Comment by alansammarone

>They are trying to make money more than anything else.

Who knows what some people will do these days, just for that.

Well, we actually have a pretty good idea, without all the gory details.

But I know what you mean, it's not too easy for multiple sources to be on the same page even when they really try sometimes.

However, only the few most popular are what most people listen to, and those biggies are usually well aware of each others' stance. On an ongoing basis. And if a combined effort were to take place nothing else would have a chance.

Sometimes even sharing personnel, concurrently and/or sequentially, which can also lay the groundwork for approaches that seem competitive but are really complementary. As designed with a single, possibly obscured agenda designed from the ground up to deceive.

Things like this might be why "trust but verify" may have to be deprecated, and reversed to "verify and still be skeptical" if the propaganda keeps getting worse.

I'd also put Gish Gallop in there somewhere as well. Or "unfalsifiable" is also certainly in the neighborhood.

This wikipedia article needs some work.

I agree it’s healthy for Americans to be more skeptical of journalism, especially the sources they think they trust. But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped. Sure reporters are lazy and will run an article quickly about a breaking story they get from a government tip. But if they find out it was wrong the editors will be pissed and likely print an update or even retraction. That’s the key difference between independent media and government propaganda.

There should not be conflicting narratives on the press about things like if the COVID vaccines work or not, or if the disease kills people or not. Or if the world is warming.

Deniability and having a response for different lines of criticism. It derails the critic who operates under the assumption of a consistent narrative and meaningful arguments. It gives the believer something to hold on under most scenarios. It removes truth and reality grounding from equation. Its diabolically effective.

Edit after down votes: The paragraph above was meant on why would one expect conflicting narratives not from different sources, as the Parent Comment stated, but rather from supposedly official sources or propaganda outlets. My bad, must have read the comment on a hurry.

You can't really believe your own senses either. Science is our only systematic way to arrive at reliable information, you really can't know anything, but you can construct reproduceable experiments that increase your confidence enough that those facts can be relied upon to construct more complex theories by linking experimental results together, and those links increase your confidence because their co-occurrences help validate each other and when experimental results diverge you can also reduce your confidence deconstruct or iterate on the theory.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

and here I was just going to say that math requires numbers, and numbers are often made up

I'm just replying to make my position clear since you replied with very misleading content. It's not my fault HN wants to be an echo chamber and makes it difficult to respond to people when they are wrong.

There are many academics who disagree with his characterisation: 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.

I'm not educated, let alone a historian, but there do seem to be some parallels here and it seems like the most disparate factor would be the very specific oppression of Jewish people. But the Soviet mass murders involved the death of a huge number of 'undesirables'; most just happened not to be Jewish. They were thrown into unspeakable conditions of torture, murder, starvation, etc. so I can see why Snyder would see them as similar.