just take a look at OAN

who are like heroin addicts on OAN.

The vitriol and absolute intransigence about the shit they are getting fed there is next level.

the sooner americans realize that the sooner we'll come arround to realizing talk radio is not only the main culprit here, it is only effective because we ignore it. it is also the easiest to destroy.

there are political alternatives to fox a click away - in 40 states with 80 senators rw talk radio is the only free easy alt for politics while driving or working or doing chores. the've had a well protected monopoly for 30 years, starting well before fox

fox cannot be locally coordinated

fox cannot be anywhere near as racist, or outrageous - and it has to pretend to be 'fair and balanced' with occasional dissenting opinions

it is a lot easier to sound certain and sell lies to authoritarians when you don't have to look into the camera. that is why liberals look at fox once in aa while and can't believe they can convince so many people to be fucking idioits - it's not fox. when the fox blockheads and blonde perms get up there they know or feel the bullshit has already been or will soon be pounded into the earholes of 50 mil a week by a few hundred lying idiots and putin tools from 1500 coordinated radio stations all across the country - without challenge or correction

and all americans have to do is convince the ad industry that boycotts and blame is coming at the advertisers and universities that sponsored and endorsed 3 months of covid denial and the death and economic disaster that denial is causing. the ad industry is already facing having to replace a dying limbaugh - the guy the whole talk radio monopoly was built around. when they have to preemptively start asking their clients if they really support trump etc they know they're going to lose a lot od clients. instead they can use limbaugh's impending death as an excuse to force democratization of talk radio. 600 of our loudest stations depend on limbaugh and they can't replace him, and they want those ears.

that will destroy it as a propaganda operation and most of the rest of the RW media will fall apart with it

They willingly made themselves into cultists and they deserve nothing but scorn. Those idiots can go fuck themselves.

We're long past the point where compassion requires us to treat them as victims. They are now accomplices in Trump's ongoing crimes against humanity, and they represent a real and actual threat to public safety.

As long as they remain a threat, then they should be treated as a threat and nothing else. Once they step away and renounce their bullshit cult, then they are entitled to compassion.


It is an abomination to require the victim of an assault to show compassion for the attacker during the assault, and that's where we are right now.


Fuck them.


And, as always, fuck my lurking stalkers from the various Konservative circle-jerk cesspit forums.

I feel smothered.

I'm amazed every day at the abundance of Trump signs, often displayed on dilapidated shit-shack homes in really run-down neighborhoods in really run-down communities.

I truly don't understand what these people are thinking. Do they imagine that Trump gives a shit about them? Or that his disastrous, murderous policies won't harm them?

Those fuckers, including the lurking fuckers I mentioned before, like to pretend that they're brave, free-minded champions of liberty, but they're actually just leading themselves to the slaughter, and they love Trump for slaughtering them.


Like I said, fuck them.

has been lying to them for four decades too. Reagan started it by dropping the Fairness Doctrine, lying and demonizing those on foods stamps and welfare. Just try to think of one piece of legislation or policy in the last forty years that the GOP has proposed or backed that benefits citizens rather than the wealthy or corporations first and foremost. We are just an after thought to them. Way, way after actually.

These people have had access to the same information that you and I have, yet they chose to embrace the pleasing bullshit spewing from the mouth of Republican propagandists because it flattered their ignorance and validated their various bigotries.

It's not as though they were strapped to a chair and forcibly indoctrinated; these people could have rejected the kool-aid at any time but opted instead to mainline it.

Yes, of course, there are some who were raised in an environment that didn't encourage them to look beyond what their parents (or the like) told them, but too fucking bad. Except in truly insular communities, the "I had no way to know" defense is now simply laughable, and anyone who remains in the Republican cult does so of their own choice.

Fuck them.

we can't stop the slid into whatever horribleness we are headed toward until this country WTF up to the fact that 40% of the country is beyond any reasoning with, that their opinions should automatically be disregarded in regard to political and policy discussions.

Trump will use his Trump trash followers up to maintain power and enriched himself.

who are secondary and tertiary recipients of the national ubiquitous constant buzz from 1500 radio stations.

there were a lot of too busy and apathetic idiots who didn't vote for hillary because they got that buzz for years and absorbed it, but they're not hard core

and in many parts of the US there are no feee easy alternatives for politics while driving, working, doing chores

they just need to see its challenged directly instead of it being ignored and that putin has been using limbaugh /talk radio for at least a decade - the dem party, progressive groups, and media need to pull their ear buds out of theirears

People have been optimistically citing these "non-hardcore" Republicans who nevertheless consistently manage to vote Republican. Or they refer to the imaginary "independents" who manage to pull the red lever at every opportunity.

