Hacker News Reader

Comment by propman | Hacker News Reader

But in the West the media is not state run. The Chinese government decides what to run and clearly that is propaganda. In America the media is controlled by 2 political parties and they are either pro or anti government. The media in the West can run any content they wish and it is up to the free market to determine if they can survive. You can listen to whatever viewpoint or angle. CNN, Fox, Huffpo, Brietbart everyone is telling you different angles it is up to you to decide. This unbiased media you are referring to is an unachievable utopia. The Western system is far superior to state run propaganda and is the best system we can realistically have. If there were a better system, through the free market it will replace the old.

View on HN

> "The Chinese government decides what to run and clearly that is propaganda. In America the media is controlled by 2 political parties.."

Is this thread attempting to argue that either means of propagating propaganda is more beneficial than the other for a people?

> "..CNN, Fox, Huffpo, Brietbart everyone is telling you different angles it is up to you to decide."

2 parties OR state-ran -- and no other option for news consumption. Modern media, eh?

China wields formal control where in the US this is achieves via peer pressure and social manipulation/control. Anytime something shocking is revealed reporters end up losing thier jobs, sometimes be suicided or at worst end up like Assange.

What absolute falsehoods. Ask Woodward and Bernstein if they got "suicided." America has not yet fallen to China or Russia's level of cynical censorship acceptance.

It looks like your account has been HN primarily for political arguments lately. Would you please not do that? It's an abuse of the site.

HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, and political argument—especially the flamewar kind, which it inexorably degrades to—is destructive of that.

Hey, just saw your comment. I agree with your reasoning and am happy to comply. I assume you will pass the same message along to users who start such discussions in the first place.

I generally only comment on issues I know about. Outside of technology, history and civics is a focus of mine, hence the comments.

Perhaps deleting comments like the parent (made on a throwaway account, apparently) would be a good idea. It would stop folks like me who feel compelled to reply to perceived propaganda from doing so.

The alternative is for everyone who feels strongly about political issues to create throwaways for such HN discussions (see parent), to avoid retribution on their main accounts. I doubt that's a world you'd want to moderate, or that I'd want to live in. (Not suggesting I'd go in for such sock-puppet account shenanigans, but it's the limiting case that comes to mind.)

Anyway, I suspect political stories will always provoke political discussion. If you'd prefer not to have this on the site, I'd humbly suggest flagging and removing such stories.

EDIT: Your point about flame wars is well-taken, however. I could certainly have highlighted the history and facts of American press freedom in a more constructive way here.

Far superior to state run propaganda as to what?

Far superior for manufacturing consent? Sure. The western system of propaganda is far more competitive, innovative, or you can call it distributed in the way it hides its agenda in a network of proxies of capital instruments, which is exactly what it would evolve into with the free market. But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda.

This is a well put thought: > But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda.

Your own or inspired by some book ?

It had been my hypothesis. Julian Assange said it better:

> The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction.

Recently I found Slavoj Zizek had even better criticism:

> The US doesn't treat prisoners as brutally – because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the openly brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). But this is why the US is an even more dangerous threat to our freedom than China: its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed. In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms.

Good quotes. Thank you. Reminded me of Neil Postman's comparison between Orwellian world in "1984" vs huxleyan in "brave new wolrd". I Postman made a lot of similar comparison in his book Amusing ourselves to death.

For State run propaganda, there is never any alternative. In the West system I can start my own news org and run it. Huffpo and Brietbart were started in response to the monopolies of the 2 parties and were started with very little in capital and are the top 50 most visited sites in the world top 5 news sites.

Self determinism and free choice thwart state run propaganda. Manufactured consent is not controlled by the government but by a whole bunch of competing sources that can be defeated. I can think of no more effective system aside from ours in which all the knowledge is free and accessible. Aside from new technology that lessons the effects, increase of critical thinking and knowledge are the only solutions. In this country anyone is free to provide this through news, education or whatever other medium they devise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com