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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

> While it is a serious mistake, as has been said, to overvalue propaganda, it is an equally serious mistake to assume, as some people do, that everything in the newspapers and on the radio, in the movies and magazines, is “propaganda’’—propaganda that is self-seeking, deceitful, or otherwise improperly motivated. This is absurd. ... The journalist of today has a responsibility to report facts as accurately, objectively, and disinterestedly as is humanly possible. The newspaperman who respects himself and his work—the average newspaperman—-accepts this responsibility. The honest, self-disciplined, well-trained reporter seeks to be a propagandist for nothing but the truth.

How the mighty have fallen.

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You seem to have made a mistake, as some people do, to assume that everything in the newspapers and on the radio, in the movies and magazines, is “propaganda

It is. Every news media story in every form and every format is presenting a narrative, possibly crafted by a government, possibly crafted by corporations, or even simply being the result of the biases and politics of the journalist themselves. If that weren't the case, the media would simply recite the cold facts. They don't because their goal is influence, not information. Ergo, propaganda.

OK, maybe not sports and weather. Everything else, though.

It’s not even the just the individual stories. The act of selecting which stories to promote and which ones to publish without fanfare and which to not publish at all is also propaganda.

There doesn't even need to be a nefarious conspiracy involved, just the rational intersection of common interests and capitalist incentives are enough.

had this debate with a family member, when I was pointing out the 'bias' in a particular newspaper - his contention that if the story was true, it couldn't be considered biased - he couldn't quite grasp that choosing (or not choosing) which stories to publish, and how often to report on something is defacto bias.

also, you can propagandize quite well with something that contains no lies. The current discourse conflates "propaganda" with "lie", but of course that's .. well, part of propaganda. The best ways to rile up a mass is to tell them verifiable things, but in selective ways, leaving out context, leaving out history, leaving out ambiguities; it would be hard to claim the information is "wrong" on its face, but it's still wrong simply because of what it leaves out.

Propaganda is just advocacy that we don't like.

Same as "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

It's not exactly a secret that in a post-Trump world, journalists have decreed that they also have a responsibility to protect democracy. If only the Iraq invasion caused within them a similar introspective episode, but for some reason it didn't? Perhaps it would've been different if there were more dead nyt journalists among the 1+ million victims.

Trump is just the 2-minutes-hate target of the day. A multipurpose distraction and negative waifu.

"negative waifu" is genius.

I think the reason Trump caused so much talk about fake news and propaganda is that until him these were only generated and controlled by very powerful organizations (autocratic governments or in free societies the governement, big companies and their media). That an upstart could also start convincingly spreading falsehoods and fear, and move masses was alarming. No longer were the NYT&co or Fox the sole arbiters of how public discourse is framed. Fake news was democratized. We all lose, whether we are being lied to subtly by the NYT and big companies or blatantly by populist upstarts.

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