"Propaganda, Facts and Fake News" - Page 19 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14979514
What could possibly go wrong with a small group deciding what is acceptable for everyone?
#14979528
Journalist and author Tamara Pearson wrote an interesting article concerning the way rich-country media distorts its coverage of less rich countries, emphasizing the deaths of rich tourists in these places, rather than exploring local politics and local concerns.

She provides an interesting list:

Tamara Pearson wrote:A list of deliberate distortions the mainstream media makes about poor countries

1) News discourse is based on the assumption that the only way to do democracy, elections, and economics is the highly dysfunction two-party neoliberalism of the US and Europe. If countries stray from the West’s way of doing politics, or from “free” trade and privatization, they are labelled as tyrannies, dictatorships, regimes, and more. Though the news claims to be unbiased, there is a stark inconsistency in the terminology used for the West and for poor countries.

2) Media coverage of charity and aid from the US and Europe rests on the assumption that such “help” is desired, and that the US and Europe have something to offer poor countries, despite their responsibility for colonizing, looting, enforcing abusive debt repayment, and largely causing the poverty in the first place. The historic and economic context behind the poverty is rarely discussed, creating the impression that poverty has no cause.

3) Media agencies boycott news stories about what people in poor countries are doing, achieving, calling for, hoping for, or building. By omitting this sort of coverage, one gets the false impression that people in poor countries aren’t doing anything about their economic or political situations. That contributes to the myth perpetuated by charities that poor people are incapable and passive and need outside help.

4) Media analysis assumes that institutions in other countries work in the same way as those in the media’s home country. For example, that police and national guards should play the same role in Venezuela as they do in the US, and if they don’t, there is something wrong with them.

5) The media consistently boycotts experts from the actual poor country in question when it comes to quotes and interviews and analyzing what is going on there. Instead, experts are typically US or European white male academics who aren’t in, or have never set foot in the country they judge and opine on. This sort of boycott contributes to the stereotype about who an expert is and what they look like. Hypocritically, the media never invites qualified intellectuals in poor countries to pass judgment on the US or Europe.

6) Related to this, is the belief that poor countries are so simple and similar that a Western journalist can be parachuted in to one to cover a presidential election, for example. These journalists often don’t speak the local language, and don’t know how the local elections work (as I witnessed while covering numerous elections in Venezuela). The media also thinks it is acceptable to use locals to do all the networking work and on-the-ground grunt work as “fixers“, or worse, as unpaid “contacts”, while a Westerner gets the byline credit and much higher pay, for writing up that work.

7) US and European culture is portrayed as the default or norm, while everyone else’s culture is “exotic” or “colorful”. Further, the media usually thinks its enough to do the occasional photo gallery of such culture (ie a festival in India) for people to then have an understanding or insight into the ways of being and living of people in countries like India, with its 1.2 billion people.

8) The media’s errors regarding poverty extend to its default definition of it. It sees poverty as how much stuff people can buy, rather than, for example, access to culture, education, and healthcare. When covering other countries’ situations, it doesn’t include their perspective on what good living consists of.

9) Western mainstream media values the lives of people in rich countries more. People have to die in the thousands in a non-political tragedy in poor countries to get a similar amount of coverage as the death of a white Australian mountain climber in Indonesia.

10) The media brands itself as “neutral”, though it always takes the perspective of its home country or region. But when 1 billionpeople are hungry, we need the media to have a more global perspective.

11) And despite lauding itself as being objective and factual, accuracy is less important to the media when it comes to poor countries. Getting a president’s name wrong, the actual title of the head of state, or labeling community organizations as “terrorists” isn’t a big deal.

12) When something really huge happens in a poor country – like a tsunami and earthquake that kills 230,000people, then the media is happy to exploit it for all the clicks they can get. Once the main drama has passed though, don’t expect too many follow-ups that analyze why earthquakes cause more damage in some countries than others, or the rebuilding and recovery needed.

13) Further, when the media does bestow to cover poorer countries, it usually needs to be in terms of a richer country. Stories about Mexico, for example, are more likely to get covered if Trump is in the headline. African countries are more likely to see the light of day when a famous Western actor deigns to visit.

14) Sometimes the media takes the position that poor countries are “too depressing” for readers. But if the reading is tough, imagine what its like to live it. We should be screaming about the worst injustices from our rooftops, not sidelining such injustice with pathetic excuses.


