Comment by floatrock
5 years ago
My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
I’ve heard this story too when growing up. I belong to one of the last generations born in the German Democratic Republic. A quite prominent element of our History and German lessons in the 2000s was critical reading of historic news and caricatures, we did these analyses in exams up to A-levels. Propaganda was a big topic, not only when learning about the Third Reich. One reason certainly was that all our teachers spent most of their lives in the GDR system.
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
I find this unpersuasive.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
While a segment of HN commenters could go on for hours about U-3 or U-6 unemployment numbers, the politicization of such, there is no real difference with most media consumers. Truth largely settles along a binary choice of the mainstream alternatives. Within those strains, views are very self-congruent. Perhaps that’s coincidence, or there are only two real truths, but I’ll defer to PG’s writings on that.
The real difference is that those in the east were predisposed to be suspicious, whereas in the west that disposition or curiousity is not a thing.
There are plenty of real truths, it's not strictly binary.
But it's in Pepsi's and Coke's best interest to have you think it's only those two.
Bias can be reflected in which stats are reported at all. There's also the framing of the numbers and the conclusions stated or implied.
Have you noticed the topics for which there's remarkable conformity between US and UK media compared with other western media? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364947
Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
The point isn't to be a cynic and a nihlist, it's to become a skeptic and to be mentally trained to always read between the lines. "Critical thinking" as they said in grade school.
The cliche "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" is just the tech nerd's version of "if you don't know who the fish at the table is, you're the fish."
Folks behind the iron curtain got used to that mentality over a few decades in a time when information flowed slowly through newspapers, radio, and early TV... we're now being forced to reckon with these tricks over the course of a few years while moving at the speed of industrialized data collection, microtargeting, and engineered dopamine bursts that maximize engagement.
People living in the cold war era were at least mentally inoculated against these tricks -- in the US we've had no preparation for it. The ease with which we've turned against each other for the easy popcorn comfort of the conspiracy theory or outrage du jour is mind boggling.
How do we know that people from formerly communist countries are any better at media consumption? From what little I’ve read about Russia, people seem to be pretty pro-Putin and there are lots of conspiracy theories.
It doesn’t seem like people there are obviously better at media consumption, let alone inoculated?
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Yes, which is why Russian propaganda is more concerned about muddying the waters than constructing any particular narrative.
Also, they realized how to take advantage of potential energy. Give groups a nudge, and they will write their own propaganda and circulate it, and it snowballs from there. I read a recent interview from someone working in the Internet Research Agency, and they said they don't even bother making content themselves anymore, they just try to push and amplify what's already there at the bottom of the fish tank and it works just as well.
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To further this point, a RAND Corp study: "The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It"
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
> Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
Universal cynicism and nihilism may function that way. But that was not the attitude of the person in the description. So I am not sure how that is relevant?
The step from "I don't trust anyone so I need to triple check everything" to "cynicism and nihilism" is quite small, especially given the effort in triple checking all information.
Remember me a joke, in USSR to know the truth you only need to put a NOT in front of an article of the Pravda, because are all false, in USA you can't because only half are false
It is sad that the wisdom from behind the iron curtain (where I grew up, too) is so fitting in the US (where I now live) today. I find that critical assessment of the media, resistance to propaganda and brainwashing detection skills acquired over there served me very well in the US.
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
> we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said
I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively
Dr. Linebarger[1] wrote first a textbook (for the US army) and then a book (for the general public) on "Psychological Warfare" which incidentally contains a section, with an outlined method complete with mnemonic acronym (STASM), on media analysis.
"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
Mad magazine used to run "reading between the lines" pieces.
[1] A while ago I learned The Game of Rat and Dragon is accurate insofar as felines not only have better reflexes than ours, they're among the best.
Ask anyone from China and they will tell you the exact same thing. They know their news is state sponsored and all propaganda. People in the united states are blissfully unaware.
We still have a robust ecosystem of quality journalism in the US. There is bias, there are mistakes made, and there is false information masquerading as news that can mislead media consumers if they are not careful. But we are still very far from the situation in China and Russia. To be clear there is a problem, and it's growing, but let's not exaggerate.
If Julian Assange were a Chinese citizen blowing the lid on Chinese war crimes in Xinjiang while they accused him of not feeding his cat we wouldn't bat an eyelid at denouncing their crackdown on journalism in their country.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/julian-assanges-treatme...
Somehow what you were saying reminded me of reading The Onion.
You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name & occupation) each spouting something humorous?
and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.
Exactly, ask the same to anyone in Cuba or Venezuela.