Comment by throwaway894345

> But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped

The NYT intentionally runs stories that are highly dubious or they know to be false, then later issue a small retraction in a footnote.

The latest fake news they published was the story around Zohran Mamdani where they used hacked data from Colombia University to claim he checked "black" on the admission documents to gain an unfair advantage. That's because they are partisan hacks. I don't necessarily like Zohran, but he represented a threat to mainstream Democrats therefore the NYT had to do something about him.

Yes, when the Russian military was assembling outside of Ukraine, I was chatting with a lot of Russians on social media who were convinced (by their media) that it was just a normal drill, and that the Americans were just buying into their own government propaganda. Over the course of those conversations, Russians would say things like, "We know our media is propaganda, but you don't know that yours is just as propagandist". It was interesting that the goal of Russian propaganda wasn't to get Russians to believe that their media was infallible, but rather to get them to believe that there were no facts, that the truth was subjective, that every country's media was equally propagandist.

I saw a similar theme in right-wing American propaganda wherein American conservatives know that their media is biased, but they assume that "mainstream media" is just as bad.

It seems like in all of these cases, propagandists aren't trying to get people to believe the propaganda, but rather to discredit the entire idea of objective facts or reliable reporting.

which is fine and all but majority of people will take that first piece of news and not see the updated information / article piece. The damage is done at that point.

Retractions are a blimp in the sea of falsehood. 30 second retraction statement has no weight against 1 day of false narratives.

The only way to create a true counter weight is the amount of time encompassing the false hood should be the same amount of time given to the retraction. 1 day of false hood should equal 1 day of retraction.

Will this mode of operation exist, most likely not. The closest the USA had to such would be the Fairness Doctrine. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Interesting. But how should we determine which narrative is correct, and whether conflict should be allowed? Perhaps some sort of "Ministry of Truth" in the federal government could do the job?

>like if the COVID vaccines work or not

Okay, if there is any such thing as objective truth then this (by which i mean your statement that there should not be conflicting narratives, not the statement about the vaccine itself) is objectively false.

The COVID vaccines were pressed into widespread public distribution on an emergency use authorization; any other newly-developed vaccine would have spent years mired in clinical trials and debate. The first COVID vaccines deployed would have taken even longer because they were also the first mRNA vaccines. There was not by any means a consensus that they were safe or effective, only that the risk was justifiable in light of a sudden global health crises.

Why not? Two reasonable people can disagree about the cause of some complex issue even without the media.

In a free country, people can publish whatever nonsense they want.