Continuing to ramble…
Propaganda can be done in many ways.
You can promote blatant falsehoods about your opponents; FOX and Breitbart do a lot of this.
You can just starve your opponents of exposure by denying them airtime; MSNBC does this to the left. Promoting puppet faux-representatives of their interests works, too.
Or you can embarrass your opponents by publicising their misdeeds; RT aims a lot of this at the USA, Radio Free Asia aims a lot of this at China, etc.
But it isn’t a one-mode-only thing. All of them actually use a mix of these techniques, plus others. Selection, tone, emphasis. Who gets on the air, what questions get asked, what answers are treated as reasonable, who gets the last word.
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Objectivity and propaganda are orthogonal. Perfectly objective reporting can be used for propagandistic purposes. Sputnik and RT America actually appear to have more editorial independence than most of the US networks.
On Sputnik, the presenters like Kiriakou were hired because they are critics of US policies, but then they’re generally just left alone to get on with it. They’d be shut down if they turned their critique on Russia, but that’s pretty much their only restriction.
OTOH, it’s well-documented that FOX news hosts were given top-down daily directives of what stories to report and how to report them. As for MSNBC…
(transcript here)
The core Russian RT hosts are an entirely different matter from Kiriakou et al; they do straight-up Kremlin-dictated bullshit. Not hugely different from Fox News, except reporting to Putin instead of Murdoch.
BTW, y’all remember this? It was just a few months ago.
