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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".

I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

Reminds me of the old joke of many years ago. An American journalist and a Soviet journalist are talking about press freedom. The American says something like "America is great. We have freedom of the press. I can freely criticize Richard Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is". The Soviet journalist says something like "We have the same freedom. I can freely criticize Richard Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is".

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> Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".

What does that have to do with the story of the article? Either the story is true or not, this has nothing to do with the source.

> I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

False dichotomy. Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.

> Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by something that's even more awful.

Well, if you believe the article, "personal blogs" will not be affected. The claim is that only "ten websites" are affected. So that means big media companies like Yahoo.

In reality this policy is nothing new. The Singapore government has for many years reacted harshly against stories they didn't like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Singapore They have required a S$200,000 (US $158,000) "security deposit" from foreign publications.

Why exactly do you feel obliged to defend those wanna-be tyrants?

That's not a false dichotomy. That's an appeal to worse problems.

He didn't rebut it or claim to. He merely said "it's a bit harsher".

That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new research shows that one part of the theory of evolution is wrong, therefore creationism is right". There's nothing like this here; his was a simple statement of the form "X is not bad, because Y is even worse". See the difference? False dichotomy means (falsely) asserting that when you disprove the factuality of one alternative, only one other alternative remains and therefore it's automatically true. (Whereas apeeal to worse problems is not about factual truths but about the weights of problems to be solved.)

> That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

Why are you comparing the two? The fact that there's censorship in Russia doesn't invalidate the fact that there's censorship in Singapore.

I think RT is great. They're certainly an alternative to American "mainstream media".

Our media (mostly) give Obama a pass about everything they were foaming at the mouth about when Bush did it. RT offers a much different perspective to our media that had a "thrill going up my leg" at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

But we shouldn't give Russian state funded media a free pass to run photos with signs that say "INTERNET CENSORSHIP WORST IDEA EVER" when Russian censorship and reaction to dissent is harsher than that in Singapore or most other countries.

There's a word for stories like that. The word is not "journalism". The word is "propaganda". In this case, state funded propaganda.

RT is much like the Pravda of yesteryear. I saved a quip about the NY Times and Pravda: "My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think."

Keep in mind that you read RT to learn what Russia wants you to think. Then it's great. That's the point I was trying to make.

> Keep in mind that you read RT to learn what Russia wants you to think. Then it's great. That's the point I was trying to make.

That's a very good point, and could be made about most things. I think the way you worded it above misrepresents it.

You may be interested to read this, then: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/14/russia-foreign-agents-law... - it's an article from Human Rights Watch, whose representative was quoted in the OP, about a somewhat similar programme recently instated in Russia requiring some journalistic agencies to register as "foreign agents" or face penalties. Funny how it's all the same actors, much the same plot, just on a different set.

According to common sense, any news organization is funded by some means. Which means it's biased by its nature in some way.

BTW, BBC is mostly government funded. Does it mean you disregard everything it reports about the government of the UK?

You have an old beef with USSR/KGB and Putin. So whatever you say about them is automatically suspect. How about that?

The BBC is funded by the TV license fee, not the government. It is an independent entity that is not dependent on government budgets.

This is more relevant in the context (i.e. RT broadcasts for foreign audiences): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC "Though sharing some of the facilities of the domestic services, particularly for news and current affairs output, the World Service has a separate Managing Director, and its operating costs have historically been funded mainly by direct grants from the British government."

Even the TV license fee is just a tax collected and redistributed by the government.

You know very little about Russia. I suggest you discuss the article at hand.

Yeah, it's really ironic considering wordpress.com is censored here. And a bunch of other blog platforms. RT is disgusting propaganda and shouldn't ever be used as a source for anything.

No it isn't. There's a big difference between "was unavailable for a couple of hours" and "censored".

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