I'm tired of getting called right-wing for saying that the media is lying, so I need to concretely back myself up. The fact that there isn't a genocide in china isn't working, as they trust the media. I keep pointing out how they intentionally didn't talk about the AIDs crisis or how bad it was, but they keep sayig lying by omission isn't lying. I want a couple more hard, concrete pieces to show that the media is lying, actively and constantly. Thanks for any help.
They lied to get us into the first gulf war, then they lied to get us to do it again a decade later. To paraphrase a quote I slightly remember, any dictator would kill to have a media apparatus as slavishly loyal as the US media is to our government. Anyone who steps outside the bounds of acceptable discourse is universally blacklisted, anyone who questions official narratives is labelled an extremist crank, and when the official narrative changes ten years later (as it did for the second Iraq War) everybody suddenly always held the new correct opinion.
They said russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. Lie. Maddow repeated it for multiple days. Pigs.
The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it's emphasis :citations-needed:
GOOD point. If OP is talking to a liberal maybe remind them how Fox News spent weeks talking about Dr. Suess books to distract conservatives from the stimulus vote. If the government did they same to you how would you know?
The media tries very hard to not openly lie most of the time. Instead, it's about emphasis, framing, and who gets heard vs. who is blacklisted. This means they repeat and platform lies and run with them in editorials, but it's not the kind of thing where you can point to something they published a year ago and say to someone else, "a-ha! Here they are plainly lying!"
In addition to the recommendations of Citations Needed, Manufacturing Consent, and fair.org, I recommend Inventing Reality, The Politics of Genocide, and Washington Bullets.
I also recommend taking any recent article that has annoyed you and walking through its sourcing with them. If you're informed on Xinjiang this will be an easy topic. They will experience serious cognitive dissonance when you pull up the literal Pulitzer Prize-winning article, point out that it's based on trusting their ability to recognize and validate expertise, and that it cites Zenz and Ruser (the latter being employed by a think tank funded by the Australian DoD) and was supported by the same group that funds Radio Free Asia. Ask why the supposed best journalists on the planet are unquestioningly citing a ridiculous sinophobic anti-semite and a military-funded dweeb with no qualifications who constantly misidentifies structures and simply calls them experts. Why are they less competent than a middle schooler at vetting sources?
And the answer, of course, is that they are actually better than that but choose not to when it suits their editorial slant, thus legitimizing fringe opinions that suit the interests of the powerful (you can say capitalists if your audience is anti-capitalist).
I'm getting ready for the big argument which will be Xinjiang. Hopefully. Thanks for the suggestion.
The corporate-affiliated media has enough plausible deniability to satisfy libs. "We thought it was true at the time as all (US intelligence) sources thought Saddam had them."
Yes, basically. Western journalists expects their governments to speak the truth (because muh librul democracy) and feel it inappropriate to suggest that the good guys might be lying.
The WMD lie has been documented well enough that you can push back on that pretty easily, though, and libs still hate Bush (if you remind them, and if you don't get sidetracked into a debate about whether he was worse than Trump).
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
There isn't some quick an easy way to prove your point, you need endless examples which this book provides.
Short answer: WMDs in Iraq. One of the biggest propaganda coups this century (so far!).
Longer answer: Manufacturing Consent. Exhaustively documents many instances of propaganda and describes how they are made.
YouTube addicted zoomed answer: Toss some Yellow Parenti at them.
:parenti:
Thanks. I think Parenti is a bit too strong for right now, but I will work with what I have.
Another perk of Manufacturing Consent is that Chomsky is a recognizable name that often isn't seen as too radical. Probably harder to dismiss out of hand that way.
i linked this article the other day, and i think it might be a good one, its pretty old now but its one that everyone universally accepts to have been outright lies at this stage, so you wont get tripped up on what counts as a lie (and the parallels to xinjiang cant help but hover in the background without needing to be explicitly stated)
and note that it cant just be waved away as "well what colin powell says is news in itself" because it comes with
CBS News Consultant Stephen Black, a former U.N. weapons inspector, found it to be “an incredible presentation of a web of evidence, not just a theory.” Here, Black analyzes some of the intelligence for CBSNews com
you can then push further with arguing that these lies are really consequential, since over a million people died in a war justified by these lies
The media is shit not just in the sense of political narrative but also just general journalistic laziness. Whatever your friend/acquaintance's particular hobbies are probably has some examples of atrocious reporting that a layperson would take on face value but an enthusiast will recognize for what it is. Find an example that speaks to your audience then link that to broader examples of political propaganda.
lying by omission isn’t lying
the narrative is mostly about emphasis, not outright denial
EDIT: like, ask your friend if the media's failure to mention US biological warfare and vicious saturation bombing against Korea while constantly parroting the US state department line counts as a lie
The current covid conspiracy. Either they were lying in april last year or they're lying now.
This isn't a particularly good one -- it doesn't show intent, or even sloppiness. Almost any inconsistency can be written off as merely a mistake, or a best guess given what was known at the time.
For blatant lies directly by them, you'll have to look at their takes foreign enemies. "Iranian nuclear weapons program" is a simple lie they keep repeating and never correct anyone on. Its so prevailant though you might have to explain why its false.
IIRC there's an example where NYT corrected themselves for calling the nuclear program a "weapons" program and then did it again just a week later.
Its a fairly good example for introducing how it all works. No one files lawsuits if you lie about Iran or any sanctioned enemy. Meanwhile, the elites have teams of lawyers on retainer for when the slightest shit is said about them.
They usually don't literally just make shit up as much as they play with framing/omit things. For just straight fiction there's a thousand big and tiny stories: the Iraq WMD saga, the "Muslim No-Go Zones" stories, claiming Kim Hyok Chol was executed, claiming Juan Guaido was elected, the "Russian Bounties" story, etc etc.
