What sources of news are reliable on the conflict?
I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.
I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.
Moreover propaganda-phobia is bad by itself. It can be a tool of a propaganda.
To teach and inform someone means to broaden their perspective. Without a goal like objectivity, a news story has no value. Why even listen to propaganda, it would not be to your benefit?
I still do like opinion pieces where authors describe their experience because sometimes an objective recapitulation does indeed not tell the whole story. But many modern news articles could use a dosage of detachment. It would improve the craft drastically.
I do not believe that anyone can be objective, because the process of selecting data to publication is a subjective process.
> many modern news articles could use a dosage of detachment. It would improve the craft drastically.
Maybe it would. But I'm reading news not to improve craft, but to keep myself informed. So I read what there is, not what it would be nice to have.
Moreover I believe that if you deem your sources are flawed, it make you better at critical thinking. Or rather it could make you better, if you didn't just turn to "post-truth", but tried to measure flaws and to undo them.
So maybe to impove craft of reporting and make it perfect, is not a good thing. It would mean that you no longer can author your own opinion, you can not practice the art, and you are extremely vulnerable to a manipulation. Though maybe if craft was perfected then it wouldn't be an issue?
Your statement would ultimately be an oxymoron too.
It demonstrates that the very notion of objectivity is flawed. Objectivity is a hyper-simplified model of external validity[1]. It cannot be measured as a boolean variable or by a real number. Neither black-and-white nor shades of gray could help with measuring objectivity. It is much more tricky. It is as tricky as the reality itself.
If someone wants to deal with the data from reality, they need to track all the way from reality to the data they got. Where did it come from and how it was processed. It is the only way, and it has no place for objectivity. I mean all your thoughts will have no references to objectivity, they would deal with ways how data might become biased or falsified on the way from a reality to you.
> There are observations that are more objective than others and those that are plain objective.
Can you give an example of a plain objective statement? I can think of no such statements. 2+2=4? It is a math statement, it is not about reality, it is just a part of definition of an addition.
Or maybe "apple hit Newton on the head"? Is it an objective statement? Did apple bounced and hit him on the shoulder also? Was someone sitting on the tree dropped apple on Newton's head? Was Newton leaning on a trunk of the tree? Did he tried to dodge? How many details were omitted? Who decided that these details are not important enough to report? Was he objective while deciding? How can anyone measure his objectivity?
The only way to explain why this is an objective reporting needs resorting to a beauty of a narrative of a sudden insight induced by a seemingly irrelevant and mundane event. And this narrative "decides" what is important and what is not. Was the choice of this narrative "objective"?
What if we choose a narrative of a God's blessing? Like Descartes did when he invented a coordinate system. If we did then the choice of details to report would be different. And it would be an "objective" reporting also.
Pure data (like numbers in a table) have no narrative, so maybe it is objective? But when we do not know the narrative behind the data, we cannot make inference from the data. So pure objective data is useless.
Everything is subjective. Though there are cases when it doesn't matter. Cases when we do not need to keep an eye on a narrative, on a process of data gathering and processing... But even despite the majority of cases are of this kind, a critical thinker needs to keep an eye on a narrative and on a process of data gathering, because it is his second nature: you never know when this skills will become needed, so the only safe way is to use them constantly. Make them automatic, so you need not to think about it.
Most western media (Murdock/Berlusconi type oligarch media aside) is fairly factual. It doesn't have 'spin' or 'agenda' in the sense that the journalists conspire to mislead (they don't have time for this).
You'll have next to no clue what's happening in middle nor South America, Africa, China, India, the rest of Asia, or the Arab peninsula.
In short: a lot of news nowadays has the agenda of selling itself and takes time to select stories and spin headlines for this. It has become genuinely harder to stay reasonably informed about what's going on in the world.
but on the other hand, there /is/ a «freer circulation of information».
It now has to be managed - the scenario is more complex.
So pardon me for being confused.
Hitler's empire was far greater than just Germany at the beginning of 1945 and he was still sending V-2s to London and Antwerp at the end of March that year.
I am envious of your faith in western media in much the same way I am envious of highly religious people that are certain what happens upon death: seems comfortable and reassuring, but it is likely not true.
I have a hard time believing that anyone can be this naive. We're you paying attention the last two years?
When journalists lied, suppressed and told everyone that Hunter Biden's laptop from hell was 'Russian disinformation" and refused to even investigate whether the claims that it had been verified by people with actual knowledge of Biden's dealings were true, how is that not journalists conspiring to mislead?
Thus all reporting on it was tabloid style sensationalism.
Hunter Biden's businesses dealings are not "U.S. centric" and Hunter Biden is not a celebrity (except maybe in addiction recover centers). They involve allegations that the son of a sitting VP (at the time), who had absolutely no experience in the energy sector, used his father's influence to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in business dealings with Chinese and Ukrainian energy firms. That involves allegations of international corruption. Including having a prosecutor removed who was investigating one of the businesses tied to Hunter Biden (you know, the famous Joe Biden story about how he told Ukraine to fire the prosecutor or they would not receive a billion dollars in U.S. aid).
> "Thus all reporting on it was tabloid style sensationalism."
Except the reporting was not tabloid style sensationalism. It was actual investigative reporting that the media tried to CONVINCE people was "tabloid style sensationalism".