Fuck. Them.

Yes, yes, yes. There are indeed some "non-hardcores" who might vote Dem, just as there are some "independents" who'll go Blue, but these are isolated cases and few enough that I can't be bothered to fuck with them.

If they can't get their heads out of their asses and reject Republican bullshit for what it is, it won't be because I told them to go fuck themselves; it'll be because they like the Republican bullshit.

Those "non-hardcore" Republicans and imaginary "independents" can't escape responsibility for their 2016 Trump vote with a blushing mea culpa now. Those fuckers are what put us here, and they're as much at fault as the idiot Republican cultists.

They're more at fault, actually, because they can't even claim that they were drunk on the kool-aid. With nominally functional minds they said "sure, Trump is a racist, sexist, homophobic piece of shit with a vile history of misogyny and a fondness for mocking the disabled, but he's the man I want in the White House."

Fuck every piece of shit who voted for Trump. Fuck them for the rest of their lives.

And if they pretend to have turned from Republican zealotry only to vote red again later, then fuck them twice as hard.

part of the electorate is not immovable. they shouldn't be pandered to like a lot of moderate dems want and the party shouldn't move right to include them. but they are not a given for trump. this pandemic will change some minds but a lot of republicans are operating in an alternate reality merely because we let a few hundred coordinated carnival barkers on 1500 radio stations create it - we don't challenge it, we ignore the source

they wouldn't even be close if we started polling for it, factoring it in, and destroyed that advantage. when that alternative reality is exposed as coming out of limbaugh's ass and some of it from putin it will fall apart for a lot of them.

Is just as much to blame, imo.

24/7 advertising will do that to you. The idea that we are citizens who enjoy rights paid for with an equal burden of responsibilities has been replaced with the idea that we should always look to maximize our personal benefits and minimize our personal costs. Taxes, laws, and regulations are all viewed as costs to be avoided and met with resentment whenever they benefit other people.

Trump was proposing to cnange libel laws so he could threaten newspapers and cable news networks that dared to criticize him.

Who makes the decision in your scenario, and how does freedom of the press enter into it? Any OPED page is going to have opinions that offend someone, and someone will call it "fake news." If you are going to threaten FoxNews with censorship for any reason, you are going to have to apply that same threat to the DNN, NYT and WAPO. Which is exactly what Trump tried to do to intimidate them.

Trump campaign sues CNN over 'false reporting' in op-ed
Campaign also filed lawsuits against the Washington Post and the New York Times recently over op-eds on Russian interference

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/mar/06/donald-trump-campaign-cnn-lawsuit-russia-election

That's the problem with rights - you also have to extend them to those you hate.

There are those here on DU who refer to any of news media that doesn't reflect well on their candidate or publishes a fact check that finds their candidate's statements as less than accurate as attempting a "corporate hit job" on their candidate.

So, again - who decides what "propaganda" is, and how does one "prevent" it in a society where freedom of the press is a pillar of our society?

and how to distinguish between facts and fiction.

There is no honest discussion with conservatives.

None.

Decades of being brainwashed to think that their is some epic battle against the evil liberal boogyman has programmed them to believe that anything they say and do, lie, make shit up, completely contradict themselves, etc., is totally justified and righteous.

Until this country makes that sober assessment and acts accordingly, we are fucked.

If you are referring to freedom of speech applying to everyone, so long as libel, threats and attempting to incite violence is not involved, that won't change. Trump attempting to silence the press with threats of libel lawsuits against any entity that publishes anything that contradicts his statements is another side of that coin, and didn't succeed.

Is that what you mean by "we are fucked?"'

What enforcement mechanism do we have in a democracy, with the first amendment, to ensure that, as the OP put it "Cable news not be allowed..."

Makes me sick. I get so frustrated when people do it I wanna punch them in the mouth. But punching out assholes does not a debate make. It still makes me want to kick them in the genitalia,so I just imagine doing it to ease the viseral disgust I feel about bothsiderism.

since Cosmocat went silent when I asked.

Anyone was deliberately promoting it but I meant to say bothsiderism irritates the fuck out of me. I was sympathizing with people that also find bothsiderism bothersome.

Before I replied I got a call from my aunt and she is dancing with bothsiderism. I hope ultimately she uses her brain,what's left of it and goes blue. I don't talk to her often. When I do I try my best to get her to understand, why voting blue is the thing that will help this country,but if she won't she won't.

If she doesn't wake up and smell the bullshit by October she will be dead to me. She was totally different when I was young. That's what makes it painful. I came on DU to be around sane people..And that no doubt made me react in this thread.

Any statements that have no basis in easily verifiable fact from multiple sources should be considered propaganda. From any medium.

