I’m reminded of the lib I work with and trying to explain to him about the problem with Neonazis in Ukraine and the media whitewashing or ignoring the whole thing; I told him about the Ukrainian ex-minister who was killed the other day, the far right one, and he was shocked that it wasn’t huge news; I told him it’s bad publicity to tell people about such a minister and he still didn’t understand why the media would choose either to not talk about it or to not reveal much about her. A lot of people genuinely don’t understand how media propaganda works (especially if they want to trust the news).
I think that’s a good point and it’s something I run into often. It seems like everyone expects propaganda to be so obvious and clumsy that, when it happens, they’ll be able identify it immediately. But it turns out that what we’re guarding our minds against is anything contrary to our existing world view, not the things we’ve already uncritically accepted. And what we’ve accepted are largely things we’ve observed through the lens of media.
It’s also hard for people to imagine the massive scope of such a conspiracy and how it could be so well organized. It’s easy to explain how media employment bias works in a hierarchy of personal interest, but that system doesn’t work perfectly and it generates a lot of contradictions which I think westerners have conditioned themselves to simply ignore. Even I want to imagine the propaganda machine to be an elegant and cunning device, but the real workhorse seems to just come down to writing “China/Russia/Iran Bad” headlines enough times. Getting past that bias with americans has been the biggest challenge in my experience. It’s pretty depressing.
I’m reminded of the lib I work with and trying to explain to him about the problem with Neonazis in Ukraine and the media whitewashing or ignoring the whole thing; I told him about the Ukrainian ex-minister who was killed the other day, the far right one, and he was shocked that it wasn’t huge news; I told him it’s bad publicity to tell people about such a minister and he still didn’t understand why the media would choose either to not talk about it or to not reveal much about her. A lot of people genuinely don’t understand how media propaganda works (especially if they want to trust the news).
I think that’s a good point and it’s something I run into often. It seems like everyone expects propaganda to be so obvious and clumsy that, when it happens, they’ll be able identify it immediately. But it turns out that what we’re guarding our minds against is anything contrary to our existing world view, not the things we’ve already uncritically accepted. And what we’ve accepted are largely things we’ve observed through the lens of media.
It’s also hard for people to imagine the massive scope of such a conspiracy and how it could be so well organized. It’s easy to explain how media employment bias works in a hierarchy of personal interest, but that system doesn’t work perfectly and it generates a lot of contradictions which I think westerners have conditioned themselves to simply ignore. Even I want to imagine the propaganda machine to be an elegant and cunning device, but the real workhorse seems to just come down to writing “China/Russia/Iran Bad” headlines enough times. Getting past that bias with americans has been the biggest challenge in my experience. It’s pretty depressing.