Comment by roody15

I'd like to point out that the student's advice, "of course the news is ridiculous propaganda, just ignore it and go about your life and focus on your friends and family" is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.

The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general. Combine that with overt (but unpredictable) penalties for supporting the 'wrong' cause, and a disinterest in politics becomes the easiest and safest path for a member of the public. As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.

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 a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder:

> 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. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

I think treating the government as a singular entity pushing a narrative is missing a bit. There is no singular government moving in lock-step, I think we've seen a lot of those seams showing recently.

There are factions, supported by various wealthy powerful interests. Those factions include people in government but also people funding or controlling media.

The owner and CEO of a major social network was literally given a public-facing government position, and others in the administration were previously TV personalities.

Wealth, media, and government are an ouroboros, not a one-directional megaphone from The Government to The Citizens.

I keep joking that instead of the normal repressive state-controlled media, the West has media-controlled states. Electing a TV host is just a culmination of that. Or a media owner, like Berlusconi. Coincidentally he was brought down by his underage sex trafficking.

Westerners voluntarily tune into their propaganda, leaving the 24/7 news channels blaring.

But there is a critical difference in that elections do happen, they do get counted, and they do make a genuine difference in the political and economic outcomes which affect millions of people.

What your Chinese friend isn't saying is that all those Substack writers in the US would be disappeared into Chinese gulag's. The US has a strong freedom of speech clause baked into its core governance system...When I was fifteen I'd be subscribed to five different punk zines and would be creating mix-tapes from 10 different sources (and much of it wildly offensive and political).

The other thing to note is that journalism in the US has gotten really lazy. A lot of the articles you will see in the MSM are based on leaked info and press-releases from PR firms, etc. It's easier to for journalists to regurgitate stories hand-fed to them than doing truly hard and costly investigative work.

No. In the West, there are competing news sources(despite the best efforts of many). They might be equally biased but you do get a devil's advocate system. China is a one party state that controls all media. Not remotely the same.

In China, you would not have known the story was bogus.

The other thing is the completely different information universes left and right live in in America. It's difficult to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the political divide because they believe a completely different set of facts. Meanwhile, in China, everyone knows the news is B.S and they only trust information they get directly. In the past, before the Internet, there was a lot more time invested in maintaining relationships just to get good information. Is that the case in China?

It reminds me of this business litigation a company I was an investor in had between the partners. I wasn't very close to the situation, so I had no first hand knowledge of what actually happened, but each side had a contradictory set of facts. Both could not be true at the same time. Each side asked me to join their side, but I told them that that's what the judicial process is for: to find out who's facts the jury believes. Unfortunately, this means it's going to be a long process that will go to trial because they are so totally far apart on the facts that they will have to have a trial. Also unfortunately, this also probably means someone is lying in a pretty pathological way. The same thing seems to be occurring in American politics and there's no real neutral arbiter I guess except the voters.

They aren't mutually exclusive; Westerners get emotional about news, but still understand that there is a propaganda component. That doesn't mean the news isn't useful. Outlets might be selective about what they say, but the truth in reporting sort of stands in plain sight; if you read a balance of sources, you get a decent idea what's happening, surrounding a particular issue.

News organizations very rarely lie. They might be misleading in framing or selective wording, but they won't outright put something in print that is a complete lie.

Perhaps none of us have living memory of how when the chips are down there is no place to turn to but a source of truth. For every propaganda(ish) outlet, there is a place you can check for real news NYTimes,CNN,Fox juxtaposed to things like propublica,snopes or icij.

One friend got taken in by a fake news story and rued the internet is full of fake news and propaganda that spreads in a minute, I am so dismayed, how can I know what is real?. a friend replied: the internet is wonderful too you can check in under a minute if something is fake.

I think the main difference is, in liberal countries people depend on the media to manufacture consensuses, while China does not need anyone but the leader to create them. No society can survive without a certain degree of consensus

Ah, so like Russia. The ultimate dream of all authoritarians. A society that no longer even dreams of freedom, that becomes fully apathetic.

Do you know how many independent newspapers there are in China? Zero. Even ones with what we'd call liberal ones are controlled and will be dealt with if they go too far.

Just because things aren't working well does not mean we have to tear it all down

The constant news consumption isn't just an American thing.

I live in Britain and have colleagues and friends who (admittedly) watch or read news first thing after waking up, and read news website articles constantly throughout the day.

