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Comment by soundwave106 | Hacker News Reader

There certainly is propaganda masquerading as news in America (and other Western nations), and it's absolutely true that some people are deceived by this. However, there is also a wide variety of media, and it's certainly possible to find articles that are well-developed and not "full of bullshit".

(I imagine there are also ways of getting information beyond the curated "official news" in China; not living there, I'm not aware of the ways, of course. Perhaps, in China, you have to seek? In America, you do the opposite, you have to filter.)

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>However, there is also a wide variety of media

By "wide variety" you mean those 6 corporations/oligarchies, many of which have been owned by the same families for decades, even centuries (i.e. Hearst)? The "variety" is just targeted marketing. For example, the communications chief at Time Warner (CNN's parent) and the CEO at News Corp (Fox News' parent) are "close confidants" who worked together for 11+ years, even though CNN is often considered "left" while Fox is "right".

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...

Yes, this is why one of the first medias you should "filter" is television news for this reason. I find US TV news (broadly speaking) fairly low quality to be honest. I also think US television news in particular is where you will find the strongest direct links between media and political figures.

If you look beyond TV, you'll find a fair selection of weekly-to-monthly magazines (and even a few independent papers) available, in addition to some foreign publications that are readily available. Honestly, just as an example, I'm looking at the Pulitzer Prize winners, and I'm not seeing too many owned by those 6 corporations / oligarchies mentioned in the Business Insider article. Sure there are "big national" papers outside the big 6 (NY Times, Boston Globe, etc.) that win, of course, but even some smaller regional papers with smaller independent ownership win their fair share.

Social / web media in the US allows instant links to this ecosystem, if you want. And, at the moment, this seems to be free of the mass censorship type efforts China employs. To be honest, I bet in certain demographics, more people get news from Google / Facebook / Reddit / etc. than anywhere else.

That's the good news. The bad news is that portions of the social web are flooded with a lot of low-quality "clickbait" that is more populist. Propaganda? Perhaps sometimes. If not, it's still annoying either way. This you have to filter as well.

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