[52-6F-62]

Sorry, but this comment betrays a lack of understanding about the very functioning of North American media.

There is no real world scenario in which they can be lumped as one group. Even individual outlets carry such a variety of voices that you cannot pin one on any given outlet.

The organizations that are lumped into the "MSM" branding opponents to a free press like to throw around are just large organizations.

Remember, "the medium is the message": you cannot extricate one article from the entirety of content published by a given outlet any more than you can exalt one article as being the sum of any outlet on its own. For example, a muffin recipe[0] is as much the New York Times as an opinion commentary on the potential problematic nature of social media, yet you cannot say that the NYT is only one or the other.

Because an outlet published an article that one might contend is responsible for a situation (rather than commentary on a situation), and that content has commonalities with content from other outlets does not mean there is any other practical association—only thematic.

Secondly, calling it all "fake news and propaganda" really belies any rational discussion of the subject... it's like saying all computers are killing machines because they've been used in war.

[0] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2868-jordan-marshs-blueb...

[3princip]

Just because the media has cooking articles doesn't mean it isn't propaganda.

At the time of the Iraq war everyone who cared to look into it knew the whole thing was absolutely fake news. If I knew it was fake, and all the people involved in the massive anti-war movement (in the UK at the time) knew it was fake then it wasn't much of a stretch for educated in the know journalists of the NY Times or other major media outlets to know. WMD, yellowcake, links to 9/11 etc. Completely fabricated propaganda was spread and promoted by the MSM.

[52-6F-62]

Your issues with opinion columns from 15 to 20 years ago does not render the entire medium of 21st century journalism "fake news".

I'm certain if you read the entirety of the New York Times (and many other outlets) published articles on the subject you would find a range of perspectives, not just the ones that you're purporting sum up journalism of the past 20 years.

I was reading the same outlets you were at that time. Those large outlets based in the cities were where I (living in rural SW Ontario) gained my understanding of what was going on with the United States response to 9/11.

I'm not making this up. They maintain well-organized archives and it's easy to search, filter by date range, section, and sort. For example, "Bush WMD" search between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2011 returns a wide variety of perspectives and types of journalism: some straight reporting of the news, some press releases, and some opinion columns from varying perspectives—some in line with what you're claiming is the entire stance of North American media, and some not. Those sections are not all equal in their "truthiness" (another fun term from those times, if you recall).

https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231...

[dingaling]

> Those sections are not all equal in their "truthiness"

So why are low-truthiness sections like 'opinion pieces' and 'commentaries' published? Well they're cheap, but also because someone's pushing a particular agenda, or agendas.

So how's that different from someone spouting outrage-wrapped half-truths on social media?

[52-6F-62]

Opinion columns are a curated forum of ideas, including agendas, sure.

But the publishing of them does not represent them as being anything of any validity any more than publishing "letters to the editor" asserts the opinions therein are of any practical value other than the exposure to the fact that they are indeed held. It's an attempt to hold an even remotely civilized, and detached discussion at length.

No single opinion column is a conclusion, except maybe that of the writer's. That's why you'll see debates go on for extended periods of time-columns and papers written back and forth on singular ideas sometimes for years, decades even.

But I'm not here to defend opinion columns—I rarely read them myself outside of a few more local polemics. I was discussing the dishonest treatment of an "MSM" that is only "fake news" and "propaganda" because of a misreading and lack of media literacy in general. (If only many people who frequented forums like Parler treated those discussions with as much deference rather than planting bombs and bludgeoning a federal officer to death)

[3princip]

I haven't claimed that all content published by MSM is fake news or even the majority.

A war was initiated under false pretenses, published by these organizations. Everyone knew it was fake and a charade and they published it anyway.

This is a question of pot calling the kettle black. And in this case (against Facebook or in other cases Parler) the harm caused by MSM is far far greater than any conspiracy theory on social media.

[52-6F-62]

I'm afraid I don't understand.

Not reporting on the matter would not have prevented the matter (in this case, you're speaking of the war in Iraq).

The "MSM" did not fabricate intelligence and start a deadly war.

[yrimaxi]

This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...?

Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested. And they’re not crackpot theories.

[52-6F-62]

I wasn't responding to long form critique. I was responding to several disjointed, self-righteous platitudes strung together.

Not to single out the commenter above, as it's a common phenomenon.

There was nothing muddying about my comment. If someone has an issue to take up with a particular writer and their treatment of a subject in an opinion column that is one thing, but that's not what was happening. What I was pointing out and opposing is the treatment of "MSM" as "fake news" and "propaganda"[0] as a whole. So, unless recipes, arts columns, news reporting, and travel writing are also all "fake news", the NYT is not "fake news".

Media literacy always has been of severe importance, and it really begins with a base level literacy and handling of the language and context the writing comes from. Picking out a couple of opinion columns and using them to brand an entire field of work and study as "fake news" is problematic.

Frankly, the problem seems to stem with many people misreading Orwell (or not at all before raising his name as a moral objection), and not even taking a moment to read that they're browsing the opinion section before they've decided to take off with outrage.

I never argued with their opinions. I countered their understanding of the functioning of North American media with illustrations.

[0] When this word is pegged in next to "fake news", one tends to understand, given the context, that the meaning was idiomatic in the anti-journalism sense and not the larger meaning of the word.