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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

Russia and China are doing it on a much worse level and as the language barriers are quite high we don't see and hear of what they say about the West in their media. The French-German broadcaster ARTE has a good series called Fake News that lifts the curtain a bit https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlQWnS27jXh8H1ej2-Sk0...

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There is no curtain whatsoever in modern times. Russian auto-translates excellently. Here [1] is the largest Russian state media site. Chinese is a bit bumpier, but it's also fully readable. [2] There's nothing particularly extreme, except insomuch as nationalism has become a bad-word somehow, and their media does focus heavily on culture, history, and national identity. Granted, Russia is quite negative towards the US, but probably no more than you'd expect if roles were reversed and Russia decided to just join the party in one of our many misguided invasions, upping the ante ever higher each time a game-changer failed to change the game.

[1] - https://tass-ru.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x...

[2] - https://www-people-cn.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_s...

> Russia and China are doing it on a much worse level and as the language barriers are quite high we don't see and hear of what they say about the West in their media.

International propaganda behind a language barrier? That doesn't sound right...

https://sputnikglobe.com/

https://www.rt.com/

https://chinaplus.cri.cn/

They also broadcast from local stations (in their parent countries) in English at high power. I bet you can find Radio Liberty and Voice of America as well. I discovered this accidentally by messing around in websdr:

http://websdr.org/

> Russia and China are doing it on a much worse level

They arent. The two things that crippled the Eastern Bloc's propaganda efforts was 1) Fear of getting caught lying and losing credibility and therefore not lying 2) Doing propaganda by stating facts in dry, formal language.

The US has perfected the lying, smearing emotional manipulation propaganda early in the Cold War and it still keeps doing it. There isn't one single country that does it like that. So, no, Russia and China arent doing it 'on a much worse level' - they are incompetent. The very fact that you have this 'perception' that its not the country that lied about nonexistent WMDs for almost a decade but 'others' who are doing 'worse propaganda' is a demonstration of how far worse the US propaganda is.

There’s an argument to be made that Hollywood is the best propaganda machine in the world at fostering putative or aspirational American ideals if not the reality on the ground. Recently the adaptation of The Sympathizer, this explores from the POV that the guys on the other side are human, too, differently from the book but similar territory concerning depictions of Vietnam War in particular.

> There’s an argument to be made that Hollywood is the best propaganda machine in the world at fostering putative or aspirational American ideals if not the reality on the ground

Indeed. The circulation of video tapes in the early to late 80s USSR, US movies et al, seem to have created a major false perception: People thought that Americans lived like how the rich in Manhattan live. Even in the late 2000s, there were Russian journalists (local) who did not believe that there were homeless in New York, for example.

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