The NSA, Germany, and journalism | Hacker News Reader

The NSA, Germany, and journalism

buzzmachine.com

101 pointsphreeza23 comments

I am surprised the author did not discuss Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

I believe it accurately predicts mass media's biases in this situation.

The propaganda model says that propaganda is an emergent phenomenon in democratic societies. Similar to how macro ant-colony behavior emerges when individual ants follow simple pheremonal rules --- propaganda emerges when journalists, managers, PR agents, government officials, etc. each optimize for their local objective functions.

The relationships between all the agents in the system are complex, but ultimately, according to the propaganda model, mass media's incentives align with business and government incentives.

>The propaganda model says that propaganda is an emergent phenomenon in democratic societies.

This looks like almost exactly what Hilaire Belloc proposed in his 1918 book "The Free Press."

I just read a review for "The Free Press." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/opinion/18tue4.html

To me it seems like they share some commonalities, but also have significant differences.

Belloc's main thesis seems to be that the Mass Media is "the true governing power in the political machinery of the State, superior to the officials in the State, nominating ministers and dismissing them, imposing policies, and, in general, usurping sovereignty — all this secretly and without responsibility."

I believe Manufacturing Consent somewhat agrees with that thesis, but Manufacturing Consent goes further by explaining how business interests align with mass media and government, and how it results in propaganda.

I haven't read "The Free Press" so perhaps there are greater similarities than what I could glean from the short NYT book review. After all, both "The Free Press" and the Propaganda Model predict that NYT aren't incentivized to give a fair review of "The Free Press."

A micro statistic (in the languages I can somewhat understand):

On which rank is any NSA/Prism?Snowden story currently on the websites, where rank is either "most read" or "most commented"?

sueddeutsche.de: no. 1

lemonde.fr: no. 3

spiegel.de: no.2

nytimes.com

-most emailed: outside of top20 -most blogged: no. 1 -most viewed: outside of top20

washingtonpost.com: outside top5

foxnews.com: outside top5

usatoday.com: outside top5

latimes.com: outside top10

www.telegraph.co.uk

-most viewed: no. 1 -most shared: no. 10 -most commented: outside top10

Dagens Nyheter: no. 6

Berlingske: outside top5

NZZ.ch

-most read: no. 1 -most commented: outside top10 -most recommended: no. 8

Sydney Morning Herald: outside top5

------------------------------

Not really a scientific endeavour, but might provide some additional data points. I should probably do that more systematically when the next story hits. Maybe someone that knows some Eastern European, Asian or South American newspapers could add their data points, then we might be able to identify some trends. It indeed looks like the anglosaxons are more interested in other stuff.

(edit: changed some formatting)

I can confirm this, even my 65 year old mom, who can barely use her iPad to Facebook started talking about this and was worried. And among the people aged Gen-Y, this is a huge and important topic.

Understandably, my worldview is totally skewed: I consume HN, Guardian, and German media.. In my little world, literally every site I visit and person I know talks about NSA/Prism/UK. It is weird feeling, then, visiting other media

Do you not beleive the Germans are in on it?

Do you mean the German government is in on the NSA spying? Certainly, they are in. The BND(1) is currently trying to state that it didn't know anything about the NSA practices _and_ delivered data to the NSA at the same time. So, they are either incompetent or lie to us. Take your pick. And the government is stating every day that everything is known by now, the NSA didn't do anything wrong and we should stop asking so much questions.

(1) The Bundesnachrichtendienst is the German foreign intelligence agency. A mix of NSA/CIA.

If the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung are on it, the Spiegel has to be on it too.

Bildzeitung will try to spin it down, like the chancellor tries to play that topic down. Every incident related to Snowden, NSA, intelligence agencies or the violation of rights in europe will fuel the whole discussion again and again.

If you are somehow in a german nerdsphere, the whole Snowden, NSA affair is really a big topic. Best way to explain is, the older german generation feels betrayed by their former allies and the younger generation is really scared about the impact of global surveillance.

I salute the German public for their awareness. I'm in the country next door (Holland) and most of my fellow men act like it's no big deal. They keep steamrolling new privacy-violating laws. (Today:'Supervision by drones has expanded' Municipalities may soon get the power to use their own drones, TomTom sells traffic/speed data to cops, talks of RFID in licenplates and what not).

It was on the front page of NRC.next (with a two-page spread inside), a morning newspaper here in Holland.

I can't help to feel quite disappointed about the lack of integrity in modern media. It used to be the tool with which governments were torn down with, and ruthlessly skinning the politics to the bone.

Nowadays, it's more of a indirectly controlled propaganda machine, only with an interest in bottom-line profit, and pleasing the people above you.

The HBO tv-series 'The Newsroom' seems incredibly accurate, and relevant to the lacking quality of the media. To the point where i'd wish Will McAvoy was real.

There is no need for conspiracy, if media companies thought they could sell more advertisements you can be goddamn sure they would. They'll print anything to sell papers. The demographic really interested in the details of this are probably not who they are selling ads to.

It really isn't a conspiracy anymore. It's more like a statement of fact. Media in the traditional sense, just pure and simple, isn't what it used to be in more than one way. Maybe it's the people tweeting the news instead of articles that change governements now (not that i'd want that, but meant as in the expression).

I'm pretty certain the watergate scandal would never have ended the way it did, if it happened in 2013. It would just be dusted under the rug, and a retroactive law passed through to legalize the offense.

This story os everywhere BBC, NYT etc. Pretending there is a media blackout undermines credibility.

BBC has been very silent about all this compared to some other UK media.

As long as you define very silent as running stories every other day.

The article forgets to mention it is close to the Bundestagswahl (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_2013), on September 22nd. Some major news outlets confront the german government open in a very aggressive way, especially when it comes to intelligence agencies, and how the chancellor tries to play the problems down.

The freedom of press which is part if the german grundrecht (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law_for_the_Federal_Repub...) would be violated in very harsh way, if something like the guardian story would happen in germany. It adds fuel to the whole discussion how the uk and us treat their citizens and their allies.

Just for the record, the german government disapproves the usage of windows 8 for government usage, and has approved bitcoin as an currency-derivative.

And the moment you enter the world of main stream media. This topic vanish into thin air and does not exist at all.

As many respectable people said so far all western countries are in a post democratic state.

A different, very cynic approach would be that germany had a history of involving journalism into politics and the uk and the us trying to have it exactly that way nowadays.

Germany achieved it once with Gleichschaltung (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung) and the us seem to achieve similar results with it's 9/11 nationalism and advertising.

Edward Bernays wasn't paid for nothing!

Contemporary society is a mess because we institutionalized the legitimacy of a voice in the form of for-profit journalists. Has anyone considered how long the journalist career has existed in its recent history form?

Before Guttenberg did we have for-profit journalists? I will indulge semantics here, but I suspect no one will argue that organized society existed for a long time before we delegitimized the primary sources of information--the person a journalist investigates--to legitimize professional secondary and tertiary sources of information(aka journalists).

In other words, complaining about the evolution of public information dissemination is utterly fruitless as it isn't actionable. I've made the bet that most career journalists are already marginalized and that the common person is and will continue to marginalize the career journalist and the institutions that legitimize them.

Primary sources disseminating public information if the future.

You are the journalist now!

s/journalist/editor/g

The individual certainly takes on more of those responsibilities today, but the community has a lot of input on the process that they didn't have before.

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