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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Good. Russia Today is not a journalistic entity, it is the propaganda arm of Putin's dictatorial regime.

As oppossed to any western mouthpiece (BBC, CNN, ABC, Washington Post, NYT etc)? Every news outlet parrots the opinions of its investors, and even when you think that a report is neutral, the adjectives try to slant the message in a certain direction. By agreeing to censorship, you are disagreeing with the concept of free speech. In the end, if Google becomes more political, it will alienate a demographic, and lose funds. In which universe is this “good”?

> In the end, if Google becomes more political, it will alienate a demographic, and lose funds

This is delusional and ridiculous logic.

Trying to purse the truth in news should not mean alienating a demographic. And frankly a competitor search engine designed to cater purely to them is never going to be successful.

Only the BBC fits, as it is also government controlled. The others may sometimes publish shill articles or whatever but they are not a government run propaganda arm. We don't have such a thing in the US, as NPR has lost almost all of its government funding. The US government runs media operations in other countries but none of our big media companies are government run like RT.

And the fact that we just elected freakin' Trump helps underline the fact that the US is not yet a dictatorial country. So the comparison between Russia Today and any US media is pretty ridiculous on that level as well. Our media has plenty of flaws (answering to corporate sponsors instead of the government has its own drawbacks), but again, they are not comparable to RT.

> Only the BBC fits, as it is also government controlled.

It might be government influenced (in that they have the power to mess with the licence fee) but it's not at all "government controlled".

But one shouldn't fail to see the bigger propaganda of them all. Not country sized, but Multi-National propaganda of which most people have fallen into and fight for. Anything against it is called propaganda.

Exactly. Same multi-national garbage you allude to is routinely regurgitated on evening news in US, Canada, and Japan - all the same message typically (anti-freedom, anti-free speech, anti-health, pro-state, pro-military, pro-pharma). I've never been subjected to evening news from much elsewhere but I imagine the mainstream news of any 'colony' of the Queen and/or US empire tows the line much the same way.

But, you know - we're hackers so we are figuring out the solutions and working to implement them. For every meaningless social ego boosting app startup there is a real entrepreneur building something that will fight against this decadence and help civilization move forward into the brighter more prosperous era we deserve.

It seems to me, that's it's becoming increasingly difficult to call most of these organizations 'journalistic' anymore.

Even the New York Times is suffering from over-politicization. Sad times.

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