Comment by tshaddox
6 years ago
> This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
Those people would be even more shocked by the extent to which this is true in the western world as well.
In China, all headlines are designed to propogate the SAME propoganda. In other parts of the world, all headlines are designed DIFFERENT propagandas.
“Look how many sauces we’ve got to choose from for McNuggets!”
That's right, including Russian sauce:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday
3.9M subscribers, so they're pretty popular.
How disingenuous to compare our hard won institutions like the free press to condiments at a fast food restaurant.
Not even remotely true. The West has myriad choices to choose from in comparison. I don't think you understand how in sync the media is there. They'll literally run identical stories at the same time on every major network, and publish the same set of stories in their papers day after day.
Sinclair is trying to get there!
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764546/watch-surreal-video-co...
Is it though? At least you can see different sides, different voices.
Different voices from the same narrow Overton Window.
Lets say it's December 2015 and I want to find out what ISIS has to say about it's activities.
It was nigh impossible to find unfiltered information from them.
And that is usually enough to placate Westerners. Even if, say, the "different sides" are just different heads of the same snake, which is often the case.
The only two political parties in the US, for instance, differ remarkably little in terms of foreign policy and labor rights. Headlines in major US media will virtually never indicate there is any significant room for debate here. The public is satisfied with the false dichotomy of "raise military budget by $100B" vs. "raise military budget by $200B".
> The only two political parties in the US, for instance, differ remarkably little in terms of foreign policy and labor rights.
Before Trump, I would probably have agreed with you, but these days, I don't know how you can say that. Trump has made major breaks with the foreign policy establishment over the past 3 years, and continues to do so (pulling half of our troops out of Germany is a good example of this). On labor rights, the two parties have been far apart for years. The GOP has intentionally and willfully attacked and degraded the National Labor Relations Board, allowing it to lose quorum and be sidelined.
If you broaden the policy proposals to health care, the parties are even further apart, with one party advocating for single-payer state funded health care, and the other advocating for the immediate elimination of subsidized health care for over 10 million people.
There may have be some issues where there is a general consensus between the parties, but there are plenty of very important issues where the parties are far, far apart.
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Yet youtube is filled with Marxist and socialist material. Major news networks talked about UBI during the Democrat primaries. We’re talking about what information is available in the US, not which policies have a chance in the current popular opinion.
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All the voices are within the Overton window though.
We're that much better at it that the masses think there are different sides. At the top, it's all the same.