We all know that misinformation and propaganda are flooding the media, and some might even say that everything is propaganda. But most of us trust some sources more than others.

This community is especially concerned with countering propaganda, so I'm curious to hear how you personally decide whether something is propaganda or not.

Propaganda is just speech with intent to persuade. Everything political is propaganda in some fashion.

The answer to this is always to vet your sources and, more so today, to look for obvious signs of AI involvement in whatever media you are consuming. Anything AI should be treated with additional scrutiny.

Dude you just got banned from this community and now you're posting again on an alt? https://lemmy.ml/modlog?userId=1813744

Is this still a "blurry 44 that could be mistaken for the fascist symbol"?

Previously:

But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/

Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.

Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.

The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:

The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.

The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine

Previously:

I said “these kinds of graphs,” of which there are many https://duckduckgo.com/?q=media+bias+chart&iax=images&ia=images

But you’ve sparked an idea for an interesting project: use MBFC’s API to create one of these graphs from their own data. Doing a little googling, it seems that scripts and data dumps aren’t hard to come by.

I think armchair media analyst Dave M. Van Zandt is going on vibes. I don’t think he understands corporate & think tank media. Does he know who Walter Lippman or Edward Bernays were, or what the Council on Foreign Relations (“least biased” 🤡) is or made note of its prominent media members? Does he know about the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?

No results found for site:mediabiasfactcheck.com "manufacturing consent".

I’ve seen The Grayzone debunk the New York Times’ lies many times, and yet:

Also, in what universe is the neoliberal, anti-labor NYT center-left? And if the Grayzone in the ultraviolet territory, where does that leave the explicitly Communist Monthly Review, outside of MBFC’s Overton window? Surprise, it’s to the right of it:

Previously:

The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

• Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
• Propaganda model
• Edward Bernays
• Walter Lippmann
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Powell Memorandum
• The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy

And speaking to the Ukraine conflict specifically:

Previously:

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: 'I want to bring up a warrior': Ukraine's far-right children's camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• Internationalist 360°, 2022–2024: History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

Previously:

NATO expansion:

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

 
NATO in general:

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

I think it's important to not have firm opinions on every issue, and be extremely wary of anyone who does. I have noticed many traditional media outlets have been leaning ever more heavily on opinion pieces in the post-print media age. They cost nothing to produce while drawing undue amounts of attention when the presenter is someone charismatic.

But at least they are marked as opinion pieces, which suggests there is at least some modicum of effort to maintain journalistic integrity by labelling them as such. If you get all your news listening to some guy ranting away in a podcast or whatever, that is all too likely nothing but opinion with zero fact-checking to back it up. Sometimes it's not even logically self-consistent.

One thing I do sometimes is approach news following a cybersecurity-style challenge/response paradigm. You think to yourself "I want to know why X seems to be the case, and am going to research it." This contrasts to simply doomscrolling and having an algorithm decide what to push at you.

But circling back to my initial point, it's ok to not have everything sorted out in your head. For example, here in Canada, much of the news at the moment is focused on tense trade negotiations with the US. News outlets go around asking what the guy on the street thinks. Should we play hardball and not make any concessions amid the threat of tariffs? Or should give up some ground to give businesses a little more breathing room? If someone were to ask me my opinion, I would respectfully say that I do not have one. How should I know how the backroom negotiations are going? I can only hope that something positive will emerge from them, but I don't have the knowledge to weigh in on such things.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion… ;)

I like how they probably wont reply to your comment , THUS proving that youre probably correct!

Learn mathematics. If something/someone tries to assert the following fallacious syllogism, then it is propaganda:

1. P implies Q
2. Q
3. Therefore P

If someone/some-organization asserts that a simple correlation means causation—especially in the case of surveys or polls—thats propaganda.

Hell, a lot of the time the correlation doesn’t even verifiably exist.

If someone asserts that because the publication/school publishing a paper has prestige, that paper must be well founded and correct, they are using it as propaganda regardless of whether it draws solid conclusions or not.

The same is, unfortunately, true in reverse. Just because something is a biased source or even a superspreader of propaganda, doesn’t necessarily mean they are always spouting misinformation. Though if the conclusions are sound, you should be able to find a better source than any clearly biased news/journalism organization

If they cite a paper/study:

• Ask what the purpose of the paper was
• Look to see if the article actually draws the same conclusion as the paper or if they omit crucial details/flaws that the researchers mention
• Ask what department/background the researchers were part of and if that background fits with the research being done
• Ask what the procedure for data collection and analysis was
  • Compare with standard procedure for similar but non-political experiment(s) to see if the data collection method followed good procedure

Propaganda is a function, not a type of communication. Pretty much all communication serves some propaganda function, even if I'm just earnestly gushing about the cool shit I did with my comrades last week.