Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.

The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.

View on HN

But is it equally unjustified?

I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there:

* If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it.

* If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning.

* If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it)

The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.

I think it is equally unjustified.

If people tended to do their due diligence about sources, then fake news wouldn't be a problem, and verifiably false and incredulous memes wouldn't have any social or political influence. But they do, because people mistake cynicism for intellectual rigor, and don't believe they need to check the sources for the alternative media, because it's enough to simply mistrust the mainstream and assume the alternative is probably correct, provided the story it tells is sufficiently cynical. As a result, any valid alternative criticisms by the alternative media are just drowned out by the racists and crackpots going on about QAnon and gay frogs.

Perhaps a lack of providing direct links to credible sources is a problem for the mainstream media, but that doesn't necessarily justify an implication that the mainstream media does so in order to protect attempts to mislead people with false information, and that, therefore, the degree of falsehood is on par between the mainstream and alternative media.

The alternative media, meanwhile, often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so. And voicing any opposition to the alternative narrative just gets you called a tool of the establishment, leading to exactly the sort of echo chamber mentality that it tends to criticize elsewhere.

I think breaking things down into "alternative" and "mainstream" is not productive. I see no particular reason to come in with an a priori assumption that the mainstream media should be given a default presumption of truthfulness until proven otherwise, and the alternative media should be presumed false unless proved otherwise. To me, they're all in the same category to start with, and each media source starts presumed false unless they prove themselves worthy of trust.

I mean, seriously... why should they be given a default presumption of truthfulness? Because they were... there? Because they were so honest before? But how do you know that? You can't just the honesty of a source if it's effectively the only source you have. (And in practice, despite there being "three news networks", they seem to have been the same source in practice. I can only remember minor sniping between the various sources every once in a while.) Why default to trusting them? I'd say it's basically just the availability heuristic at play, in a way. It's easy to see the availability of effectively a single source, and approximate that to honestly, but you have no rational basis to make that approximation.

If anything, after decades of fairly unquestioned and monolithic dominance, the simple heuristic of "unchecked power corrupts" suggests that the mainstream media is virtually 100% likely to be deeply corrupt. I find the idea that the media was allowed to operate in a state of highly ethical reporting for decades and it simply never occurred to any commercial, governmental, or intelligence entity that "Gee, golly, it sure would be useful to exert a lot of control over that" to be an idea that requires a degree of trust in commercial, governmental, and intelligence entities that I can find only marginal evidence in favor of and significant evidence against.

The media often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so, all the time.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue here. Your bullet points are equally applicable to "alternative" media outlets and "mainstream" media do often link out to government reports, sources, etc in their articles.

Maybe we're consuming different sets of MSM and alternative sources, but my experience is not only that they are not equally applicable, but that your suggestion that they are is completely ludicrous.

95%+ of MSM articles I read that reference an external document do not link to it. MSM articles are usually littered with links, but they're internal links to lists of other articles by the same MSM outlet about the topic. Meanwhile, the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration - is basically unimaginable to me; I've never seen it happen as far as I can recall.

> the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration

This is literally what Alex Jones does.

Does InfoWars count as "alternative media"? I mean, it's clearly not "mainstream", but the format - the medium - is no different to a mainstream news show. I wouldn't've thought it fell into either of the two categories we're discussing.

Yes, but while the Internet has resulted in more propaganda, it has also resulted in more opportunities for clarification and other sides of the story to at least be available. Your story may not make it through the FANG gauntlet of algorithms and, as such, a mass audience may not see it, but it feels to me like alternative angles are way more available now than they were in the 90's and before.

After two years of Russiagate this claim is hard to swallow. I seek out alternative news specifically because the mainstream is full of shit.

We have a lot of fun (\s) in Germany right now:

A youtuber named Rezo ja lol ey made a video shortly before the elections (European and regional parliaments) about how one of the biggest parties CDU (and also SPD), the ones in the government for many many years now (Merkel's party), have been acting differently from what they said they'd do, and how they're massively messing up on climate action. He calls for viewers not to vote for them, (and of course not AfD, alternative for Germany, a newish right-wing party who denies climate change - their youth organization is starting to challenge that) and to vote for people with a better climate agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ (destruction of the CDU)

This video blew up very fast, and had a few million views before the elections (now at almost 14 million, Germany has 83 million inhabitants). The CDU actually made a response video but didn't publish it, and then published a 11-pages pdf. There was a support video of 70 more German youtubers too.

https://www.cdu.de/sites/default/files/media/dokumente/wie-w...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpg84NjCr9c

In the elections, both CDU and SPD lost a lot of votes, and the green party gained a lot. Some of the discussions and statements in the more official media are.. interesting.

Some CDU politicians seem to think that this video is the reason for their losses, and not their policies or the way they treated the young voters before (protests against internet upload filters on EU level have been called 'paid for', marginalized or laughed at, they tell the Fridays for Future protesters to go back to school and leave the climate to the pros etc).

Main CDU figures have mentioned Russian disinformation campaigns, said to review the guidelines for publishing ('If 70 publishing companies would have said not to vote for CDU, what then?'), said that the Green party had profited from a shift in public fear of climate change from terror and security etc. Now they're trying to set up a conversation with Rezo, offline. It's all quite weird.

> The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.

Being able to control the flow of information is much more powerful than being able to buy bots. When information was monopolized by a few outlets, those outlets had tremendous power and they did abuse it. Infamously, the New York Times denied the widespread famine in the USSR during the 30s and mass starvation of Ukrainians, now considered an act of genocide by many countries (most estimates ranging from 3-5 million Ukrainians starved). This sort of thing cannot happen in today's connected world. If millions of people are starving, YouTube video after YouTube video of dead people littering the streets would be posted to call out the deniers on their falsehood (provided the victims had internet access). But the 1930s was before the internet, and the world just had to take the word of reporters. The NYT author that denied the starvation won the Pulitzer prize for his false reporting.

> The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.

I don't think there's much basis for this claim. I think that the internet makes stupid people that believe in falsehoods much more prominent and and easier to find. Florida's reputation for being a crazy state is analogous to this. Florida police are required by law to publish all arrest reports, which makes crazy stories easy to find and publish. The internet essentially does that for the ignorant and stupid. I'm willing to bet that despite increased anxiety over people being led to falsehood, actual belief in falsehood is either the same or declining.

I think you're also misrepresenting the situation when you say that trust in mainstream media is being replaced by trust in alternative media. Do you earnest think that people trust the average YouTube video more than mainstream media outlets? I think that's an important factor at play here: much of the alternative media is well aware of the fact that can't rely on trust to get people to listen to believe them, and so they have to back up their claims with solid evidence if they want to be trusted. Those YouTube channels I consider reputable are very cautious about only making claims that they can back up with evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com