No news is neutral. It can’t be. An incident converted into news by someone is always gonna get affected by that someone’s point of view of events. Let me give you an analogy…

A news article by a tiger about another tiger hunting a deer will have a stark difference from the one written by a deer because both have very different point of view of the same event.

It will be attributed to a deer’s mental bankruptcy if he starts believing in tiger’s version of events instead of one of his own’s.

So every news outlet there can be used to manipulate public opinion about things happening around them or in other parts of world by not telling the whole story or the real story. So it comes down to knowing who own/control/protect/fund that very news outlet you are going to get/consume your news from.

Yeah I do agree. As JT from second thought says, we all have biases as human beings, and it’s impossible to escape that. In fact, I think that western news outlets try and hide their biases and portray themselves as the arbiters of truth is actually more biased than admitting where your biases stand.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try and be objective as possible, but what we view as objective will change based off of our biases. For instance, main stream news outlets will almost always report what police say over witnesses, and give them more weight, when police have not shown themselves to be any more trustworthy than the general public (and I would argue have shown themselves to be far less truthful!). This is in part because of (western) media’s bias for the liberal status quo, and also their incentive to have good relationships with the police, so that they get the juicy stories first over their competitors

Before talking about news and propaganda, we need to distinguish between reality and opinion.

Everything we as humans know can be classified under opinion, as we can only observe reality through our senses and form our conclusions based on that. We label different opinions with terms such as truth/fact/law/theory/hypothesis/lie/propaganda/news, and add modifiers such as objective/subjective/biased. The same opinion can have different labels depending on the person judging it. How a person judges an opinion depends on the collective set of opinions the person has received up to that point in time.

As for reality, it is not affected by any opinion, period.

Now that we’ve established the above, we know that news outlets are just organizations which share opinion according to some form of guidelines, this usually means requiring the opinion to be true to most people.

To go further than just news outlets, anything or anyone that shares information/opinion can be called a propaganda machine by someone who opposes the ideology they are based on. An ideology is just a set of opinions considered to be true.

Propaganda is not misinformation, it is “propagation” of an ideology. All news is propaganda, even news you like and agree with.

This is correct, but people generally don’t think of news as propaganda when it matches the prevailing ideology in a society. News from a capitalist perspective would be considered neutral and unbiased, while any socialist slant makes it biased and “propaganda”

All matter of speech is propaganda.

Propaganda is language to convince someone of a new idea or to reinforce an existing idea as valid.

The validity of an idea should be judged based on its dialectical relationship with reality.

We can have a dialectical relationship with reality directly by building things ourselves, but we as social creatures have to rely on other people to get a larger set of hypothesises to work with and create a large model of reality in our minds. This large model is known as a world view.

When information contradicts a person’s world view, they call it propaganda. When it confirms their world view, they call it fact. Information ought to be verified with correspondence with reality but it is difficult for everyone to verify everything that they hear. (some information is impossible to access directly). In the end I personally don’t see all information as completely in the matter of fact and fiction as a bianary, but as a continuum. My dialectical relationship with capitalism in my life and the people I know informs my understanding of how capitalism works as a whole. Other writers like Marx, Lennin, Cockshot etc inform my worldview and I have found the least reason to reject as a whole, making my worldview that of a Marxist Lenninist.

Media outlets are shaped by the outlets funding and editorial decisions. Read Michael Parenti’s “Inventing reality” on more on the particulars of those decisions.

I would make a distinction between bias and propaganda.

Every news outlet and all of their workers have a bias. But to count as propaganda for me they need to have a certain goal what they want people to believe. It is hard to define it exactly, and the biggest players will probably fall under that definition, but not everyone.