To sum up, commercial media is there to provide a nice environment for commercials, for the propaganda function they provide capitalism, for the sponsors who pay their salaries. So they can't take any interest or have any sympathy for countries that capital has ruined.
#14979657


Sivad wrote:I watch Telesur but it's just as slanted as FOX blah blah blah


Everything has bias, duh.

But of course you're here criticizing governments or media orgs that are directly targeted by U.S. empire, such as Telesur, as though you're somewhere dripping with objectivity, lol. You should work for the U.S. State dept, since you're on the same page as it with regard to Latin American countries the U.S. has or is in the process of destroying.
#14980199
I like the above skinster-tweeted Marc Curtis quote that: "Our “newspapers” are not newspapers but corporations which sell views, filtered “news” and advertising, to maximise profits."

It gets to the heart of our propaganda problem:

It's not that certain stories are propaganda.

It's that our entire information-delivery system - the one that democracy requires if there is to be any real citizen input or choice - is based on the corporate propaganda model.

And this has made us ignorant consumers of useless merchandise and harmful social engineering programs.
#14980324
Is Journalism Dead?
Are clickbait and biases the future of mainstream news outlets?


The notion of portraying the news as entertainment remains a much-disputed topic within the world of journalism and adding publications’ attempts at appealing to the millennial demographic to the conversation only worsens the picture. Despite its importance, reading or watching the news is not exactly at the top of the agenda for many college students due to the stigma that journalism is intentionally made to be boring and uninteresting.

In fact, many youths dispose of publications entirely, choosing to inform themselves on national or worldwide matters via social media. To be entirely frank, Twitter is as credible a source as The Washington Post to many college students, regardless of the radically different methods the outlets take to report on the same findings — the former tends to focus more on the public reaction to the given event — as familiarity plays a key factor in the individuals included in a publication’s audience.

In an environment rife with tabloids, yellow journalism — better known as “fake news” — and a tendency to lean toward opinionated reporting, it’s easy to envision journalists as individuals solely concerned with pushing agendas or generating enough clicks to earn the maximum amount of revenue with the minimum amount of effort or care for the consequences.
#14980411
Secret Brain-frying Microwave Technology UNMASKED!!! - #PropagandaWatch

Remember how the conspiracy peddlers in the mainstream press freaked out over the super secret Russian microwave technology that was frying diplomats brains in Cuba. Well, it turns out that was just a tad exaggerated. So what was the real culprit? Find out in this week's edition of #PropagandaWatch.
#14980624
Actually the sound of Caribbean crickets? And it was turned into a highly secret weapon of the Russians by the main stream media?
Another conspiracy theory debunked. Now if the Trump - Russia collusion conspiracy theory by the MSM can also be debunked.
#14993514
MSNBC Yet Again Broadcasts Blatant Lies, This Time About Bernie Sanders’s Opening Speech, and Refuses to Correct Them

MSNBC is a dishonest political operation, not a news outlet. It systematically and deliberately refuses to adopt a defining attribute of a news outlet: a willingness to acknowledge factual errors, correct them, and apologize. That they not only allow their lies to stand uncorrected but reward their employees who do it most frequently — especially when those lies are directed at adversaries of the Democratic Party — proves that they are, first and foremost, a political arm of the Democratic establishment.

The most recent example is as glaring as it is malicious. On Saturday in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders delivered his first speech for his 2020 presidential campaign in front of thousands of people. MSNBC broadcast the speech live, and anyone can watch the full two-hour event, or just Sanders’s full 35-minute speech, on YouTube.

As a result, there’s no confusion possible about what was said. Everyone can see it with their own eyes.

Before Sanders spoke, he was introduced by a series of speakers including three African-Americans: South Carolina state Rep. Terry Alexander (who spoke of Sanders’s lifelong commitment to equal justice and opportunity), former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (who heralded Sanders’s long-time commitment to racial justice and his status as “only one of two white elected officials” who supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign run in 1984), and racial justice activist (and Intercept columnist) Shaun King (who described in detail Sanders’s history as an anti-racist and civil rights activist in the 1960s and his decadeslong devotion to issues of racial equality).

