On Citations Needed, the official podcast of Hexbear, they often say that emphasis is the atomic unit of propaganda. It's not that facts that run counter to the propaganda narrative are never covered; it's that they're de-emphasized while facts that support the propaganda narrative are centered.
A point that's just as important but less discussed is the level of evidence that's required to support or counter the propaganda narrative. We've all seen this in action on reddit: if you want to say that China isn't a genocidal neo-fascist hellhole or that the U.S. may have done some bad things abroad, anything less than an effortpost with dozens of links will meet a cold reception, and you'll absolutely get called out if one of those links is anything but an academic source or a mainstream imperial paper in the vein of the Washington Post or New York Times. But if you want to say China Bad, or that our sanctions on Venezuela are good? Oh boy, you can just toss that opinion out there and watch the upboats roll in.
Exactly. I looked at the page history for a bit and it's the perfect example of this. Someone removed all the unsourced claims for being, well, unsourced, and the next revision brought them all back, still unsourced. At another time, someone replaced all the unsourced numbers with "unknown", which was also changed back. Would they have done this if the article was about something else? I doubt it.
On Citations Needed, the official podcast of Hexbear, they often say that emphasis is the atomic unit of propaganda. It's not that facts that run counter to the propaganda narrative are never covered; it's that they're de-emphasized while facts that support the propaganda narrative are centered.
A point that's just as important but less discussed is the level of evidence that's required to support or counter the propaganda narrative. We've all seen this in action on reddit: if you want to say that China isn't a genocidal neo-fascist hellhole or that the U.S. may have done some bad things abroad, anything less than an effortpost with dozens of links will meet a cold reception, and you'll absolutely get called out if one of those links is anything but an academic source or a mainstream imperial paper in the vein of the Washington Post or New York Times. But if you want to say China Bad, or that our sanctions on Venezuela are good? Oh boy, you can just toss that opinion out there and watch the upboats roll in.
Exactly. I looked at the page history for a bit and it's the perfect example of this. Someone removed all the unsourced claims for being, well, unsourced, and the next revision brought them all back, still unsourced. At another time, someone replaced all the unsourced numbers with "unknown", which was also changed back. Would they have done this if the article was about something else? I doubt it.
“common sense” is when you don’t need sources
If I could make every American listen to only one Citations Needed episode it would be one of the common sense ones.