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by yucky 1455 days ago
That's it?

With all of the vast wealth and intelligence agencies we have, the best we do on the propaganda front is when the NY Times says mean things about Trump?

Does that sound right to you?

1 comments

Well, define "we" first.

How much American TV watch people in South America? How much English TV watches a German for example, or Italian? I would say, close to zero. So the first issue is that Western media landscape is fragmented. So it is difficult to project such possible attack to outside.

Second issue is media freedom. Media is truly privately owned and there is strong culture of press freedom. Still, there is probably also some level of cooperation with the government. So we should always pay attention if the government is trying to sell us something through media.

>So we should always pay attention if the government is trying to sell us something through media.

Isn't this how our entire "news media" landscape works (with the exception of a handful of legit investigative journalists)?

"My anonymous sources tell me..." really means "someone in the government wanted me to put this message out to the public."

Also, hasn't the US been busted funding revolutions/freedom fighters in 3rd world countries multiple times, utilizing propaganda at every step along the way? Or is that all BS?

War and propaganda go always hand in hand but the main difference here is in capability and scale.
Yes, and who has more scale or capability than the US? So we should fear our own propaganda more than any, right?
This post was about Russian capacity to create such conflicts completely out of blue. You can fear anything you chose to. Like I have explained many times, it is not this scalable because of fragmentation. Yes, there can be a mass hysteria like was for example after 9/11, but it is very difficult to suck something out of non event like was this plan to move some monument. I hope you notice the difference in significance between these two events.
This recent post touches perhaps it from the angle you are concerned about

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31976955