201–210 of 262 posts
I'm subscribed to daily newsletters on The Washington Post, Bloomberg and The BBC News. This is how I stay in the loop.
I also get instant notifications for breaking news (e.g. when the latest prime minister of the UK resigned).
Very rarely now I manually visit news websites.
I haven't used social media (Facebook, Twitter) for years. If I want to share something with someone, I use instant messaging.
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You have to ask this question: How is the government controlling the media? In Russia's case, it's pretty clear. They have laws to prohibit free press, jail time for claiming things opposite to the Kremlin. In some other cases, it's more subtle. In Hungary, Orban's influence on the media is very high, and not healthy for a democracy. But if you claim that the most objective news sources in the west still show straigh…
You are only focusing on government punishing journalists and journalists complying due to fear. This ignores journalists being lazy by accepting and printing leaked stories from government as truth without any verification. Another example is not reporting on topics due to fear of losing their job or social status because it goes against a popular narrative.
https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2021/08/26/ukraine-pres...
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What sources of news are reliable on the conflict? I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.
In general case it is impossible to report news objectively. I personally do not mind propaganda per se anymore. I mean it is ok with me, if the source has a political agenda. I praise media who state their agenda clearly. But what I do not tolerate is the outright lying. I do not like hidden agenda, though it can be revealed by watching a source for some time. Moreover propaganda-phobia is bad by itself. It can be a…
To teach and inform someone means to broaden their perspective. Without a goal like objectivity, a news story has no value. Why even listen to propaganda, it would not be to your benefit?
I still do like opinion pieces where authors describe their experience because sometimes an objective recapitulation does indeed not tell the whole story. But many modern news articles could use a dosage of detachment. It would improve the craft drastically.
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> The claim that western media is full of propaganda is just kremlin propaganda. This made me chuckle.
You have to ask this question: How is the government controlling the media? In Russia's case, it's pretty clear. They have laws to prohibit free press, jail time for claiming things opposite to the Kremlin. In some other cases, it's more subtle. In Hungary, Orban's influence on the media is very high, and not healthy for a democracy. But if you claim that the most objective news sources in the west still show straigh…
Mainly through access. If you don't report favorably, your government sources might withdraw. Sources that provide you with exclusive information that you can provide first. There are of course unimaginable other venues to enforce compliance to a certain framing. There is also documentation how this was achieved in the past.
I saw how the press quickly turned people in favor of the Iraq war. It was clear propaganda. You can see the same stuff happening today with different enemies. Yes, Russia is a despotic state, but you are a victim of disinformation as soon as that prevents you to demand accountability at home. Because that would be your job as a citizen of a democratic state and what you can influence.
I live in Ukraine. From 2015 till 2022 I didn’t read or watched news and no social media or blogs or analytics. Then war started. Now I follow news everyday, because I have to take care of my family’s security. I follow analytics of battlefields progress so if I see warning signs I would have to take decisions to move my family further to the western part. I follow news on volunteers who help military so I can take a…
What sources of news are reliable on the conflict? I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.
I know i'm biased, but first, this is a belief i held in my formative years (that the Russian army was full of violent pigs), and it seems to align the the propaganda i'm seeing now. So perhaps there is some exageration right now, perhaps there was some exagerations 15 years ago, but to me it aligns perfectly.
I also know two ex-special force guys, one who worked in Africa against Wagner, and while Wagner seems to be less rape-happy than the average Russian military guy, massacring and trying to put it on their opponent is their MO. I think i can say it now because Wagner was recently caught and will be more carefull next time, but the French army decided to keep satellite + air surveillance over all their old bases and now put bodycams and surveillance on all sites that can be used to frame them.
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You're probably being downvoted because of the mere suggestion that Western propaganda is shaping the narrative but this is something that also irks me. I do not defend at all any of Russia's actions but the fact that it's just become commonly accepted that the war happened because "PuTiN iS cRaZyyy" is kinda scary. Absolutely no mention of the US' role in this or the fact that NATO specifically sent Boris to stop th…
The war started in 2014, following the Euromaidan protests, and the Russian invasion of Crimea. Putin isn't crazy - he's coldly calculating, and clearly demonstrated his ruthlessness in Chechnya (which the world chose to ignore).
I do read a lot about the Ukraine war - I can't resist - but I do so in the full knowledge that the first casualty of war is truth.
That said, I remember back in the early days of the war, when the media was flush with stories of Ukrainian resistance and Russian blunders, there were a lot of "enlightened" voices dismissing it all as wishful thinking and asserting that Russia would, in fact, steamroll Ukraine soon enough. Such comments have aged poorly. People can point to the fact that Russia still occupy large parts of Ukraine but it can scarcely be denied that the war has gone much worse for Russia, and much "better" (militarily and relatively speaking of course) for Ukraine, than most would have predicted in February.
In trying to better understand whats currently happening in Europe I've been watching this CNN documentary about the cold war that was filmed in the 90s and includes interviews with many of the people originally involved.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3H6z037pboGWTxs3xGP7...
In some ways I find myself having to do the job I guess journalists used to do. Learning about the subject, acknowledging my own naivete, and then trying to piece together some kind of a narrative of whats going on.
I find podcasts can be good for news but theres a lot of junk in that category too.
It's really hard now. I feel like the things I do to consume news in a way that informs are mostly weird hacks at this point. In the documentary case you can even argue about how much that even has to do with news in the first place. Definitely speaks to the current quality of news content.
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What sources of news are reliable on the conflict? I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.
This seems to be a core problem of a lot of people. The inability to discern that not everything has an agenda and is propaganda. Most western media (Murdock/Berlusconi type oligarch media aside) is fairly factual. It doesn't have 'spin' or 'agenda' in the sense that the journalists conspire to mislead (they don't have time for this).
I have a hard time believing that anyone can be this naive. We're you paying attention the last two years?
When journalists lied, suppressed and told everyone that Hunter Biden's laptop from hell was 'Russian disinformation" and refused to even investigate whether the claims that it had been verified by people with actual knowledge of Biden's dealings were true, how is that not journalists conspiring to mislead?