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Comment by midasuni | Hacker News Reader

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

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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."

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