> Easy to see why; when, you know, Russia isn't currently invading a sovereign nation, RT is covering America from a declinist, civil libertarian perspective. RT's all over the WikiLeaks and Snowden stories; RT's covering Rand and Ron Paul whenever they make a peep.
This is pretty hilariously written as if western media weren't up to the same thing. RT and BBC News occupy neighbouring channels on local TV, so over the past few weeks I've been entertaining myself by repeatedly flicking from one view to the other.
As for the BBC coverage, this is one of my favourites: http://i.imgur.com/vkFqM3Q.png . It's as if the Russians crossed the sea to invade the mainland of poor old Ukraine. Compare to this: http://i.imgur.com/BXsojhV.png , notice the magically disappearing expanse of water mostly segregating Ukraine from Crimea.
Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine without exceptions when the Soviet Union collapsed. And yes, that includes the Crimean peninsula.
I'm not actually sure how the BBC coverage is worse... it shows the geographical area with its surrounding and has an inset showing the geopolitical borders to boot.
Except that it doesn't. While Crimea is a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by sea, there's only one major road from Crimea to the Ukraine, which runs through Krasnoperekopśk. This is because the Crimean border with Ukraine is mostly inlets lake and weirs, and there are just minor alternative bridges and roads.
Neither map is correct, that is the point I take from the parents comment.
RT has been spreading what amounts to propaganda for a long, long time now. If that wasn't annoying enough, they vote gamed/spammed reddit enough to get banned from the site.
Perhaps the worst part of all of this is that people still lap that shit up. Maybe it's because they think they are making a stand by being contrarians. Or maybe they just can't see that they have a second-option bias.
---
I predict that people are going to reply to this post and start complaining about America. But this is not about the US; it is about RT.
When you look at places like Fox News objectively there are the same problems. It is always a challenge for a media outlet to maintain high editorial standards, when those standards put it in conflict with the very people who provide the money to operate.
I give major props to folks resigning over having their integrity compromised.
My Twitter timeline is boiling over with a review of her "old" articles which are just big piles of anti-US sentiment. Wonder when she got an integrity transplant?
People demand sensationalist validation of their preferred viewpoints. Most news is dependent on advertising, which means it must maximize viewership to remain competitive. News outlets that use this model have an existential incentive to utilize cheap tricks and sensationalize to drive up viewership and emotional investment in their properties. They will never be able to overcome that as long as that business model is in place.
NPR and BBC are good because their viewership numbers don't matter nearly as much.
A day will come when no propaganda will be useful, everything will change then. In the end of the day there is not much doubt that the US, FOR ITS OWN CITIZENS is far more democratic than Russia and has a lower crime rate, corruption and alcoholism though, no propaganda can change this.
The problem is that also the west has its share of wrongdoings and the world will actually improve only when we start to give everyone's life - honestly - the same exact value.
A lower crime rate, but a higher incarceration rate. A lower level of traditional corruption, but many more forms of "legitimized" corruption (campaign finance, pork-barrel quid pro quo). More democratic, but mostly for those who can afford a good lawyer.
It's not a competition: both states have deep systemic problems with regards to human rights, which is "worse" is meaningless. The vast majority of mainstream news in both has about a 10-to-1 ratio of paid propaganda (which includes distractions and noise) to substantive news, whether it's Moscow or advertisers who foot the bill.
No, Fox News doesn't have the same problems. For one, Fox News is not state sponsored and has no obligation to be a media arm of the US government. Fox News, like MSNBC and other US media outlets, markets to a particular segment of the population. In order for them to efficiently do so requires bias. There is a clear distinction between bias and propaganda.
So a privately sponsored propaganda outlet is oh-so-fundamentally-different, how?
As the parent says, Fox plays the tune of he-who-pays-for-the-piper. That this is Rupert Murdock and not a state really doesn't change the situation.
Edit: It is transparently obvious that Fox News doesn't put out anything and everything that will get their demographic excited and that instead Fox News puts out a cohesive line of what it's owners and their allies want it's listeners to think. That makes distinction between Fox output and RT output nominal.
And hey, at least an RT host had enough guts to want credibility. That actually speaks better for RT than Fox.
> No, Fox News doesn't have the same problems. For one, Fox News is not state sponsored and has no obligation to be a media arm of the US government.
It has an obligation to be a media arm of one of the two parties in government. I'm not sure that's actually better than state-sponsored news, which is a designation that includes some some reasonably decent options like the BBC.
Everyone has bias, just like you could constructively argue that government-based PR is propaganda until proven otherwise.
The Communists wouldn't even have considered it a bad thing to be accused of engaging in "propaganda"; it was simply an alternate means of warfare in the class struggle.
But the parent comment's point is that Fox News's market position essentially requires bias; it is biased news that their market is seeking, in reaction to other media coverage biased the other way (true or false, that's the perception of the core market segment).
Similarly many progressives and liberals watch programs that starts with a bias more favorable to their views.
Even presenting fact can hardly be done without bias. You might see the same fact as "NSA SCOOPS UP HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TEXT MESSAGES AROUND THE WORLD EVERY DAY" or "NSA stores 3% of SMS traffic captured on foreign networks" on different channels with different biases, and they might both be right.
RT responded to her: ‘Ms Martin also noted she does not possess a deep knowledge of reality of the situation in Crimea. We’ll be sending her there to give her an opportunity to make up her own mind from the epicentre of the story.’ [0]
Just as people who critiqued the gulags declined opportunities to see it first hand.
In a war zone is pretty easy to mistake a camera for a bazooka, those that cover war from the 'wrong angle' often end up dead, like the reuters reporters deaths exposed by Bradley Manning.
That said RT is great for getting PoVs not shared by the us government
It's interesting that this is being upvoted, it is totally factually incorrect.
First off, they did not get banned because they "vote gamed/spammed reddit" and they did not get banned from reddit, they got banned from r/news. Why did they get banned from r/news?
The reason that was first given was vote gaming and spam, after a lot of comments asking for proof, none was given. When the moderator who banned the site was asked why he banned the site, he said "simply because it's the Kremlin."
Interestingly enough, the moderator who banned them "Bipolarbear0" has recently been receiving a lot of criticism for many things, among them is censorship of the many subreddits he moderates. This was recently brough up by Glenn Greenwald himself for the censorship of his article on jtrig.
Now in regards to whether RT has been spreading propoganda is factually false. RT is funded by RIA Novosti which is a Kremlin owned news organization, it owns many, many news organizations, one of which is RT. RT was described by Putin himself as created to spread an alternative perspective on the news. What does that mean?
It means that unlike most western news organizations, RT would not use a western bias, but instead have a Russian bias. The reason many people liked RT is that it brought more independent and centrist views on the news with regards to world news, but many disliked that it had an obviously pro russian bias in russian news. As a result RT had on many people who US news would never bring on, the prime example is Noam Chomsky who has been censored from US mainstream media for years.
I digress, the main point is that RT was formerly a very independent news source with regards to world news, while having a russian bias with regards to russian news. The reason people like RT is that it offers a different perspective to the american mainstream media in a way that allows us to be able to draw our own conclusions instead of just "lapping up" US propoganda (which by the way was legalized in last years NDAA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...).
So maybe next time you analyze other news sources, opinions, and world views, you should account for cultural relativism. Because the only reason your comment is being upvoted is that it has a clear American bias.
Propaganda is being spread by all the parts. Fox News and CNN are not any better. We should read it all, filter the propaganda out, and try to understand what's happening in this world. It's geopolitics, the big game of the big players. You think you exactly know what's happening in Ukraine and who's to blame? I wouldn't be that sure.
Yes, they actually are. Imagine if Fox got state sponsorship, renamed itself to "America Today" and set up shop in Russia, trying to create viral pro-US content under a generic "AT" banner. Even people here in the state would go bonkers over it, and many of them would be Fox audience members.
You can say there's propagandizing going on, but to really examine the two next to one another there's no comparison.
> You think you exactly know what's happening in Ukraine and who's to blame? I wouldn't be that sure.
I think that's a broader point that doesn't stick anything to any particular news agency either. IMO if you want to say people should back up and examine the news more closely, you shouldn't do it from a shaky "all is propaganda at the same level as RT" podium.
> We should read it all, filter the propaganda out, and try to understand what's happening in this world
Agreed. But we shouldn't treat all our sources as equally credible.
> You think you exactly know what's happening in Ukraine and who's to blame?
TBH, I don't know too much about it. I admit that, but on the other hand, I'm not the one selectively reporting the news. I'm not the one who is politically posturing on the air.
Actually RT is a pretty good source for news that don't relate to Russia. They covered a lot of interesting stories that CNN and Fox stay away from. Not just related to America but other parts of the world.
Related to Russia they are completely useless. They rival Fox News there pretty much.
Al Jazeera America is the same way. News not related to Middle East, especially Qatar are quite good. Otherwise, don't listen to them.
This is pretty much "and in your country they hang Negroes" expanded to the scale of a general principle of media coverage: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes