Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You just have to approach it all critically.
It's not like the US media hasn't been successfully spreading it's own global propaganda for ages.
An end to the US's media/academic monopoly on truth-setting is a very welcome change. We need real competition here.
I will trust the one that has codified free speech - however flawed.
It's never clear if people doing the whatabouting actually dispute the negative characterization of China, or whether they agree with it but also want to change the subject to a broader topic in way the unfocuses the lense of the conversation.
The moral condemnation of what China is doing is not information I want to be lost from the conversation, and that seems to always be an effect of the whatabouting.
For-profit channels distribute profitable ideas. Profitsble ideas have mass appeal. Unsurprising.
However, there are no social pressure to write for the mainstream (beyond the practical constraints of our capitalist society). Social media has empowered counter-culture narratives toward both good and bad ends.
Go criticize the state in China and compare your experience with the US - guess which state will "fail"
Americans criticize countries singing anthems and making military parades and all that stuff, while seemingly completely unaware of Mt. Rushmore, anthems and jets in sports games, etc.
I would say the proper reaction to bullshit is critical thinking. Take someone like James Randi, and imagine instead of disproving deceptions he had just pretended to receive a message from spirits that this or that person was faking something. That's "competition" alright, but it's not helping, and it just helps normalizes something that has greater potential for abuse than use.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/...
http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/04/randis-involvem...
The result of this system is not truth.
The result of this system is propaganda successful disguised as objectivity...
which is exactly what you need in order to effectively manipulate a democracy.
Yes, and it makes it all the more damning, because it kinda shows we know how logic works, what standards or principles are, but for "social reasons" we can suspend that.
> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. [..] Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
-- George Orwell
This now split up into more echo chambers, little "orthodoxies", but the sum of that is not truth either.
I think it's just the world responding with a higher profile countermeasure to a systemic problem that could be handled more 'naturally' but isn't.
The good news is that there are many opportunities in the U.S. and West: The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Nation, Mother Jones, Common Dreams, Tom Paine, Democracy Now, and many more. The Guardian generally supports those positions too; Le Monde does, last I knew, as well as Der Spiegel. You could read that kind of thing all day and never run out of content.
There are unfortunately very few leftist outlets right now of any real quality. WSWS, Evonomics, and Current Affairs are among the few exceptions.
Which ones?
Some of the sources you cited are somewhat to the left, although I would characterize most of them as progressive left and not "leftist," which to me implies something like democratic socialism, syndicalism, libertarian socialism, or something even farther left. (That said, The Nation does have a front page article up from Chomsky! Good on them.)
After 2016, I noticed that many progressive outlets spent some time dipping their toes into neoliberalism -- lots of subtly pro-capitalist and pro-interventionist pieces, basically cheerleading the pre-2016 global order -- and as a result I tuned out from most of them. This may have changed? I revisited some of the names you mentioned and I don't see it so strongly anymore.
Regarding what the article is referring to, things like the Washington Post allowing China to buy ads or China funding lobbyists who speak to congressman who likely have no idea, I can't see anybody justifying that, unless they hate the US, which okay, that's your prerogative.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the average person is at least two orders of magnitude less endowed with information than the people you might speak with on HN, whether or not any of our opinions are correct, so even a tiny bit of propaganda reaching enough people can change minds against the interest of the country.
I think this should've been illegal 50 years ago, and I think the people abetting this should be tried for treason, almost by the very definition.
Their purpose is to pretend to be serious news outlets to amplify various social media phenomena by selectively reporting about them and repeating this over and over again, with the purpose of legitimizing the phenomenae.
The message that comes out is aligned to the goals of the Russian Federation. The messages that are repeated are chosen for political purposes. The point is to not speak to Russians but to the "disgruntled people" of the West. The main idea seems to be to amplify divisions, whatever those may be.
For instance, just look at what is coming now out related to the "Yellow Vests" in France.
These sites are not a channel for presenting facts or a "counterbalance to Western media". They are simpleton propaganda outlets, news theater that is one part of the media influence mechanism that the Russian leadership wields.
The narrative in the prominent articles is always quite predictable: NATO equals bad, USA equals culture imperialism, Europe equals falling apart, Ukrainians equals fascists, Russia the underdog does nothing wrong, and so on.
