8 ms·

While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave

• fidotron 1y ago
  The important point is to distinguish between truth and the co-ordinated release of information in the NYT, BBC etc. The latter is very much intended to send a message, but it is not to be taken as literal truth.
  • hnlmorg 1y ago
    I cannot about the NYT, but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available. So much so that the left and the right accuse the BBC of biasing the other in equal measures! If you want to talk about bias in the UK press then you’re better off looking towards The Sun, The Mail and anything owned by Murdoch (that guy has done so much damage to the world it’s unreal).
    • whatsupdog 1y ago
      > BBC is one of the most impartial sources available. I really hope that is sarcasm. BBC is highly skewed to the left. No debate on that. Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?
      • ptaffs 1y ago
        I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.
      • retsibsi 1y ago
        > Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right? They're saying that the BBC is relatively impartial, not that it is biased to the right. If you're saying that the BBC has left-biased stories, and therefore the claim of impartiality requires evidence of counterbalancing right-biased stories, I think you need to start by providing evidence of the former. (Even if you think it's blindingly obvious that the left-biased content exists, your examples will clarify what would be required to balance it out.)
      • pixl97 1y ago
        Is the BBC highly skewed to the left, or is reality?
        • tolerance 1y ago
          I don’t think this is the flex you think it is.
      • lazyant 1y ago
        their treatment of Israel-Palestine
        • rithdmc 1y ago
          or, both in modern times and during 'The Troubles', Ireland. Biased does not mean it has to skew to a certain political leaning all of the time.
      • hnlmorg 1y ago
        > BBC is highly skewed to the left. No debate on that. The fact that you argued that shows there is some debate. ;) > Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right? No, because my point is that it isn’t biased to the left nor right. What the BBC does is offer both sides of the political spectrum to have equal time sharing their arguments. If you think that’s biased then what you’re actually saying is that the left deserves less time than the right. Thus it’s not the BBC exhibiting bias.
    • anukin 1y ago
      BBC is impartial till it reports on anything which has to do with its old colonies. Then it becomes high brow British aristocrat weapon of propaganda.
    • semanticist 1y ago
      The left accuse the BBC of bias because, eg, the new Green Party leader has not been on any relevant BBC politics programs while Farage and other right wing politicians are regular fixtures. The right accuse the BBC of bias because they fact-check them when they lie. These things are not equivalent. The BBC has lost a lot of credibility over the last decade or so. I can completely understand why they rolled over (often pre-emptively) to placate a Tory government that talked a lot about defunding them, but ultimately it has not served them well. The newspaper situation in the UK is diabolical for sure.
    • abletonlive 1y ago
      > but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available. I almost spit out my coffee in laughter reading this. Entirely ridiculous assertion. You are completely blind to the fact that the BBC is insanely partial by picking and choosing what it reports on and what it doesn't. This is just level 2 detection of bias that you aren't reaching, imagine all the other things you're missing.
      • hnlmorg 1y ago
        You’d need to have literally infinite resources if you wanted to avoid a situation of having to pick and choose what you report on. What matters is that all sides of the debate get representation. And the BBC does this almost to a fault. The ironic thing is the fact that BBC is so good at doing this, everyone feels their voice is marginalised and then complains of bias. So when people call the BBC “biased”, and as ferociously as you have, what they’re actually saying is “the BBC airs too many opinions that oppose my own biases”
  • zenmac 1y ago
    >the co-ordinated release of information That hit the nail right on the head, with ONLY 6 companies controlling all the mainstream media. News are just like coordinated company memo.
• ynniv 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • T-A 1y ago
    Thank you for reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539
    • ludicrousdispla 1y ago
      and here I was just going to say that math requires numbers, and numbers are often made up
  • runlaszlorun 1y ago
    Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true". Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true". Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one. Lord help us all... Lol
  • brookst 1y ago
    It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies. That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”. I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.
    • zmgsabst 1y ago
      Both statements as written are true: vaccines do kill people and vaccines do save lives. If you insert the implicit “all”, then both are false: not all vaccines save lives and not all vaccines kill people. But your knowledge of medicine is quite deep if you know the relative rates of vaccines with zero deaths ever versus the rate at which defective vaccines are produced. Do you have a good source you can share?
