Without having seen in real time how facts get distorted beyond any recognition there's no way to make people understand. They assume that there are some mistakes in foreign reporting, but the vast majority of Americans (and Brits, and <insert Western country here>) will never visit anywhere outside the West and have no context for anything. They're struggling to understand mistakes in foreign media reporting because their entire context for foreign stuff is other foreign media reporting.
For me the thing that got me to realise what a crock of shit it all is, was the Bolivian coup. When I saw Chapos calling it a coup right off the bat I was a bit skeptical (I was still a baby leftist at the time) but over time as all the evidence rolled in and there were still shitty op-eds that weren't wrong so much as complete fantasy rolled it, it really drove home how little you can trust even the big names.
Actively following these sorts of events in real time on Twitter and other fast-paced social media before the relevant hashtags get astroturfed by chuds and corporate media have the time to concoct an "official" version of the story, and then seeing the distortions reported in the MSM, has been an eye-opening experience.
It's probably not a coincidence that Occupy blew up shortly after US-Americans saw online posts about and videos of the Arab Spring, mostly unfiltered. It's definitely not a coincidence that attitudes towards racist police violence changed significantly when white people and other unaffected groups started seeing more and more recorded examples of cops acting like assholes and violent thugs with little apparent justification, with ideology becoming the only remaining barrier to understanding. Anglos who can overcome the ideological hurdle through their lived experience of class oppression have a much much stronger understanding of what the hell has going on in the world than they did even 10 years ago, even if for many of them that understanding is still weak and plagued with some imperialist distortions.
Without having seen in real time how facts get distorted beyond any recognition there's no way to make people understand. They assume that there are some mistakes in foreign reporting, but the vast majority of Americans (and Brits, and <insert Western country here>) will never visit anywhere outside the West and have no context for anything. They're struggling to understand mistakes in foreign media reporting because their entire context for foreign stuff is other foreign media reporting.
For me the thing that got me to realise what a crock of shit it all is, was the Bolivian coup. When I saw Chapos calling it a coup right off the bat I was a bit skeptical (I was still a baby leftist at the time) but over time as all the evidence rolled in and there were still shitty op-eds that weren't wrong so much as complete fantasy rolled it, it really drove home how little you can trust even the big names.
Actively following these sorts of events in real time on Twitter and other fast-paced social media before the relevant hashtags get astroturfed by chuds and corporate media have the time to concoct an "official" version of the story, and then seeing the distortions reported in the MSM, has been an eye-opening experience.
It's probably not a coincidence that Occupy blew up shortly after US-Americans saw online posts about and videos of the Arab Spring, mostly unfiltered. It's definitely not a coincidence that attitudes towards racist police violence changed significantly when white people and other unaffected groups started seeing more and more recorded examples of cops acting like assholes and violent thugs with little apparent justification, with ideology becoming the only remaining barrier to understanding. Anglos who can overcome the ideological hurdle through their lived experience of class oppression have a much much stronger understanding of what the hell has going on in the world than they did even 10 years ago, even if for many of them that understanding is still weak and plagued with some imperialist distortions.