Fact check sites:

Climate Feedback, which is dedicated to fact-checking media coverage of climate change.[88]

FactCheck.org and FactCheckEd.org: self-described "advocates for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics," and serving as an educational resource for high school teachers and students, respectively (the latter founded 2005). They are projects of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and are funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Fact Checker (The Washington Post):[89] A project of The Washington Post, known for grading politicians on the factual accuracy of their statements with zero to four "Pinocchios."[90]

Media Bias/Fact Check is a web site that rates factual accuracy and political bias in news media. The site classifies media sources on a political bias spectrum, as well as on the accuracy of their factual reporting.

PolitiFact:[94] A service of the Tampa Bay Times - Created August 2007, uses the "Truth-o-Meter" to rank the amount of truth in public persons' statements. 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner.

Snopes focuses on, but is not limited to, validating and debunking urban legends and other stories in American popular culture.

RealClearPolitics's Fact Check Review aspires to offer quaternary-level critiquing of such tertiary-level efforts at fact-checking as those listed above. Within its inaugural review item on April 9, 2018, RCP writer Kalev Leetaru said its efforts at "checking the fact checkers" were to "explore how the flagship fact-checking organizations operate in practice (as opposed to their self-reported descriptions), from their claim and verification sourcing to their topical focus to just what constitutes a 'fact.'"[95] Leetaru is a Georgetown University fellow in residence, holding the chair established there for study and promotion of "international values, communications technology and the global Internet."[96]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking

Rachel Maddow's commentary, as well as any editorial on a candidate, including those that speculate on the POTUS' mental health could fall under that definition of propaganda. Where does analysis fall in your definition?

I have seen, right here on DU, those on the left excoriating an analysis by the Urban Institute of the Sanders' 2016 Medicare For All proposal as "big-pharma funded propaganda," when it found that the numbers that Senator Sanders presented didn't mesh with their projections and understanding of the costs, and that it would disrupt health care delivery more than the proposal stated it would. Does that mean that the proposal is propaganda? Does that mean the analysis of the proposal is propaganda? Where does non-partisan expert analysis of a politician's statements fall in that definition?

I have heard right here on DU that any fact checking of certain candidates by the free, legitimate press that didn't simply support that candidate's statements was a "corporatist hit piece," and/or "DNC propaganda" and the candidate started their own media channels so that their supporters could bypass the "corporate owned media," that was both "ignoring" the candidate, and "publishing hit pieces" on the candidate.

"Easily verifiable" doesn't mean that people will accept that something has been verified as false, and I have heard those on the left and right call the very sources that you listed "biased" and "unreliable" when they don't support their own confirmation bias. Politcians other than Trump have attacked fact checkers who found their statements to be factually inaccurate as "attacks." Are those politicians then guilty of "propaganda?" Are all public figures who double down after being fact checked guilty of "propaganda?"

And what do you think of the OP saying that "Cable news organizations should not be allowed to knowingly spread propaganda." How does one "not allow" it? Especially when headlines can put a particular spin on facts, but still be factually correct.

Journalism is not simply being a stenographer. Journalism applies judgement, context and followup, and your definition leaves that open to the definition of propaganda.

Calling something an "attack" is PR opinion, obviously.

You:

Me: Hearsay, or even consensus of opinion never equals the the validity and reliability of fact-based opinion. So no, some public figures are mistaken. If they're honest, they correct themselves when corrected by facts. If they're not, they're pandering to a particular audience, and guilty of propaganda.

Or what are fact and science good for. Doubt about facts is part of science, and so it's self correcting by its very replication. So is fact-checking about public issues.

Some public figures are grownups, some are adults. People who are adults commit to the truth of fact-based knowledge and live their lives accordingly. Adults know the difference between adults and grownups. Grownups don't. here are very real maturity, judgment and character differences between the two.

Too many people confuse the two.

So, you would call these pushbacks against fact checking "propaganda" on the part of a politician?

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/426961-wapo-fact-checker-fires-back-at-ocasio-cortez-criticism-over-rating-shes-wrong

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/11/democrats-fact-checking-1489135

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/video-medicare-for-all-claims/

What you call "Pushbacks" are part of the back-and-forth of arguments between politicians whose aim is ego point scoring and building one's credibility off the mistakes of others.

That media report these arguments can either confirm people's biases for either side, or get people to weigh the facts along with each side's record of credibility and truth telling.

We can argue all day about which kind of dishonest or stupid arguments are propaganda or political ego showmanship, but I'd say that repetitions and patterns of
character attack,
party attack,
longstanding labeling attacks (like "hoax" and "lock her up" ) that foment and maintain hostility and divisiveness much like the obvious presidential attacks across an "enemy" spectrum, do approach the threshhold of propaganda.

