, you need a friendship with Russia. If we are getting into a war with Russian in Europe, you in the states will laugh about it because you are far away.” Is he off, really? I can’t imagine too far off, and yet his remark is followed by the authors, ‘It was a line that could have come straight from RT’s talk shows.” And the author states this, again, completely un-ironically. My head spins.

...

One thing that I think one should bear in mind is that a good balanced story on a controversial topic is going to have both extremes claiming bias. I can't remember exactly how the old newspaper journalist expression goes, but something to the effect of: You know you are doing something right when everyone is mad at you.

The statement about US apathy towards Russian - European animosity doesn't ring true IMO. Indeed, 25 years apart in time and light-years distant in ideological space, West Germans embraced JFK and Reagan like rock stars and there wasn't significant doubt about the US commitment to NATO in Hometown USA, Berlin, or the Kremlin.

Our Relations have been dented a bit by the tapping-of-Merkel's-phone scandal, but again you need to look at the context. Merkel was a product of East Germany, where she had to be a convincing Yes Woman to advance, and now she holds the economic power to make or break the EU. If you don't believe in US Higher purpose, then I'm still sure we can agree about US vested economic and strategic self-interest.

Regular viewers of CNN understand the information formatting of teasers to stay-tuned in the sensational world of Cable News market share. RT might not understand this because it sounds like they may not have this sort of cut-throat competition to out do.

The notion of objective media may turn out to be a quaint historical anomaly. In the past, all media had a slant, and mostly they were up front about it. I remember seeing the front page of a US newspaper from the late 1800s; at the top it proudly claimed: "The leading Republican newspaper in the Northeast." In those days every big city had a Republican and a Democratic paper.

Sadly it seems you are right. But it was once a lot more balanced in general here in the US***. I remember countless warnings about the potential for this sort of thing to re-emerge in the US with the Advent of Cable TV.

It used to be that the three networks had concurrently running half-hour slots to to keep your attention and pitch a few minutes worth of commercials.

Now they can fixate and paralyze the audience via sensation and telling them what they want to hear...all day long.

I'm not perfectly sure how America managed to get to a more journalistically modest place in the post-war era. I imagine it had something to do with everyone taking a local newspaper along side the radio and TV sources.

Too, I see dangerous parallels to what polarized news sources we have now and the struggles we faced as a new nation. As the two party system emerged from Hamilton's Federalist and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans it fueled similar outrageous bias as found in the media today. The key motivation then, and now it seems, is that the extremes have so convinced themselves that it's a righteous struggle that they must win at any cost.



***I remember being blown away by the political bias of British newspapers my Welch buddy would show me back in the early 80s

[Madrigal]

The idea of objective news is propaganda.

Back when I studied film I had a professor who said that documentaries were the most dishonest film genre of all, because they purported to show you the truth. I get what he meant (although he was being deliberately controversial). The moment you point your camera at one object and not another, you've already carved out reality.

News is always going to be subjective, but that doesn't give it an excuse to be bad. There is a point in which one crosses the line between merely selective reporting (something that can't be helped) and constructing a story that didn't happen. This bothers me because it's unprofessional, a waste of my time and ideological manipulation of the masses, but not because I fear being chronically misled myself. I think I've been around enough to understand the doublespeak and correctly interpret what a story is attempting to misrepresent most of the time; at least in broad terms. I have an idea of what something will say once I know who is saying it. Similarly to how a historian will look first at the references at the back of a book to make the first judgement on its content.

That said, intelligence doesn't necessarily have an ideological preference. Left wing papers can be fucking stupid and aristocratic papers might have some good insight. Sometimes a marxist propagandist and a defender of financial capital can have the exact same analysis, both lucid but only differing on the political way forward (if I could count every time Stratfor and my ex party's internal circulars outlined the same "possible scenarios", almost makes you suspicious). Like a spanish saying goes, you have to know how to take the lime with the sand, recognize the quality in different sources.

At this point I read the most right-wing newspaper we have because it has better analyses than its center-left counterpart which is kinda busy whitewashing everything the government does. Center-leftists have a notorious inability to analyze reality under a populist government. Then they start quoting Marx and being involuntarily lucid under a neoliberal one. Just know what you're reading and you'll be fine.

[msg_v2]

The idea of objective news is propaganda.

My dad was a journalist, and he said the same thing.

I find that right-wing papers mention certain facts that left-wing ones don't. It's interesting to read them sometimes. Nobody ever disputes those facts in an argument.... they just post different facts. Political arguments seem to consist of people arguing with different facts. Sometimes I feel that what's missing is the truth.

[C.J.Woolf]

Distance helps. The BBC, Al Jazeera, and even RT have value reporting US news that US sources overlook.

[Madrigal]

My dad was a journalist, and he said the same thing.

Kinda OT, I read some propaganda my dad's group wrote in the 70s. Laughed my ass off, never read something so sectarian in my life (seriously, that's a feat). I mean, it wasn't so much incorrect (it was pretty lucid actually) as it was lacking in any mass appeal whatsoever considering they were surrounded by peronists. Which is why it doesn't just matter what you're saying but how you're saying it, for the purposes of reaching out to people. If you have a really important message but you're not considering how that will go down with your readers, you can be as right as you want and nobody will listen. My father read a flyer I wrote once (accidentally left it lying around) and he said he wanted to have a talk with me. I thought I was in for a sermon, but he said, "This is very good dialogue. I only learned how to write like this when I did my Masters." I kinda miss writing political materials but I'm working on getting back into that. This time around I want to give a big F-You to trotskyist sectarianism and adopt more of a Patria Grande/Guevarist bent.

[Ruby_Bookrose]

My dad was a journalist, and he said the same thing.

I find that right-wing papers mention certain facts that left-wing ones don't. It's interesting to read them sometimes. Nobody ever disputes those facts in an argument.... they just post different facts. Political arguments seem to consist of people arguing with different facts. Sometimes I feel that what's missing is the truth.

I, like others reject the idea of "objectivity" and "truth". Yet, I do believe we can absolutely "know things" by making visible the means by which we create news stories and the perspectives of media outlets, sources, etc.

Journalistic practices try to sort through evidence to create informational narratives but pressures associated with commercial interests (both liberal and conservative) constrain results.

Propaganda tries to use facts (usually via well-funded technologies of vision: eg. movie industry, embedded reporters, satellite video, cooked-up polls, etc.) to claim a right or exclusivity to objectivity to make their narratives more compelling and motivations subtle.

[Madrigal]

Oh and