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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

The government can't keep their own secrets contained most of the time. They are not controlling the media. That is beyond silly to even suggest.

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Go watch CNN for an entire day and write down how many times Yemen or Palestine is mentioned compared with Ukraine. Come up with your own hypothesis about why this is. It's more complicated than just "government control", but thankfully people have been thinking about this for a while. You've probably heard of the book Manufacturing Consent which goes into all the structural incentives at play in the media which lead us here.

I both read and watch news heavily, including both US news and international outlets.

No, that comparison doesn't come up literally ever that I've heard from. I do recall several anti-war pieces in NY Times and others encouraging us to not back Ukraine, the usual war hawk pieces suggesting to escalate, and a bunch of poorly written stories that rehashed weeks old tweets.

As the joke goes there are two kinds of people: those who believe in conspiracies and those who have actually interacted with the government.

The closest you might get is something like Journolist which was Ezra Klein trying to convince other news heads to parrot his takes - which is a disgrace, but not some secret conspiracy.

The point of analyzing structural incentives is that you don't need a conspiracy. Everyone involved actually believes they are fully and truthfully discharging their duties and fighting the good fight. None of them are walking around plotting how to pull the wool over the public's eyes. They wouldn't be hired if they believed otherwise; there's a famous clip of Chomsky making this point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBx-37c3c8

Do you believe the media has relatively clear political convictions? The treatment of presidents and parties in the US changes drastically depending on who's in power. It's almost like a joke.

Have you looked into who funds the media and their fact-checking services like PolitiFact (Poynter), and the IFCC? You might be surprised to find it's may of the same groups / people - George Soro's open society, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, Clinton foundation, The Koch foundation (interestingly enough) etc... When the same folks that lobby and buy politicians, own the media and fact-check their own stories, the government doesn't need to "control the media". They're both already being controlled by some people with very deep pockets and substantial political connections.

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