[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.

[marcosdumay]

Do you have any study that found any of the 3 western ones ineffective?

The effect is so strong and universal that everybody finds it.

[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?

[marcosdumay]

Plenty of them had the government following the money that pays for all the gifting and arresting the fraudsters, yes. Lying for the love of the sport isn't a crime, for deluding a society into giving you money and power is.

And also have a diversified professional media, so that the money leaves a track.

[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.