Once RT starts running articles detailing the corruption in Russia and why there is an opposition movement in the first place (hint: not due to foreign involvement) it might start gaining plausibility as an outlet for high quality fact-based journalism.
In comparison to major US outlets? I get what you're saying, and agree that they place a halo on Russia, but, I would argue instead that you can get a much more holistic view of what is actually happening in the West from RT than what's being sold you to us on a TV screen in the US. From what I've seen, it doesn't look like RT is sparking anything that isn't already brewing and should not be covered.
There are very serious issues and changes brewing in France and all over Europe that OUR media is obscuring and even dismissing.
For one example (of many), regarding the Yellow Vest situation, Paris is on the verge of open revolution, but, up until about a week ago, most of the US outlets, especially the liberal ones (sorry, but it's true), portrayed peace and harmony in France and would mention Macron as some kind of noble visionary in contrast to Trump - not once did I see a mention of how his polling numbers were precipitously dropping to the lowest in modern history, among a myriad of other indicators. That, to me, is propaganda.
The word "division" is thrown a lot now, but conflict is inevitable, and I think the greater sin in our media has been obscuring issues behind a TV screen until things reach a climax.
France24 reported that the number of protesters is slightly down and that the Netherlands have also had peaceful protests.
Times in UK reported that "hundreds of online accounts linked to Russia" were used to fire up the demonstrations. Disinformation and pictures of injured protesters from other events were used to tell a story of brutal French authorities.
Guess what RT and friends bring up in their reporting, and how they present it?
Source: I live in Paris.
In comparison, RT, etc. Is almost rubbing it in people's faces even now that it feels overdone.
Really? How about: Occupy Wall Street, BLM, Anonymous, sovereign citizen/militia groups, pipeline protesters, anti factory farm agitators, union activists, socialists, alt-righters, Antifa, straight up Nazis, Nation of Islam, the list goes on.
I don't agree with the positions of the vast majority of these groups, but I do think that it's important that we understand what they try to do and why they are trying to do it. Existing media outlets (even so-called "alt media") provide grossly distorted views of events associated with these groups, if they report on them at all.
So while Western journalistic outlets may be far from perfect, you have the opportunity with them to get less politically biased information. The best of them are actually quite good at providing factual, less biased information. The same is not true of China and Russia. One tradition offers more truthful and factual reporting than the other (which in reality offers nothing less than full on governmental propaganda... especially in the case of the Chinese media. They provide a counter narrative in the same way that the Saudis have provided a counter narrative to the Khashoggi murder).
You can read a diverse selection of sources and compare their reporting to not only get a more accurate approximation of the truth, but also to notice what various sides focus on. The latter means that even if one side only publishes complete lies, the things they choose to lie about still tell you something.
A bit bizarre, to attempt to legitimize lies and manipulation, but I guess I'm not surprised to see that kind of comment these days.
Authoritarian governments' interest in manipulating foreign audiences is as strong as their interest in manipulating domestic audiences. The article describes massive Chinese investment in it, and Russia's investment in it is well known; as we know, both operate even on the micro-level, such as on social media and in Internet forums. In the comment below I linked to a study that describes it as a massive and effective campaign "political warfare":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18638027
Lies are not a counter-narrative; they don't improve your understanding; they are just lies.
Just recently they published a story[1] that has yet to be verified by anyone else and seems completely made up at this point.
At the same time, they did not have problems with running ads for when MBS was visiting London.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
Related: A study by a leading U.S. defense think tank on intense, active warfare, on the part of China and Russia, in the political realm:
https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering-comp...
The Chinese and Russian governments are currently waging political warfare against the United States and its allies. Although efforts to manipulate public opinion and political debate often receive less attention than armed interventions or military modernization programs, Beijing and Moscow are embarked upon campaigns to suppress dissent, discourage foreign narratives they oppose, generate support for policies they favor, keep their rivals distracted, and mitigate pushback against overt acts of aggression. To date, these efforts appear to be having success.
If anything, Chinese propaganda is both subtle and obvious. Nothing wrong with that really. PR is part of the game for anybody. Just don't pretend they do it at lesser level or not as well than the West.