Eleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just on One Subject, Just on One Station | Hacker News Reader

Eleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just on One Subject, Just on One Station

racket.news

8 pointsdb48x4 comments

why roast only one TV channel on a Russian-regime disparaging story? a long excuse-filled preface justifies it somehow?

by definition this isn't studying falsehoods in news. its a hit piece one a narrative and one media outlet.

the generalization is that Russian bots don't exist and one station not commonly known for glorifying rumors is full of them. "Nothing [you see] is true but everything [contrary to it] is possible"

if they wanted anything else... they could track dozens of falsehoods on many topics with many tilts.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If you read the article you’ll see that they started out trying to catalog every falsehood on every station, and soon got overwhelmed. To break it into smaller parts, they decided to start with one specific set of lies (those resulting from the Hamilton 68 project) on just one channel. I’ve no doubt that we’ll get more as time goes on.

In the mean time, keyword searches on the Internet Archive are also instructive. For example, if you want to look at what other networks were saying on this topic then y ou can go to <https://archive.org/details/tv?q=%22russian%20bots%22>.

Also, don’t lose sight of the fact that that these lies had a purpose: to vilify and discredit one unpopular person, and by extension a whole political party. Because the Hamilton 68 project was tracking ordinary Twitter users who just by chance happened to mostly belong to one political party (it wasn’t tracking bots at all; everyone at Twitter knew this the whole time, but they declined to tell the truth because it would help that unpopular politician), it allowed the media to discredit any popular topic of conversation within that party as merely “Russian propaganda”.

I go out of my way to limit my exposure to corporate-owned mainstream media outlets. I’ve come to rely more on progressive news sources and independent journalists who a) frame stories from a point of view I can relate to and b) have a solid track record for accuracy and journalistic integrity.

Those criteria rule out everything from MSNBC and the New stork Times, not to mention all the transparently right wing propaganda media outlets.

Yea, we lost a lot when journalists stopped believing in truth above all else. Now ideology is first and truth only matters when it's convenient.

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