We're talking, multiple times per hour. They read the news more frequently than things happen to be in the news.

There are certainly some news outlets that operate like propoganda. I mean Fox comes to mind, if you ever watch you’ll notice they carefully craft their statements and rarely talk about facts, mostly feelings. News is at its core a business, and they know they get eyes on things by scaring people or talking about things that seem shocking at face value. NYT and other outlets that do long form articles (Wired) have invaluable information. But we live in a world where most people (especially perpetually online people) just browse the headlines and take what they want from it. We’ve lost nuance, and because of that in the US one party is using that to their advantage.

Isn’t it a feature that people are vocally dissatisfied with what the media reports? To just accept it quietly in silence seems in fact the worse outcome. Even if everyone knows the media reporting is wrong, keeping quiet about it creates a strange meta state where the reporting is true enough that no one wants to publicly question it, because nobody else is questioning it, so it’s unclear whether your fellow citizens accept it as true or not, so you need to assume they believe it’s true.

I had a teacher in high school that married a Chinese woman, and when her parents came over they said "Your propaganda is so refreshing, you hardly even notice it."

It's always struck me how hamfisted the Chinese government sound in its communications.

The problem with this statement is that your Chinese friend comes from a place where every information source allowed by the government can be safely assumed to be propaganda, by definition. That's how their system works. Not so in the west.

I basically agree with every word you wrote. But also, it means you wake up one day one day and tanks are rolling through the capital city, and the President is threatening American cities with illegal military occupation.

That's a ridiculous statement and honestly this blog post itself is very misleading. The quote taken on condition of anonymity is someone saying there is no evidence this was a national security threat. The NYT article is not at all a hair on fire credulous tale of near disaster. It quotes government officials and experts, connects it to "normal" criminal cartels and offers some opinions on what could be a worst case scenario. As much as this could easily be a simple criminal case, it was already connected to threats made to politicians so it's not far-fetched.

This sounds like "nobody drives in NYC because the traffic is so bad".

>They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life.

In my experience with people I've interacted with in China is that there is quite a range of belief in the propaganda. I've had people say some truly wild things that were clearly the result of how news and history have been presented to them. Its also important to consider that we are interacting with people that are more engaged with the West and aren't seeing the perspective of a lot of the country.

Okay I got a little bit rage baited by this but to summarize- we Westerners value openness in government to prevent abuse and corruption, so getting mad about propaganda is common.

I used to work for a large semiconductor manufacturer and the first time I visited the headquarters in the US I was shocked to see Fox News was on 24/7 in the cafeteria.

Whenever I see a major negative news story about republicans I always visit the Fox News website and you’re lucky if it’s a sub heading at the bottom. If it’s a particular bad story there will always be a Biden or Hillary story dug up as a headliner to change the narrative.

Look up Manufacturing Consent - good read!

This is perfectly reasonable when people know that they have no control of the government, it’s like the weather then…you just deal with it.

The problem is that in the USA , we’ve been told that we have a democratic republic, and that we have significant self-determination in affairs of the state, and that justice, freedom, and the right to live relatively un-disturbed are inalienable rights.

It’s bullshit in practice, of course, but we’ve been told this, and we’ve been told it’s our duty to protect those rights, up to and specifically including armed insurrection.

Many people actually believed what they were told.

Perhaps propaganda is not the right word. I think a better word is "sensationalized" which happens often even here on HN with titles trick people into clicking on the link. With each click having monetary value, this is just the norm.

I disagree about "the government pushing"

it's *different groups* of power - some have more control, some less

but all push one big agenda or the other, so instead of centralized propaganda you get affected by targetted propaganda

That's fine but it's also the end of self-rule and agency

What's the most popular tag-line for YouTube/TikTok videos and online spammy ads? "The TRUTH about ..."

Americans have PTSD, and paranoia.

Before Nixon, Americans had an idylic belief in "America" as some bastion of exceptionalism, independence, idealism. We're the best, and we can do anything. We never got attacked, we had the most money, power, etc. Everything's good and we're the best.

But since Nixon, they learned their most-venerated politicians lie to them. But not only politicians; the news lies, corporations lie, scientists lie, their neighbors lie. And when 9/11 happened, suddenly the facade of invulnerability fell (because it was a foreign terrorist, rather than domestic, like Oklahoma City). Year after year, the media bombards Americans with terrifying stories of somebody lying to them, secretly hurting them. They're all out to get you. And polls show year after year that Americans are less trusting of their institutions.

