> less biased
> vice
I mean come on now; that's just swinging all the way the other direction.
> vice
I mean come on now; that's just swinging all the way the other direction.
2. RT is owned by the Russian government. I have no particular fondness for Vice, but they're worlds apart.
More generally, "X has a hugely compromising feature, Y has a mildly problematic feature, therefore they're exactly the same as each other" is the kind of fallacy that causes the public to trip and fall on its face over and over. Let's try to avoid it it we can.
And man, I wish I were being hyperbolic. But they are possibly the worst american news source to link to.
Yeah, their coverage is sometimes kind of shitty. But every news organisation is beholden to their audience and their owner. If Vice actually did publish lies all the time then their reputation would tank and they'd stop getting clicks.
The free market connection to honest journalism is a tenuous one, but it exists.
Also they do tell blatant falsehoods, intentional or no. Americans care much less than they say.
Almost as absurd as the fact that yours is a brand new account created specifically to comment on this story. I'm sure it's just coincidental though...
Also I'm curious, why was it this story in particular that inspired you to sign up for an account on Hacker News?
look at his syntax. he's using the right single quotation mark char (’) instead of a plain apostrophe: that's because he's not typing, he's copying the predefined chunks of text from some approved document aka the fresh methodichka (методичка).
Journalism in USA is totalitarian. There may be two points of view, but they differ so little as to be indistinguishable to anyone whose intellect isn't constantly gaslighted by the overwhelming ideological conformity. The journalism to which we are subjected is still propaganda, because after all a journalist has to stay in the club in order to work, and he does that by parroting the bullshit the insiders tell him. Nobody steps outside the lines and stays on the air.
A great place to get reporting without the approved USA right-thinking is foreign state media. I actually prefer Al Jazeera to RT, but I'm under no illusions: after they shut down RT, AJ is next, soon to be followed by BBC.
Have you ever taken a week to mostly watch Al Jazeera or BBC or France 24 or CGTN or even RT? If you did, you might reconsider the blind certainty you evince here. This is one reason it's good to live overseas for a time: the corporate-state-approved media can't get you there, mostly.
Some differences:
- Governments have far more power and resources to skew the narrative.
- Governments are less accountable than any private individual or organization. Organizations are at least accountable to shareholders, the rule of law, and the government they operate under.
- Domestic organizations are at least ostensibly committed to maintaining the system, many foreign governments literally want to tear the system down.
- Governments have a historical track-record of tyranny, and have generally caused more harm than private organizations.
s/Government have/Google has/g
> Governments are less accountable than any private individual or organization. Organizations are at least accountable to shareholders, the rule of law, and the government they operate under.
Again s/Governments/Organizations/g
> - Domestic organizations are at least ostensibly committed to maintaining the system, many foreign governments literally want to tear the system down.
Based upon what? Is that any justification for propaganda? Both Facebook and Google are both domestic entities and look at all of the polarization and discord that they have caused this election cycle.
> - Governments have a historical track-record of tyranny, and have generally caused more harm than private organizations.
In this era, the source of tyranny is private corporations that grant themselves monopolies with red tape and further regulations that make competition impossible. I guess based upon your arguments, we should grant private corporations a monopoly on speech.
RT is not only owned by a foreign state but is specifically owned by a state which attempted to deceptively influence Google's home country's elections, partially with the help of RT. RT is undoubtedly Russian propaganda and can't be anything else; anyone at RT who genuinely wants to provide a view that isn't uniformly pro-Russian risks retaliation from the government.
If the scenarios were flipped and Voice of America were peddling propaganda to influence Russia's next election (which they probably actually are doing), Yandex would have a pretty valid reason to lower the rankings of Voice of America stories.
I'm not sure the impact so much matters as the intent. Even if it wasn't really a big threat, and even if Trump would've won without any sort of interference (which probably is the case, but it is and will be impossible to truly know), the fact that they did it at all shows they're trying to game the system, partly by gaming Google. Google is now going to make it harder to game.
It is a bad precedent to de-rank results in this way, but I think this is a special circumstance. I agree that a better approach would be to provide warnings and context rather than merely trying to push things down.
I think some of the election-related stuff is mostly politicization. If you follow some of the hearings on the subject of Russian propaganda (cspan has some) it seemed more that they were targeting and prodding cultural divisions.
Organizing anti-immigration rallies at the same time and location as Muslim rallies and pushing racial and cultural divides. It seems like their focus is to polarize people and try to promote extremism.
But I don't believe that Vice has quite the divisive and disruptive agenda that these state sponsored propaganda bullhorns have.