If you'd like to see how the media worked to convince you that the whole story was just "sensationalism", take a look at how the NY Times repeatedly dismissed everything that was being said before the election (when they called the laptop "unsubstantiated"), but then earlier this year (when it could no longer hurt Biden's chances) finally admitted that at least some of the allegations are likely to be true: https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/the-times-finally-admits-hunte...
But my suspicion is, you really wouldn't care in the slightest if Joe and Hunter Biden are actually corrupt.
On YouTube I follow Denys Davydov, a Ukrainian pilot that reports about the war. A few days ago he showed a video of a Ukrainian helicopter flying close over traffic, and he was critiquing how irresponsibly and dangerous that was. He claims to know that road and that is was far from the battlefield. So even him as a Ukrainian is able to try and be as objective as possible.
News can be objective. The claim that western media is full of propaganda is just kremlin propaganda.
This made me chuckle.
In Russia's case, it's pretty clear. They have laws to prohibit free press, jail time for claiming things opposite to the Kremlin.
In some other cases, it's more subtle. In Hungary, Orban's influence on the media is very high, and not healthy for a democracy.
But if you claim that the most objective news sources in the west still show straight-up propaganda, I would love to see some evidence of that. Any evidence, like a journalist that is fired over going against a government. Or laws, or some other influence from the government straight to media companies.
https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2021/08/26/ukraine-pres...
But a few days ago a Turkish minister said over 60% was sold to Europe, so which is it?
5 seconds to enter "Ukraine wheat exports by country" into Google, yielding a USDA page saying: "In 2021, Ukrainian wheat exports were valued at $5.1 billion, with Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as the primary destinations."
Telegraph 1 - Turkish politician 0.
Here's the BBC quoting the UN:
> However, UN figures show that the bulk of Ukrainian food exported in the last three months has been going to Spain, Turkey, Italy, China and Netherlands.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61759692
See why I'm confused?
Mainly through access. If you don't report favorably, your government sources might withdraw. Sources that provide you with exclusive information that you can provide first. There are of course unimaginable other venues to enforce compliance to a certain framing. There is also documentation how this was achieved in the past.
I saw how the press quickly turned people in favor of the Iraq war. It was clear propaganda. You can see the same stuff happening today with different enemies. Yes, Russia is a despotic state, but you are a victim of disinformation as soon as that prevents you to demand accountability at home. Because that would be your job as a citizen of a democratic state and what you can influence.
I've found The Guardian's reporting and FT's analysis to be quite good. They report based on verifiable facts and also claims by both sides, with explicit mentions if there's corroborating sources or not. The Guardian also have a daily "what's new" so that's useful to keep up.
Do you have any specific examples? I can't say that it mirrors my experience but i might have missed something.
However, most Indian journalists call them "right wing."
The Institute for the Study of War aggregates open source intel into daily control of terrain maps. https://twitter.com/thestudyofwar
Thanks.
The complete lack of geopolitical and historical context in the media around this event has really shaken my trust. In the future I'll probably just be heading directly to the history books rather than trying to parse out the missing context from the media
One reason the US and UK come across stoppy (eg "Boris to stop the peace negotiations") is Ukraine used to have nukes and in 1994 the US, UK and Russia signed an agreement for them to give them up in return for the parties to guarantee their borders. If you let Russia just send in tanks, kill a few people and then say lets have a new agreement then what's even the point? If they don't stick to the first one they probably won't stick to the second. And then why even bother with nuclear non proliferation? If the agreements aren't worth the paper they are written on you may as well try to get nukes instead.
It has little to do with the quality of the news, more with the psychosocial mechanisms of any polarized conflict that involves life and death. One may lament it, but only from the outside and at some distance.
As a side note one might wonder if this is not a main purpose of war: to create a polarized environment where dissent becomes impossible.
Putin isn't crazy - he's coldly calculating, and clearly demonstrated his ruthlessness in Chechnya (which the world chose to ignore).
“Residents of Crimea, up to 60% percent of whom are Russian, were given a choice of either joining Russia or opting for more autonomy from Ukraine under the 1992 constitution.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/16/crimea-...
Isn't it suspicious that Ukraine's large, aggressive, well-armed neighbor was somehow involved in the referendum, and then sent in the "green men" to enforce the inevitable results?
And what about the native ethnic Tatars? Russia pretends they don't exist.
However, it's worth mentioning that Eastern Ukraine has also been heavily targeted with Russian propaganda for decades now and it's quite likely that had an impact. I haven't read into it, but I'd be surprised if they didn't also encourage Russians to move to Ukraine to make it more ethnically Russian. This is pretty much in the playbook of every colonizer (e.g. Israel with Palestine, Morocco with SADR, or China with Xinjiang).
I know i'm biased, but first, this is a belief i held in my formative years (that the Russian army was full of violent pigs), and it seems to align the the propaganda i'm seeing now. So perhaps there is some exageration right now, perhaps there was some exagerations 15 years ago, but to me it aligns perfectly.
I also know two ex-special force guys, one who worked in Africa against Wagner, and while Wagner seems to be less rape-happy than the average Russian military guy, massacring and trying to put it on their opponent is their MO. I think i can say it now because Wagner was recently caught and will be more carefull next time, but the French army decided to keep satellite + air surveillance over all their old bases and now put bodycams and surveillance on all sites that can be used to frame them.