After Sanders’s speech, MSNBC immediately asked its panel for reactions. The first person they turned to was Zerlina Maxwell, who the host identified only as an “MSNBC analyst.” What the host omitted, but which Maxwell herself acknowledged, was that she was a paid official for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Sanders: that, revealingly, is the first person MSNBC had opine on Sanders’s speech.

After the host noted that Maxwell was making gestures of disapproval throughout Sanders’s speech and asked her what the cause was, Maxwell proceeded to state demonstrable lies about that speech. She said:

To be very serious about it, I clocked it. He did not mention race or gender until 23 minutes into the speech. And just for point of comparison, I went back and looked at Elizabeth Warren’s opening speech, for example. She mentions race and discrimination in the first paragraph. So that’s a big difference.

In the very first sentence Sanders spoke to define his 2020 campaign — which came, at the latest, at the five-minute mark even if one counts all the cheering, chanting, and obligatory acknowledgments that preceded the substance of the speech — Sanders proclaimed that the core message of his campaign is that “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry.” He then vowed, “This campaign is going to end all of that.”

In the very next passage of Sanders’s speech — at most six minutes into it — the senator vowed that “the principles of our government will be based on justice: on economic justice, on social justice, on racial justice, on environmental justice”

In sum, Sanders did not just mention race and gender once in his speech before the 23-minute mark Maxwell claimed, but did so repeatedly. It was not only the major theme of the speakers who introduced him, but a primary theme of his own speech from the start: both explicitly railing against the evils of “racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry” and vowing to usher in “social justice and racial justice,” but also launching full-scale, vehement attacks on the policies — inequities in the criminal justice system and immigration abuses — that have as their primary targets racial and religious minorities.

It is, needless to say, perfectly legitimate for MSNBC to devote its airtime to critiquing what Sanders said about race and gender: to claim it’s insufficient or insincerely held or superficial. But what is indisputably unacceptable is for MSNBC to outright lie about Sanders’s speech by stating categorically that “he did not mention race or gender until 23 minutes into the speech.” That is simply a lie, and it’s a lie that would have been instantly recognizable as such to anyone who watched the speech.

Indeed, it is utterly inconceivable that both MSNBC and Maxwell are unaware that what they said about Sanders’s speech both on air and later on Twitter is false. Tweet after tweet directed at them documented this in clear and indisputable terms:

False. Both @ninaturner and @shaunking spoke about race before Bernie even took the stage and Bernie began discussing race at the 5 minute mark after spending the first 4 minutes thanking everyone. Why the false criticism? #BernieInBrooklyn

— Joan Turri (@JoanTurri) March 2, 2019

At minute mark 5:43 – “The principles of our government will be based on justice. Based on economic justice, based on social justice, based on racial justice, and based on environmental justice.” Bernie Sanders#BernieInBrooklyn

— Joan Turri (@JoanTurri) March 2, 2019

also at 3 minutes
also at 13 minutes

— Thomas Caniglia (@ThomasCaniglia) March 3, 2019

This is an easily disprovable lie, one that apparently was delivered on MSNBC as well as Twitter. https://t.co/BDaG45IwwK

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 3, 2019

Despite all this, there is no correction from MSNBC or Maxwell — par for the course for this Democratic National Committee operation masquerading as a news outlet.

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/03/msn ... rect-them/
#14996046
Bernie vs Trump should have happened in 2016.

Or Biden vs Trump.

Everyone knows nominating the VP is the best chance of retaining government. 1988 was a win and 2000 a nail-biter.
#14996053
colliric wrote:Bernie vs Trump should have happened in 2016.

Or Biden vs Trump.

Anyone voting against Trump will be voting against the success of America and Israel.
#14996072
Hindsite wrote:In an environment rife with tabloids, yellow journalism — better known as “fake news” — and a tendency to lean toward opinionated reporting, it’s easy to envision journalists as individuals solely concerned with pushing agendas or generating enough clicks to earn the maximum amount of revenue with the minimum amount of effort or care for the consequences.


Lol, you're the one that watches the Fox News Channel, listen to yourself!
#14996173
redcarpet wrote:Lol, you're the one that watches the Fox News Channel, listen to yourself!

Yes, and it is the best of the MSM with very little Fake news and finally the Trump - Russia conspiracy scam has been debunked.
HalleluYah
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