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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

On issues regarding the global south (like TFA), The Economist is one of the most noisy and unreliable narrators.

I'd recommend a diverse media diet that complements mainstream Western media (Reuters, AP) with non-Western English mainstream outlets like AJ, SCMP, CGTN, RT, TRT.

State/oligarch controlled media is only harmful if you think it is objective truth and not propaganda. This applies to RT, CGTN but also to Reuters, AP, Wikipedia.

We actually live in a very rich+diverse English-language media landscape, which "reputable", low-signal, vibes-based tabloids like The Economist, The Atlantic, etc. do not represent well.

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I don't understand how any value can be gained from reading RT. People often say it's a way to hear the other side but Russia doesn't have a free press so...whose side is that? It's the "side" that the Russian government wants you to believe.

> Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov believes there is neither freedom of the press nor freedom of expression in his home country. "The history of independent journalism is over, [it's] finished," the 61-year-old said on September 11 at the start of the first Hamburg Press Freedom Week. The editor in chief of the Novaya gazeta newspaper, which is banned in Russia, told Germany's NDR public broadcaster that, since he still lives in Moscow and will return there, he can only say in Hamburg what he can also say there, and "in Moscow, I can't talk about anything anymore."

I think that there are two dangerous assumptions going around:

1. That you must "dig" for good information. Meaning that all large media orgs can be dismissed out of hand for no other reason than being large. The more you dig the closer you are to the truth!

2. That Western media can never understand, study, or discuss non-western subjects.

Then ignore RT. It's entirely up to you if you want to ignore the perspectives of major geopolitical players.

All I'm advocating for is healthy skepticism and having a diverse media diet.

RT does not offer "perspectives". Its sole purpose is to warp viewers' perceptions towards the position beneficial to Putin's clan without any regard for truth and objectivity.

Since the latest crackdown, the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points. Officials hold press conferences, but all questions and answers are pre-agreed. The country has thousands of newspapers and radio stations, but they only repeat the same central messages from the Kremlin instead of expressing the ideas of their staff and collaborators.

It is astonishing, really, how the public exchange of ideas has ceased in such a short time and how the entire society now willingly accepts a fake reality just like in Brezhnev's era.

> the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points.

I perceive that as not much different from the few German media I still occassionally watch. Since at least a decade, actually.

And I've got grumpy about them much earlier, tossed my TV in 1996 already. But wasn't even so bad then, as it is now.

Edit: I also like their "Question more!" Just for the hell of it.

Yes!

Question all the shit the suckpuppets are bubbling out.

All the times.

If you're consuming RT you are choosing to believe that you are too smart to believe propaganda. Maybe so. More likely, you are the sucker in this transaction. Also, Wikipedia may have biases but it is weird to call it oligarch-controlled.

I read RT and think, "this is how the Russian elite think / want me to think".

I read BBC and think, "this is how the British elite think / want me to think".

If they both agree on something mundane, like Chinese EV exports, then it's almost certainly fact-based journalism.

If they disagree significantly or use emotional appeals, I look for the primary evidence to better understand who is in the right.

Everyone consumes propaganda every day, but it takes work to see through it. It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC, and therefore we ought to rely on the latter while totally ignoring the former.

> It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC

Really? There's a lot of reasons to expect it to be true. The NYT and BBC, while imperfect, have guard rails like independent trustees and a commitment to impartiality. RT is a dictator's tool, populated by his flunkies. Most people would think RT's news quality is significantly worse.

This is what you are led to believe if you consume RT. One of the cornerstones of RT's propaganda is cynicism paired with moral relativism; the idea that everyone is the same, that all governments and peoples of the world are the same dirty pigs as Russians, which in turn means that Russians do nothing wrong when they invade a foreign country to torture children, rape women, murder innocents.

But that's not true. Despite all of their faults, NYT and Fox News are not under direct editorial control of the White House, whereas the RT (and all other media in Russia) is directly run from the Kremlin. Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that. RT is a government-run project to warp perceptions; NYT and Fox aren't.

And public broadcasters like PBS or DR in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors, like one could blame the corporate media.

> or DW in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors

Wrong. Sometimes so biased that they are fully flat. Got caught over and over again. Including things comparable to

> Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that.

Though more indidrectly and subtle, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same shit, just (implemented) different.

> One of the cornerstones of RT's propaganda is cynicism paired with moral relativism; the idea that everyone is the same, that all governments and peoples of the world are the same dirty pigs as Russians

Wow. Western Liberalism & IR Realism are now Russian conspiracies. I don't know what to say except this is essentially NSDAP rhetoric.

In what sense is Wikipedia "state/oligarch controlled"?

a) because Wikipedia is directly downstream of Western state/oligarch controlled media via its sacred "reliable sources" policy, which hilariously gives e.g. Radio Free Asia, The Economist perfect scores while outright blacklisting analogous outlets from non-Western countries.

b) because it requires significant resources to operate/contract an astroturfed influence campaign on Wikipedia, especially if you want to control the "objective" narrative on hot political issues.

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