I’m sorry. I failed to understand how deeply the Western propaganda machine is embedded within all that we consider “news” and uncritically believed the AP article because it “seemed true” i.e. confirmed my biases.
Then I got pressed and malded in the comments, when called out.
Thank you for education me. I have some serious learning to do.
Special thanks (and apology) to @Awoo @kristina @American_Communist22 and everyone else who engaged with me over multiple comments. Sorry for being so thick-headed. I’ll do better in the future.
I would very much recommend reading Parenti's Inventing Reality. It's dated but chock full of example after example of how our news gives the appearance of being uncritical while advancing the machinations of the ownership class. If you've paid any sort of attention to coverage of Bolivia or Venezuela the past few years you'll be blown away by how they keep getting away with the same techniques over and over again.
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media - this is an unofficial reprint someone is selling on amazon. I bought a copy and it's pretty decent. Just a few OCR related typos. The official used copies go for over a hundred sometimes so this is definitely worth it.
Or, if the seven seas is more your cup of tea
Also, the Blowback Podcast is pretty awesome.
I don't mean to derail the thread here, but I just finished Against Empire. Before that was BS&R as my first Parenti book. Would you recommend Inventing Reality next, or another one of his?
I didn't complete either book, but I think I liked Inventing Reality more. BS&R reads more like a polemic. It's good and brings a lot of common assumptions into question. Inventing Reality on the other hand really dives into how the sausage is made, who sits on the boards of which media companies, etc. Very fascinating and mindblowing shit.
Sounds good!
I've listened to a lot of his lectures but only read BS&R and Inventing Reality so far. Inventing Reality is a must read though. I would definitely recommend it to libs over BS&R as well, simply because he's less more abashedly pro-USSR before already laying the groundwork for the bias of the media. BS&R first for baby leftists tho, as he addresses leftist anti-communism.
Btw, did you ever check out that Thomas Frank book? (I think it was you?😅)
Thanks for the lecture link! I've seen most of what is on YT, but some of these names are new to me!
And uhhh which Thomas Frank book? I just looked at his wikipedia page and don't remember talking about him at all, but my memory is also dogshit.
The book was Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?. it was about how the Democratic transformed into the neolib organization it is today?
It totally could have been someone else though as my memory is also a hot dumpster fire and I can't search the comments anymore.😅
Thomas Frank is a lib, but he is a fairly prescient lib getting this book published while everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to receive a coronation.
Fuck I was going to recommend Inventing Reality when talking to @LiberalSocialist but for the life of me I could not remember the name of it or the author for whatever reason, I was blanking out. Please do take this recommendation.
Thanks for the links. Reading it is the first thing I'll do. It's been recommended a lot in this thread.
You're welcome, it's really a great read overall. And really it just scratches the surface of what we have to watch out for nowadays. Pretty much all US news media regarding foreign conflicts is just copy pasted from State Department memos and most non-US western news media source a ton of CIA funded organizations. And then if we're not being gaslit by the CIA, it's the fucking billionaires. Fucking madness. :this-is-fine: