
The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda - taylorbuley
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda
======
reso
Glenn Greenwald had this story nailed a few days ago:
[https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-
disgrace...](https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-
disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-
shady-group/)

~~~
Jerry2
Yasha Levine also wrote an interesting article on this:
[https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-
americ...](https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-american-
democracy)

------
kushti
Even controversial site bellingcat producing fakes (see
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-
criticizes-...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-
allegations-of-russian-mh17-manipulation-a-1037125.html) ) is avoiding to be
tied with PropOrNot insanity but WaPo journos picked the crackpot theories up
easily.

------
jessriedel
The media has a terrible time reporting on anything that requires scientific
understanding to assess. The only real solution to this is to put folks with
technical training in the media, and to give them real veto power on stories.
The current mechanism where a non-technical writer reads a summary of
technical results (e.g., a university press release) then asks a few technical
contacts their opinion, is hugely flawed.

Ultimately, this road leads to the writing component of journalists being
reduced to commodity status, so writers won't let it happen easily. And in any
case, readers are selecting outlets based on their ability to tell a
compelling story rather than get that facts right, so there's no market
pressure.

~~~
taylorbuley
journalists tend to pride being "good at everything, great at nothing."
unfortunately it's tough to scale expertise when the domains are so
specialized. i'd speculate this is expemplified by all the "ai" we keep
hearing about lately which is probably just vanilla machine learning algos at
work

------
gumby
Seems like we could crowdsource these lists. We could sign up for the ones we
like, inserting them into our blocker plug ins and let FB know which ones we
cared about.

(Then we could live in even more extremely segregated bubbles!)

------
kafkaesq
The thing to wrap one's head about, in regard to the "pro-Russia"-slanting
body of opinion (and not infrequent bursts of outright disinformation) that
have become increasingly prevalent in the past few years (not so coincidently
with the start of Putin's apocryphal 3rd term): _These people think this stuff
up largely on their own, because it suits their own (half-baked) intellectual
agenda_ (faux anti-globalism, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and all
that).

Yes, occasionally they'll suck up snippets of dialog, or memelets that might
first have originated in sources actually supported by the Russian government
(and indeed, there are more than a few bonafide trolls out there in certain
media outlets; and of course, the occasional Putin-enchanted celebrity here
and there; etc).

But by and large, this contact is incidental. And if people go around denying
that the invasion of the Crimea was really and invasion, or that we "don't
really know" what happened to MH-17, or (as one very educated acquaintance of
mine said to me recently) "Have you read Putin's Syria speech? It was actually
quite thoughtful"... it's probably not because they've been brainwashed by RT
and Sputnik News... it's because that's the way they think things "ought to
be" (and because they apparently don't to a lot of primary source reading...
they're very susceptible to letting their intuition and gut feelings run amok
over the basic chronology of recent events). Sources directed by the Russian
government might provide a bit of an echo, and "fluff" this mentality up a
bit... but I suspect not by all that much.

Or as the quote at the end of the article puts it: “To blame internal social
effects on external perpetrators is very Putinistic.”

~~~
pdx
Instead of engaging in amateur psychoanalyzing of your educated acquaintance
because he dares praise Putin's speech, you could have also chosen to read it
yourself. Here, let me help you.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/28...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/28/read-
putins-u-n-general-assembly-speech/)

~~~
kafkaesq
Thanks, but I read it when it first went around. Like a lot of things he says,
it was indeed cogent and thoughtful -- but also, at its base, fundamentally
warped.

~~~
throwanem
That's quite a bold statement. Would you like to elaborate on it?

~~~
kafkaesq
As to the other main thrust of what he's saying (supporting Assad as the
lesser of evils... like you know, back in the good old days of the anti-Hitler
coalition): let's just say things are "a bit more complicated" than the way he
presents it. And that he's side-stepping some very important things -- the
atrocious human rights record of the regime he'd like us all to throw our
weight behind [1]; (this is time-traveling a bit, but) the conduct of own
armed forces[2] in that country since that speech (for example, their use of
cluster munitions, against those some UN conventions he claims to hold so
sacrosanct); and this little bit of unpleasantness [3] (NSFW).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War)
\-- especially the part about _" According to various human rights
organizations and the United Nations, human rights violations have been
committed by both the government and the rebels, with the "vast majority of
the abuses having been committed by the Syrian government"_.

[2] "Russian airstrikes have killed around 3800 civilians, about a quarter of
them children" \--
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_intervention_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_intervention_in_Syria)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack)
[NSFW]

------
squozzer
And now The New Yorker joins PropOrNot's shit list.

~~~
trendia
McCarythism in the digital age.

