[52-6F-62]

What exactly are you claiming is being censored?

The media regularly investigates and reports on itself.

The press is far from perfect, but you’re alleging a vast and deep conspiracy when reality is likely far simpler:

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Sales and business have little impact on editorial. Editorial flies by the whims of a wide variety of strong personalities.

Politicians and relevant players get columnist and editorial roles because of their inside status and insight (of whatever level of quality that might be).

Suggesting those outlets produce a single unified perspective or ideology is a bit much. Which would explain why you might see contradictory ideas.

I continually stress media literacy as crucial-especially these days. It’s not a mystery to be solved. Most of is pretty straight forward hum drum.

Edited to add:

The Atlantic is a very different machine from WP or NYT. It’s magazine whose content has been analysis and ideas and always has been. Their work will always have perspective woven into their articles. It’s not new to them. But it’s not a conspiracy, it’s part of their business model.

[jtr1]

These do not have to be mutually exclusive accounts. There does not have to be a secret cabal of shadowy deep state operatives pushing a unified message, there just needs to be a propensity for the rich and well-connected (by definition a small group) to find their way into positions of influence in rough proximity to major media outlets. As you've said:

Politicians and relevant players get columnist and editorial roles because of their status and insight.

It's not difficult to see that wealth, status, and connection are self-compounding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to say that many people in this group hold views that are out of step with the majority of Americans, particularly when you are talking about the pro-military intervention crowd.

[52-6F-62]

Granted, but what’s being implied and not said outright is that those people are somehow influencing entire organizations of strong-willed career professionals and not just given their own post to say what they want alongside the rest.

I’m asserting the latter is usually what’s happening.

Over the past 100 years there have been many times where North American governments have attempted to rule over the press. That never went well for them (save the inception of Fox News).

OP seemed to suggest the large number of contradictory articles was the result of a larger unified conspiracy. I’m suggesting that is highly unlikely.

For what it’s worth- people don’t get into working for the media because it pays really well. Not usually anyway. So in that way I’d rule out wealth as a primary motivating factor to sacrificing one’s principles in that business.

[leftyted]

It seems unlikely to me that there is no coordination between left wing media institutions. They say the same things at the same time using the same language. I don't read much right-wing media.

I'm not saying there's a shadowy conspiracy (though I'm not ruling out people talking about "messaging" via email). It may be that they read each other's stuff and the demands of the 24 hour news cycle dictate that there's a certain amount of cross pollination and regurgitation.

> For what it’s worth- people don’t get into working for the media because it pays really well. Not usually anyway. So in that way I’d rule out wealth as a primary motivating factor to sacrificing one’s principles in that business.

Another perspective on this, courtesy of Noam Chomsky in conversation with a journalist: "I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting here."

> Over the past 100 years there have been many times where North American governments have attempted to rule over the press. That never went well for them (save the inception of Fox News).

I think it's unknown to what degree American intelligence agencies influence the media but I'm willing to bet it's "more than not at all". It may be relatively benign stuff ("Don't use the term 'Islamic terrorism,' Al Qaeda uses that stuff to propagandize") or it may be not so benign.

I agree with the original poster. It's absurd that the left-wing media has been agitating for censorship of "hate" and then complaining when "evidence of war crimes" is deleted. There's been shockingly little mainstream questioning of just how quixotic it is to try to "remove hate".

I'm fairly concerned about the move toward censorship by internet platforms. The only way tech companies can realistically do this is with algorithms. Lots of people seem to think it's a given that these companies can algorithmically remove "hateful things". No one seems to be saying that rules and laws need to have precedent in order to be intelligible. For example, in the US, there are incitement laws but what actually constitutes "incitement of imminent lawless action" is something that has been defined in the courtroom. You can't just say "delete hate" without precisely defining hate. It's a blank check.

I find censorship via algorithms extremely scary. There will be false positives and false negatives and there is absolutely zero recourse. Censorship by algorithms is a perfect expression of bureaucracy. In perfect bureaucracies, responsibilty is spread so thinly that it's impossible to determine who is responsible for a mistake. With algorithms, there's actually no human on the hook at all. Are you going to blame the programmers?

By all means, use machine learning to flag posts so humans can look at them. But automating the removal of content and the banning of human users is a road I strongly suspect we will regret going down. If the volume of content is sufficient so that you need to use algorithms to remove human-generated content then I'd say it's time to reconsider whether that content should be removed at all.

[phatfish]

In many cases the censorship is carried out by a 3rd party company setup in a low wage location where someone with their own biases, religious convections and influence of their own society moderates content for the west.

The tech giants don't want anything to do with it because it means employing 1000's of extra people and the costs that go with that. So it just gets contracted out to the the lowest bidder.

It can't all be automated yet, not some machine learning algorithm dreamt up be Facebook is any better of a prospect.

This is the problem with the black box of the multinational corporation deciding what is moral or acceptable with no oversight by the government.

[leftyted]

> It can't all be automated yet, not some machine learning algorithm dreamt up be Facebook is any better of a prospect.

Some of it is automated. Youtube removes/demonitizes stuff based on automated checks. I suspect other platforms do this stuff too or are headed in that direction.

[dillonmckay]

Surely they have enough income to hire thousands of US based moderators at a living wage, and moderators for other countries, too.

The relative ethics is the biggest issue, to me.

[52-6F-62]

> It seems unlikely to me that there is no coordination between left wing media institutions. They say the same things at the same time using the same language. I don't read much right-wing media.

> I'm not saying there's a shadowy conspiracy (though I'm not ruling out people talking about "messaging" via email). It may be that they read each other's stuff and the demands of the 24 hour news cycle dictate that there's a certain amount of cross pollination and regurgitation.

There is a difference between being a part of a zeitgeist, and actively conspiring to brainwash people.

The original implication was that a group behind the scenes of large organizations was coordinating them—not that journalists might communicate and share ideas.

They also do regularly read each other's work. Many articles are written in response to others. That is not a new feature in North American press.

> I think it's unknown to what degree American intelligence agencies influence the media but I'm willing to bet it's "more than not at all". It may be relatively benign stuff ("Don't use the term 'Islamic terrorism,' Al Qaeda uses that stuff to propagandize") or it may be not so benign.

That just opens the door for anyone to insert whatever they like, though. That's the sensationalist take I was trying to tone down with my post. It's coming out of thin air.

> I agree with the original poster. It's absurd that the left-wing media has been agitating for censorship of "hate" and then complaining when "evidence of war crimes" is deleted. There's been shockingly little mainstream questioning of just how quixotic it is to try to "remove hate".

Again, to this point, the media/press (and in your words specifically the "left-wing" media) is not a uniform entity and doesn't operate as one. What you're seeing are effects, not causes.

As for the rest—I'm not sure what the solution is yet. It's a tough problem, and definitely a nuanced one. I was only commenting on the conspiracy theories coming out of nowhere on a forum that usually prides itself on empiricism and facts.

[jerf]

"The original implication was that a group behind the scenes of large organizations was coordinating them—not that journalists might communicate and share ideas."

When complaining this is impossible or unlikely, you might want to google the term "Journo-list". It is a thing that is known to have happened, and the idea that one exists again today does not require too much suspension of disbelief, especially since much the same symptoms that made people suspect it at the time are fully visible in the news again. They were absolutely coordinating on stories and doing all the bad things that independent journolists aren't supposed to be doing.

[52-6F-62]

I did look it up because I hadn't heard of that group. Thanks for the reference.

It sounds like there is a larger story to tell about that than "see here is a secret hidden cabal of forces pulling the strings of journalists."

The very Wikipedia article on the subject outlines the active stories outing the list for some of their less-scrupulous conversations in publications like the Atlantic[0].

That sort of goes along with what I had been saying—there is no unified voice. I didn't say there were no bad actors—I clearly stated the press is far from perfect—which includes overzealous rabbling to the point of pressing professional ethics to a breaking point, and making an ugly display of it.

This group also was known to each other—they were not a massive conspiracy pulling the strings behind the outlets from the top-down.

These weren't professionals having their pockets lined to break ethical standards or push pre-decided stories. They were rabble-roused in isolated online communities. If anything, that's the part that sounds familiar now.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/07/meet-th...

[wybiral]

> It's not difficult to see that wealth, status, and connection are self-compounding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to say that many people in this group hold views that are out of step with the majority of Americans, particularly when you are talking about the pro-military intervention crowd.

Yes, the wealthy certainly rig the system to stay wealthy and get more wealth. That's an easy thing to assert. But to then make vague connections to intelligence and relatives of presidents as though they posed some unseen censorship apparatus on media with some specific goals is where it gets into conspiracy theory zone.

[billfruit]

Journalists and the press has their self interest to protect too. That is why it is hard to take criticism of Facebook, Google, etc from them, because their criticism is tainted by conflict of interest. One does not go to the Pope to get an impartial view about atheism. I do not say that what Atlantic/NY times/etc says on this topic is without value. Only that what they say should not be regarded as final or defenitive word, rather only as claims in argument.

[52-6F-62]

> Only that what they say should not be regarded as final or defenitive word, rather only as claims in argument.

I'd agree with that.

It's the claim that they're in on a massive conspiracy because of a select set of articles on the subject is the line I've taken to issue.