[alansammarone]

While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder:

> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

[whatamidoingyo]

This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true.

We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.

[dumbfounder]

I don’t think it’s some master scheme. They are trying to make money more than anything else. So they distort the truth to what sells the most. That just happens to be one of two major ideologies that hate each other. The effect is the same, but the motivations, and thus how you counteract, are different.

[fuzzfactor]

>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.

[pixl97]

Known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

[th0ma5]

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

[lt_snuffles]

This wikipedia article needs some work.

[ceejayoz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firehose_of_false...

[free_bip]

Be the change you wish to see in the world

[throwaway894345]

I would expect to see conflicting narratives in any country with free press. Why would we expect different outlets with different biases to run consistent narratives?

[oofbey]

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.

[oceanplexian]

> 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.

[throwaway894345]

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.

[eighthourblink]

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.

[throwaway894345]

Sure, the damage is done, but that doesn't make it _propaganda_.

[yndoendo]

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

[marcosdumay]

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.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

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?

[snickerbockers]

>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.

[dcow]

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

[_DeadFred_]

When one side has to ignore all of science, that has build Western society and allowed it to live in unnaturally dense populations with unnatural life spans, that is not disagreeing on cause. That has driften to theological/emotional belief in something. Keep those out of news.

[marcosdumay]

Because there is no real doubt about those.

If some media comes disagreeing, they are blatantly lying. Also, there should not be diverging narratives about whether if you jump off a cliff, you will fall.

[dekhn]

there is more scientific doubt about the true effectiveness of COVID vaccines than you think.

[throwaway894345]

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

[marcosdumay]

In a healthy society the professional media shouldn't be composed of lying crackpots.

[throwaway894345]

Is there any “healthy society” that prohibits lying in the media?

[zubiaur]

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.

[hamburglar]

One thing that’s interesting is that if you intentionally consume media with different viewpoints, you can often glean what’s true and what’s not by comparing how they each spin the story, because the opposite sides will almost never be in coordinated collusion about their misrepresentations.

[nostrademons]

> I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively.

The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.

[tracerbulletx]

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.

[nostrademons]

Science relies on our senses too - that's all the data we get. But yes, science is a way of compensating for bias in our individual perception and building durable models that make useful predictions even for phenomena we can't directly perceive.

Be wary of overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, though. Science may say that the measles vaccine is 99.7% effective, but if your kid comes down with a rash 3 days after a high fever and a week after being exposed to a known measles case, it starts from head down, and they've got white spots in their mouth - congratulations, they're probably in the 0.3%. Likewise, science may say that men are on average better in spatial and mathematical reasoning than women, but if you meet a top-notch woman programmer in your job, believe your experience, not the science. That science makes a conclusion about the averages doesn't prevent you from having an outlier right in front of you.

[tracerbulletx]

Yes, also there's science the social system, and science the method. I'm only really speaking about the portion where senses are prone to a bunch of different failure modes, and science is a way to compile a bunch of sensory observations as a form of parity check or error correction mechanism. Science the social system also has failure modes, but the system is the only thing we have that has shown any actual progression in its results, and has a strong track record.

[terminalshort]

But what if you don't know the facts? And how can you if you don't have eyes on the situation or know someone who does. I'd rather go with Mark Twain:

> It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

[fidotron]

The important point is to distinguish between truth and the co-ordinated release of information in the NYT, BBC etc. The latter is very much intended to send a message, but it is not to be taken as literal truth.

[hnlmorg]

I cannot about the NYT, but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.

So much so that the left and the right accuse the BBC of biasing the other in equal measures!

If you want to talk about bias in the UK press then you’re better off looking towards The Sun, The Mail and anything owned by Murdoch (that guy has done so much damage to the world it’s unreal).

[anukin]

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.

[abletonlive]

> 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.

[hnlmorg]

You’d need to have literally infinite resources if you wanted to avoid a situation of having to pick and choose what you report on.

What matters is that all sides of the debate get representation. And the BBC does this almost to a fault.

The ironic thing is the fact that BBC is so good at doing this, everyone feels their voice is marginalised and then complains of bias.

So when people call the BBC “biased”, and as ferociously as you have, what they’re actually saying is “the BBC airs too many opinions that oppose my own biases”

[whatsupdog]

> 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?

[retsibsi]

> Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?

They're saying that the BBC is relatively impartial, not that it is biased to the right.

If you're saying that the BBC has left-biased stories, and therefore the claim of impartiality requires evidence of counterbalancing right-biased stories, I think you need to start by providing evidence of the former. (Even if you think it's blindingly obvious that the left-biased content exists, your examples will clarify what would be required to balance it out.)

[hnlmorg]

> BBC is highly skewed to the left. No debate on that.

The fact that you argued that shows there is some debate. ;)

> Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?

No, because my point is that it isn’t biased to the left nor right.

What the BBC does is offer both sides of the political spectrum to have equal time sharing their arguments.

If you think that’s biased then what you’re actually saying is that the left deserves less time than the right. Thus it’s not the BBC exhibiting bias.

[pixl97]

Is the BBC highly skewed to the left, or is reality?

[tolerance]

I don’t think this is the flex you think it is.

[lazyant]

their treatment of Israel-Palestine

[rithdmc]

or, both in modern times and during 'The Troubles', Ireland.

Biased does not mean it has to skew to a certain political leaning all of the time.

[ptaffs]

I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.

[semanticist]

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.

[zenmac]

>the co-ordinated release of information

That hit the nail right on the head, with ONLY 6 companies controlling all the mainstream media. News are just like coordinated company memo.