To function in a society, you have to trust somebody. So they still watch the news, listen to politicians. They hide in some in-group, like a political party or ideology, or even just a Facebook group. But they are hyper-aware that anybody could be lying to them at any time. That some commonly-held truth is actually a weapon used to hurt them.

They have been bombarded with fear for decades by the media and politicians. Every single day they are told that "the enemy" is working to destroy everything they love. This isn't an exaggeration, this is literally the line given by politicians, and then parroted by their favorite media source. This is why Americans both obsessively watch media, and are really emotional about everything they hear in the media. It's why so many Americans latch onto conspiracy theories now (they didn't used to). We are all afraid because our system has made us afraid, and we don't know who to trust.

Sounds like Americans are engaged in a democracy they see the ability to shape whereas China is a lost cause, so just bend over and ignore it? :)

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 changed restrictions on disseminating propaganda materials domestically. Passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, it amended the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously blocked the domestic distribution of content produced by U.S. government agencies like the State Department. This is a driving factor behind a lot of the decline in quality of news as propaganda starts to drown out legitimate reporting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Surprised this hasn't been posted within a comment yet :)

...and let someone else pay the price in the end for letting these things happen unchecked. Perhaps your children :)

So you are saying that experts on CNN are paid by the government?

Propaganda gets too much credit.

The entire Republican platform (especially since ~2016) has switched focus to something less like propaganda, and more like engagement for engagement's sake. Conservative talking heads do tend to frame everything from a particular perspective (that's the propaganda part), but rather than try to convince everyone to agree with them, they do the opposite: try to get as many people as possible to disagree with them, so they can get themselves and their audience into eternal "arguments". These "arguments" are never intended to be logically defensible. Instead, they are intended to fail as spectacularly as possible. Naturally, most other media outlets love this, because they get to profit from their own participation. The only value left in this dynamic is engagement.

By leveraging the alleged "two sides" of American politics, both politicians and media corporations have managed to create an infinite feedback loop of engagement with their media; and at the same time have managed to direct that feedback into political support for their preferred policies. Knowing this, it's entirely unsurprising that many of the highest positions in government are now held by household TV personalities, like Dr. OZ and Donald Trump.

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So what can we do about it? If engagement is the new currency, can we simply boycott this entire thing by disengaging? I doubt it will be possible to get enough people to actually participate, particularly those who are currently the most engaged. Disengagement only creates an implicit victory for whoever is speaking loudest.

Honest argument is incredibly important. There is no value in diversity of thought until differing positions meet each other and collaborate. Media corporations have found huge success by replacing argument with bickering. I think the first step in undoing that damage is to help people understand the difference between the two: argument is goal-oriented, whereas bickering is goal-avoidant. Knowing that difference, I think we should find ways to practice argument with each other, and redirect our engagement into collaborative progress.

unfortunately we are trending toward that direction, trust in media is hitting all time lows in the US.

I mean your comment, number one on this post, is propaganda to ignore the major sourcing of information that least pretend to have a system for evaluating what i true, what is worthy to present and replace it with.......? In the USA we have historically tried to keep abreast of what is going on in the world, partly because we are a nation of immigrants with ties/emotional ties around the world. Is that a thing in China? It didn't seem so when I was working with people in China. Giving a Chinese cultural position (ignore the world) might not be a fit for an American.

This is just wrong. There is a huge difference between having a free press vs not. And while publications like the NY times are not perfect, they pretty much never outright lie, unlike state propaganda.

Comparing Chinese media with American media is insane. One can argue most big media companies in the US have an editorial line that is aligned with one ideology, particularly true for most legacy media outlets. But many are still putting out very high quality mostly unbiased content. News are not meant to be consumed as facts but to challenge one’s own beliefs and seek out the truth or truths. Living in a bubble completely disconnected from both national and global events that impact us all is irresponsible and usually exactly what totalitarian regimes expect us to do.

The good news is, the only people who watch cable news in the US anymore are either boomers or in an airport.

Amen !

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I agree from a high level, but I think the major difference is that: - Chinese news is propoganda in the traditional sense - directed/approved by the central government - US news is not centrally controlled like that, but most sources lean heavily left or right, and distort narratives to fit their views.

I feel like liberals believe that, while Fox News is clearly presenting things from a right-leaning perspective, most of their chosen news sources are neutral. That's absurd. NYT is certainly far left in how they spin the majority of their stories.