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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Good and bad are obsolete, there is only confusion. RT don't care about being trusted, they don't care about credibility, they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else. If nobody is credible, if no information can be trusted, then there is no truth and no lies, only gut feeling.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins-raspu...

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Let's not get carried away

If I assume that RT is a propaganda tube (which I do), there's nothing to be carried away by here.

For people living in communist countries, there was an important mental exercise: if Russian media claim something, let's start by assuming, that most probably something exactly opposite happened!!!

RT obviously has an angle but it isn't Pravda.

WaPo/NYTimes has a very obvious agenda as well and thinks nothing of citing anonymous government sources in puffy articles.

I'm struggling to see the difference here, other than Jack/Twitter doesn't care that it has an agenda or is influenced by a government, but they disagree with the particular agenda...

Yes RT is worse, but it's also more overt, this divide will always be full of shades of gray not black/white. It's a very dangerous road to travel down, letting Twitter be the arbiter of news orgs, and if this is going to be limited to simply Russia and not hundreds of other news orgs then it's quite obvious it has it's own agenda as well.

Yes, that's kind of how I feel too.

nonono, you have it all wrong, my aganda is 'objective truth from an unbiased source' but your agenda is propaganda

All sources have an agenda beyond objective truth. Influence is a lot more subtle than just the obvious maneuver of publishing outright falsehoods. Through emphasis and omission you can easily mislead people without ever saying anything untrue. Assuming the reporter hasn't been lied to by his sources in the first place.

Pravda was a complete failure in terms of influencing an international audience. RT is not repeating mistakes.

What is someone supposed to say to this, really? Yes, RT has much more credibility in the US and Europe than Pravda, but that is probably because, while hewing to an alternate viewpoint, they're doing actual reporting, and not just operating as a mindless propaganda outlet.

Are you saying that being a mindless propaganda outlet was not the reason Pravda never succeeded in influencing anybody in the west? The entire point of learning from that is that you have to build credibility.

I think you are reading far more into my post than I wrote.

No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that to be taken seriously they have to be serious, and they are serious enough that it doesn't make sense to talk about them like they're InfoWars.

“they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else”

It’s reasonable to assume this is indeed one of the objectives behind RT, undermining western news media. In 2008 the Kremlin had TV-Novosti (RT is a brand of TV-Novosti) on its list of core list of "core organizations of strategic importance of Russia" for example. Just look at the guests they have on there to perpetrate narratives against governments and cultures they see as adversary.

From Liz Wahl who resigned from RT on air, blaming it for propaganda:

“They get these extreme voices on that have this kind of hostile toward the West viewpoints towards the world, very extremist. These are the people that they have on. And when I was on the anchor desk, they would instruct you to egg on these guests and try to get them, you know, rallied up, to really fire off their anti-American talking points. Listen, I'm all about exposing government corruption. I'm all about being critical of the government. But this is different. This is promoting the foreign policy of somebody that has just invaded a country, has invaded the country and is then lying about it, is using the media as a tool to fulfill his foreign policy interests. And RT is part of Putin's propaganda network and it's very, very troubling in the wake of what is going on in Ukraine today.”

I mean clearly they broadcast a lot of anti-American stuff and their coverage of any story with Russia is suspect at best. But they have lots of real reporting and they're not just making stuff up. And it's useful to have a counterbalance to American papers, which are highly influenced by American intelligence services.

I agree counter balance is indeed healthy and I think generally, in the west, we are served a wealth of different viewpoints on any given issue, so much so that we can take it for granted. My point above was that RT, in the Kremlins own words, plays a core role in their wider global strategy and it absolutely plays a part in undermining the west.

For my own reference, could you supply some links to support you assertion that the American press is highly influenced by American intelligence? My perception of the US press is that this type of manipulation is really not prevalent on a large coordinated scale.

The topic is a hobby horse of Mark Ames, whose work I really admire. It's not necessarily on a "large, coordinated scale," but it's a mistake to assume it has to be to be influential.

Thanks for replying. I was however hoping for something more substantive though.

Then take it from the multiple journalists who have quit and then apologized for enabling Putin’s propaganda. When the people who work their can’t stomach their employer that should tell you something.

Wow, that was a fascinating read. Thanks for posting.

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