Trump is inheriting the right to Breitbartize Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

Are they?

The main ones are state-run from the US, UK, China and Russia, aren’t they?

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It’s worth remembering that there two types of propaganda, the type that is lies and the type which is selective about the truth. Neither option is good but lies are far worse than selective truth.

The worry here is that propaganda seems to be moving back from selective truth to lies, and Trump is only going to accelerate that.

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I know the BBC is, and America has PBS, but MOST of the US media is NOT state run, and the UK has a lot of independent media (some good, some bad).

I honestly am not 100% sure about where Russia and China are. I know both were exclusively state run at one point, and I think China still is for the most part.

But if you are in Russia or China right now, what is VoA or what ever saying right now? That Russia and China sucks and America is awesome? (Well, not literally saying that, but I imagine that is the gist.)

What will Trumps new message be? “Russia and China isn’t that bad, you should stay where you are!” Or will it be something like, “Taiwan is a real country. You should burn down your leaders.” Or will they also just echo fake news/heavily slanted as the other countries already do? Is the fact this system could be misused a good reason to question having it?

And again, but other than NK, aren’t there covert means to get out side news sources? I mean, if Russia is hacking the Democrat’s emails and peoples credit card numbers, they should be able to access www.cbs.com or www.theguardian.com :wink:

So a US funded propaganda project is going to be taken over by the same sort of far right anti-communists that they spent decades trying to encourage under foreign left wing governments. It’s not a coincidence that the current far right surge in Europe was mostly founded right after the fall of communism. Who do you think an awful lot of those “independent political movements that eventually brought down the system” were? I’m only shocked that people think VoA was actually committed to the cause of freedom and not always subservient to US interests.

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I think the plural is important here. Read/listen to as many different news providers as possible and build your own reality out of the different views.

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I reject your reality and substitute my cone.

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Sorry to nitpick, but you seem to imply that PBS is run by the state. It is not.

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Fair point, it is a private org that gets money from the government, as well as corporate sponsors and viewers.

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Gee, it’s almost like there’s a lesson in there about not being so deluded that you allow the controls on government to become corrupted by the “urgent” necessities of your personal ideology.

“These pesky War Powers restrictions sure do make it hard to get things done! I’m just going to proceed with bombing Country X cause it’s pretty important that we do it right now!”

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Of course they were, but broadcasting selective truths and biased commentary is not the same as broadcasting wholly fabricated lies like Breitbart, InfoWars and Trump’s Twitter feed.

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2014 sucked too.

Sorry to nitpick, but you seem to imply that the BBC is run by the state. It is not

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Anyone desiring some broader perspective on this issue, see these links. Keep in mind that despite all of the talk about firewalls, VOA and other USG-funded organizations were ALWAYS federal entities, though RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), were made “grantees” – which does not mean they don’t have to respond to requests or general guidance from the U.S. foreign and national security policy structures in government. And the language in the 2017 defense authorization bill is not new, or directed by Trump himself or advisers, but has been the subject of discussion/debate in DC for some time:

http://bbgwatch.com/bbgwatch/wp-defends-defunct-bbg-board-fails-to-mention-voa-chiefs-former-links-to-the-paper/

http://bbgwatch.com/bbgwatch/washington-post-enabling-bbg-dysfunction-with-a-dysfunctional-message/

Also:

No-one in Australia listens to this. It’s aimed at our neighbours.

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And radios are still cheaper than internets, or phones.

It wasn’t that long ago that Ethiopia (for example) blocked VoA broadcasts. (Actually it’s happened again.) Leaving VoA’s motivation, quality, etc. aside for the moment, evidently enough people still listen to it that the Ethiopian gov’t thought it important enough to jam the signal.

More recently, they cut off the mobile internet.

Overtime during the Cold War, VOA and the Radio Free networks (not to mention the Armed Forces Network) all played more music. They still had news, cultural programming about the US, but many people tuned in to hear rock and roll. Here is a good book on some of this in Austria in the 1950s:

And the second half of Michael Kramer’s book discusses “hip militarism” and how some young vietnamese became familiar with American pop culture through the Armed Forces Network:

I think that @Abiatha_Swelter is on the mark about how people might turn to other state run radio for alternatives, but I’d also argue that people would tune in DESPITE the propaganda and specifically for the cultural stuff. I think the slow shift to having more popular music on air time indicates that.

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Nothing new there; Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw played a lot of music as well.

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Um. Okay. Sorry.