Cambridge Analytica: Director 'met Assange to discuss U.S. election', channelled $ to WikiLeaks

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I mean, maybe. But if Trump is a threat to anything, he might be a threat to the carefully built American hegemony, that came out of not just force, but out of Europe deferring to us. It’s clear Europe will not defer to Trump on many things, if on anything. In a weird way, Trump is a threat to that carefully built American leadership, and hence a threat to the “real” American state, which is intertwined with corporate ideology. Attacking Trump is attacking a perceived threat to American hegemony, I think. Weird as that is to contemplate. I think there is a reason why Bannon decided to back trump, and what Bannon wants more than anything is the destruction of the American state in favor of a privatized corporate state. Him being out of the picture doesn’t make that less true and the election of Trump can still accomplish what he’d like, because Trump is nothing if not a disaster.

As for VOA, I don’t know if people around the world listen/watch it in the same way they did during the CW, as it did provide an alternative to Soviet news (even with it’s own propagandic twist - pro-democracy and pro-free trade).

I think part of this is trying to parse what the real representative is of the American state - is it obvious propaganda like VOA or is it corporate propaganda like CNN/MSNBC? I don’t think the answer is so clear cut, honestly.

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Voting is nearly meaningless without individual liberty and the structures in place for people to truly choose freely. ie. you need liberty in addition to democracy. Things like free press, freedom of association, independent judiciary, etc etc.

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Please define. Often terms like liberty are thrown around in an entirely thoughtless and meaning less way. Same with terms like:

None of which we currently enjoy in America. The judiciary, for example, functions in completely different ways for the rich and the poor. If you can’t pay, you’re less likely to have any sort of robust defense, and end up being pushed to plead guilty, no matter what the reality, because the public defender working your case has at least 100 other defendants to help that week.

Free press is virtually non-existent, given that the most powerful press outlets tend to be corporate owned with their own agendas that may not match up with the well being of the American populace. There is no clear example of a Cronkite who will fly to Vietnam during Tet and come back and tell us all that the generals, American government, benefiting corporations, and American press are lying about the war. People who attempt to speak truth to power, especially at the intersection of corporate power and state power, are more often than not likely to be silenced or at least ridiculed and sidelined.

As for free association, well, too often that’s thrown around as an excuse to discriminate against certain segments of the population, that people who offer services to the public have the right to put up shitty, racist signs or to promote homophobic bullshit masquerading as “religion.” Given that pretty much all businesses that serve the public benefit in some way from the public largess, that’s nothing but an excuse to bring back segregation. Fuck all that fucking noise, I say.

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I did mention VoA upthread, BTW.

Networks such as Radio Free Asia would also be a good equivalent. The USA funds a diverse array of propaganda channels across the world.

But media does not have to be state-owned in order to be propaganda. For the example most obvious to US liberals: FOX News.

The US cable networks represent the various factions of the American oligarchy. FOX is the network of the GOP, MSNBC is the network of the establishment Democratic party.

OTOH, there has historically tended to be a firm consensus between the factions on some basics: imperialism is good, capitalism is good, militarism is good. Perspectives that challenge the foundations of American exceptionalism are largely excluded from mainstream view.

Down on a smaller scale, Brietbart represents the alt-lite, TYT promotes the Berniecrats, etc. They’re all doing propaganda.

I never actually said that, BTW.

Both MSNBC and RT are propaganda networks, but they are not equivalent. There are substantial differences between the media landscape of the USA compared to Russia [1], and inward-targeted propaganda tends to be significantly different from the propaganda intended for export.

Nevertheless, the media networks of both nations are absolutely awash in propaganda.

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[1] Most obviously, US media ownership is more diverse and factionalised. The Russian oligarchs are more united than their US equivalents, thanks to Putin’s tendency to seize the assets of his opponents.

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The Gods of Twitter strike again: this just appeared on my feed.

https://twitter.com/public_cointel/status/1005941082562187267?s=21

Bannon has been keeping busy, BTW.

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propaganda does have the requirement of being purposely misleading, but then it becomes an argument of degrees again. For example, Fox makes news up regularly while the other cable networks do it less frequently; on the same note Fox has a full roster of Captain Planet villains as contributors, the others just have war criminals and hardcore capitalists.

While it is true they are all biased and not great, Brietbart is not as trustworthy as CNN.

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Not really. Another example of propaganda would be the leaflets dropped from allied bombers during WWII that accurately described Nazi war crimes. Or these leaflets that the Nazis dropped during Dunkirk:

Nothing misleading about it; just some uncomfortable truth.

The “propaganda is foreign fake news” meme is itself the result of propaganda, designed to weaken critique of local propagandists.

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I’m obviously not just arguing about dictionary definitions or even common usage here; I’m trying to get at things to do with the underlying concepts.

But I still found this bit of history on usage to be interesting:

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I agree with the earlier sentiment that to dismiss all mass media as “propaganda” is to dilute the meaning of the term to near meaninglessness.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting underwrites “Frontline,” but I know I’d be much more likely to put my faith in the objectivity of a Frontline documentary than in the objectivity of a segment I saw on Russia Today.

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Not “all mass media”.

All mass communication that is produced with the intention of altering political opinion.

Non-propagandistic journalism is possible, it’s just extremely rare except on topics so obscure that nobody powerful cares enough to bother messing with it.

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It’s also worth pointing out that the message here is not “ignore all media”. It’s “be aware of the ideological biases of the media you consume, and don’t fool yourself into thinking that the stuff you agree with is unbiased”.

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I’ve posted this piece before; it’s a rambling discursive sorta thing, but well written.

There’s a passage in it that strikes me as relevant to these sorts of discussions about the pervasiveness and subtlety of propaganda:

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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.

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