[phkahler]

>> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

During covid the Governor of Michigan banned shopping for gardening supplies. This raised a big fuss. One of my FB friends shared a reporters story saying the ban was fake news and that the order did not include anything like that. He even provided a link directly to the order itself so you could see for yourself. Most people would not bother because hey, he went to the source! I followed the link, found the paragraph - which was super clear and explicit about the gardening thing - and posted a direct quote of it in response. I lost a FB friend that day. Facts are hard to find (you must do it yourself) and just piss people off when they don't like them.

[tw04]

> That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does.

Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.

[nocoolnametom]

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.

[fasbiner]

I can’t think of a worse person to cite that principle; Snyder has lied and evaded historians with basic inquiries about his work.

As we speak, his official position is that Russia and China are both engaged in genocides and another state categorically is not and you should be punished for inquiring. I don’t think that position is going to age well, for him or for you.

The propaganda is so effective because the propagandists can rely on your lack of basic rigor and media bubble to present abstractions as a real moral position. And there’s no way to say this without hurting feelings and causing people to get defensive. Look up what any historian who isn’t on tv has say about Snyder’s work on libgen, it’s not sensationalist or context-free, it’s just someone going through and documenting mendacious claims and poor historiography: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer...

What is telling is not that one reviewer can be authoritative, but more that the response is "Shut up and go away, I'm trying to have a media career." Pretending to be a controversial truth-teller speaking for principles is how Americans like to be propagandized to and how we like to become niche celebrities instead of doing work that requires accuracy and rigor.

[chrisweekly]

Fantastic quote. Spot on. Thanks for sharing it!

[ynniv]

[flagged]

[brookst]

It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies.

That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”.

I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.

[zmgsabst]

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?

[brookst]

So many fallacies. To be charitable, I will assume you are just trying to wind people up with nonsensical rhetoric.

There are no zero-death vaccines, as you know. There are also no zero-death diseases, as you probably know. The relative rates of death between the two are not even close, as you know.

[stogot]

relativism is indeed wrong, but thinking that because knowing the truth is somehow “hard”, that you should throw out objectivism is also wrong.

[T-A]

Thank you for reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539

[ludicrousdispla]

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

[runlaszlorun]

Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true".

Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true".

Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one.

Lord help us all... Lol

[snickerbockers]

That is actually orwellian as fuck.

[suddenlybananas]

Well, Snyder himself is a bit of a propagandist with his ridiculous double genocide theory.

Here's a longer discussion[1] with examples of how he is an ideologue. (I would have liked to post a reply to the people responding to me but alas, I cannot.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comm...

[ImPostingOnHN]

Could you please stop repeatedly editing multiple comments to respond to replies? The "reply" function exists for a reason, and your backedits disrupt the directional read of a thread, confusing the discussion.

If the HN system tells you that you're posting too fast, and you need to slow down, that also exists for a reason: you are, and you do. You can still reply (so please stop saying you cannot), you just need to slow down, be patient, and wait. It's ok to wait. Don't try to evade the restrictions. Wait.

[suddenlybananas]

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.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Looks to me like you can use the "reply" function just fine. Good job! Keep it up.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'.

I, on the other hand, am always right.

[suddenlybananas]

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.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Indeed, everybody except me is a ideologue with whom at least 2 academics and a reddit poster disagree. I, on the other hand, am always right, of course!

Additionally, as a jew, I was raised on an ironclad ideological assertion that the holocaust was the worst thing people have ever done to each other, and no genocides have or will ever rival it. I'm keenly aware that there is a vested interest in maintaining that view [0], even if it is not true (many academics say that an equal, perhaps greater number died in The Holodomor, for example – not that that need be true for the two to be compared).

Take your own link, for example: it describes David Katz, a holocaust scholar, who commented, "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin". This is just a dude saying his opinion, even though a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin is not, in fact, "very wrong".

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate

[suddenlybananas]

Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler.

(Again I cannot reply to the comment below, but my point is not that I am not ideological; of course I am. But Snyder is also extremely ideological and uses his history to push a very particular kindideologues of politics, which is ironic given the context of the thread. )

(Adding another edit since I can't reply! But again, I don't understand why my interlocutor cannot understand that both sides can be ideological and that one needs to take that ideology into account when evaluating claims. Snyder is one such ideologue who consciously seeks to minimise Polish and Ukrainian collaboration with the Holocaust and claim that Jewish Soviet partisans fighting the Nazis were "criminals", see: [1] for examples (also an ideological source--of course--but some of the quotes from Snyder are really quite damning. ))

[1]: https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/

[ImPostingOnHN]

Your entire reply to my post, from beginning to end, is 1 sentence, quoted below for posterity (before subsequent edits anyways, I can't keep track of all your changes made after this reply):

> Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler

We see that you're literally ideologically repeating, almost verbatim, an ideological opinion, while complaining that someone else is an ideologue. Thus, your comment is extremely ironic given the context of this thread and your prior complaints. Indeed, you are the only one who appears to be the ideologue, and so all we have to go on as far as Snyder, are the naked, unsupported assertions of an ideologue.

Sure, stalin is very, very, very different from hitler, just like an isosceles triangle is very, very, very different from a scalene triangle. Any 2 different things in the universe are different by definition, and "very" is nebulous, therefore your logic also means that anything can be described as "very, very, very different" from everything else. A truly meaningless statement.

In short, the evidence presented indicates that Snyder is not an ideologue, and there aren't actually any issues with what Snyder is saying, only ideologues who either disagree with what he says or don't like that he's saying it.

[philwelch]

For example, Stalin probably killed a lot more communists.

[gedy]

> drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust.

That's a propagandist?

[steve_adams_86]

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.

[stronglikedan]

> I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme

That applies to anything, when taken to an extreme.