There's also the doubt machine propaganda that erodes public interest in politics altogether, like "both siderism," "what ifism," and "all-or-nothingism."

When discourse is taken as a whole, one needs to look at historical records of which side has better served Americans' interests. It's factually out there.

No, I wouldn't call what you link propaganda, no. It doesn't block or shut down discourse.

I'd just like to add something that the public can see outside media muddying of public discourse...

While there are Republicans who disguise themselves as Democrats in elections, Republicans haven't been able to disguise themselves as Democrats in public discourse, which is why so many Republicans have recently shown they just cannot live with the propaganda they've seen from their party.

And so the public has seen them come over to the truth telling side of the Democratic Party.

we can also boycott the ever loving fuck out of those that promote hate...AND tear local radio stations that have fed our communities nothing but racism and hatred for 40 years apart... BRICK BY BRICK!

You can extend rights and still fight propaganda.

Last edited Mon May 18, 2020, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)

That's very, very different from a boycott. That implies enforcement of some kind.

believe me, there are plenty on the right who will gladly define "propaganda" if allowed to. And thats what would happen if this started

nm

Now more than ever.

One was the propaganda in our MSM. It is not just Fox and RW radio. Our media are controlled by their big advertisers. Case in point would be the McDonald's coffee case. Ms. Liebeck was painted as a money grubbing filer of a frivolous lawsuit instead of the truth being reported about McDonalds raising the coffee temperature to just below boiling to get more coffee per bean and keep it fresher longer. They settled confidentially with numerous other burn victims which came out in the trial but was never reported. The BP oil spill was another where news outlets were threatened with loss of oil industry ads if they reported the victim's stories.

Big business has the leverage over the media, and unlike the days of Walter Cronkite, the advertising department is not separated from the news department.

The other root cause is campaign finance. Our politicians represent big Donors, not the American people (unless you subscribe to the BS that "...corporations are people too my friend!&quot . The powers that be have followed through on the Justice Powell memo which was a call to arms for corporations to exert political power. There is a reason we have had two corporate bailouts in 10 years but nothing for the American people.

Big money owns MSM.

Big money dominates campaign financing.

at the federal level, it wouldn't be health care, taxes, or the social safety net. The very first thing I would change would be to overturn Citizens United and put in place airtight legislation to get big corporate (and anonymous) money out of politics. If I were allowed to proceed with another item, it would be to bring back the fairness doctrine.

Once these first two items are in place, the other big items, such as health care, taxes, social programs etc., would seem to be much easier to debate and ultimately make legislative changes.

Cut off the pipeline of money and propaganda, and then maybe we can have some intelligent discussions and pass legislation that the majority of the general public really want.

Oh well, one can only dream …

that if Joe Biden is elected President all republicans will be tortured, raped and murdered by the Democrats. I know that sounds extreme and i wouldn't endorse it but Fox News would run with this rumor.

Threatening those people with a rumour like that and see how it turns out.

Oh, my do I agree with this. Every news broadcaster should be diligent in ONLY telling the truth and fined if they don't!!

They are convinced that the only way to avoid "Becoming Venezuela" is to keep moving farther to the right.

I notice that they don't use North Korea as an example anymore. I wonder why.

In the case of your example, the people had virtually no access to critical points of view. Secret police networks violently suppressed any and all dissenting opinions.

Today people have access to critical information, so it's more a matter of willful ignorance.

They figured things out. They figured out maybe I should listen to the American soldiers who are telling me we will be treated well, instead of throwing my kids off a cliff.

Such people will believe literally anything. They are usually religious.

And you know damn well a GOP administration with the power to do it would certainly ban whatever they considered "propaganda"

Under the guise of defegulation. Time to bring it back.

I say our education system is failing because it fails to teach critical thinking skills.

If the vast majority of our population had good critical thinking skills they would know how to evaluate information & identify facts, opinions, & propaganda. They would recognize propaganda for what it is & not be blindly taken in by it & manipulated by it.

Our education system (through high school) is too focused on a "believe what you're told" approach where conclusions are presented, as opposed to an approach where information is presented & critical thinking is required to reach the conclusion.

So these millions of folks are trained to believe what they're told without thinking critically about it & evaluating the information, & they grow up to turn on Fox, or OAN, or the radio etc & they believe what they're told without thinking critically about it & evaluating the information.

Until we fundamentally change that we will continue to have a society where far too many people are willing & eager victims of propaganda.

Organizations.

Of course they call it “fake news”, or “BS to make trump look bad”, but the opinions of it all are the same (but opposite).

Boycott of advertisers, time?