• suddenlybananas 1y ago
  Well, Snyder himself is a bit of a propagandist with his ridiculous double genocide theory. Here's a longer discussion[1] with examples of how he is an ideologue. (I would have liked to post a reply to the people responding to me but alas, I cannot.) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comment/kx9p2hp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comm...
  • ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
    Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'. I, on the other hand, am always right.
    • suddenlybananas 1y ago
      There are many academics who disagree with his characterisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Bloodla... The point is, he's an ideologue (who may end up being right even if I think he's not) which makes it a bit ironic to mention in the context of talking about propaganda.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
        Indeed, everybody except me is a ideologue with whom at least 2 academics and a reddit poster disagree. I, on the other hand, am always right, of course! Additionally, as a jew, I was raised on an ironclad ideological assertion that the holocaust was the worst thing people have ever done to each other, and no genocides have or will ever rival it. I'm keenly aware that there is a vested interest in maintaining that view [0], even if it is not true (many academics say that an equal, perhaps greater number died in The Holodomor, for example – not that that need be true for the two to be compared). Take your own link, for example: it describes David Katz, a holocaust scholar, who commented, "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin". This is just a dude saying his opinion, even though a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin is not, in fact, "very wrong". 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate
• snickerbockers 1y ago
  That is actually orwellian as fuck.
• whatamidoingyo 1y ago
  This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true. We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    Known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
    • lt_snuffles 1y ago
      This wikipedia article needs some work.
      • ceejayoz 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firehose_of_falsehood&action=edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firehose_of_false...
      • free_bip 1y ago
        Be the change you wish to see in the world
        • cindyllm 1y ago
          [dead]
    • th0ma5 1y ago
      I'd also put Gish Gallop in there somewhere as well. Or "unfalsifiable" is also certainly in the neighborhood.
  • throwaway894345 1y ago
• phkahler 1y ago
  >> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like. During covid the Governor of Michigan banned shopping for gardening supplies. This raised a big fuss. One of my FB friends shared a reporters story saying the ban was fake news and that the order did not include anything like that. He even provided a link directly to the order itself so you could see for yourself. Most people would not bother because hey, he went to the source! I followed the link, found the paragraph - which was super clear and explicit about the gardening thing - and posted a direct quote of it in response. I lost a FB friend that day. Facts are hard to find (you must do it yourself) and just piss people off when they don't like them.
  • tw04 1y ago
    > That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like. You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does. Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.
    • nocoolnametom 1y ago
      Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." "Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity. Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!) So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles? Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them. I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.
• terminalshort 1y ago
  But what if you don't know the facts? And how can you if you don't have eyes on the situation or know someone who does. I'd rather go with Mark Twain: > It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• chrisweekly 1y ago
  Fantastic quote. Spot on. Thanks for sharing it!
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  > I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme That applies to anything, when taken to an extreme.
• ctrlp 1y ago
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• fasbiner 1y ago
  I can’t think of a worse person to cite that principle; Snyder has lied and evaded historians with basic inquiries about his work. As we speak, his official position is that Russia and China are both engaged in genocides and another state categorically is not and you should be punished for inquiring. I don’t think that position is going to age well, for him or for you. The propaganda is so effective because the propagandists can rely on your lack of basic rigor and media bubble to present abstractions as a real moral position. And there’s no way to say this without hurting feelings and causing people to get defensive. Look up what any historian who isn’t on tv has say about Snyder’s work on libgen, it’s not sensationalist or context-free, it’s just someone going through and documenting mendacious claims and poor historiography: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer-Bartovs-review-of-Bloodlands.pdf https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer... What is telling is not that one reviewer can be authoritative, but more that the response is "Shut up and go away, I'm trying to have a media career." Pretending to be a controversial truth-teller speaking for principles is how Americans like to be propagandized to and how we like to become niche celebrities instead of doing work that requires accuracy and rigor.