Original Post:
I asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us. Most of them just berated me, one user claimed the Syria conflict to which I provided a link to a recent UN Statement on which quite accurately reflected the conflict start to finish. Another user claimed that the recently declassified Nixon era documents about the Chilean revolution and coup, but I was able to find a 1973 archived Newspaper accusing the Nixon Admin of having a hand in it from Times Magazine meaning it was already a mainstream theory at the time.
I am not a tankie, but I can help you out - there are many many examples of this
Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism “socialist”. This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.
In mainstream press, criticism is focused on individuals and policies, rather than the system itself. In any kind of financial crisis, there is never much mainstream media coverage suggesting that capitalism itself is at fault, it’s always little cracks in the system. There are always going to be more cracks because it is a deeply flawed system.
The media often refers to the democrats as “left wing”, despite democrats being very decidedly right wing. This serves capital by shifting the overton window and preventing people realizing there is no left wing alternative in the United States.
Any economic policies which acknowledges the reality, that taxes being spent on things like healthcare and education are always a net benefit to the economy, are dismissed as somehow delusional or wrong. In the mainstream press, the national budget is treated as being like a household budget, which it clearly isn’t.
The mainstream media is owned by billionaires. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times (UK) are all owned by the Murdoch family. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times, the Atlantic, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe, are all owned by billionaires. It’s obvious that it is in their best interests to mislead us into thinking that capitalism is the best system.
Exactly. They’re not hiding things in the sense of conspiracies, I don’t think, rather journalists are also believers of capitalist dogma and won’t question it because it never occurs to them. We need to remind people “A better world is possible” because mainstream society and media are telling them it isn’t and we’re just naive.
Example, please
In a capitalist financial crisis you receive news about who is at fault. In an authoritarian state owned financial crisis you don’t receive that news because the authoritarian state run media wouldn’t blame themselves.
Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
There are countless, literally countless, articles and studies talking about the beneficial aspects of social programs in addition to aversion of suffering.
Obamacare, social security, medicare for all, et cetera
This I definitely don’t agree with. We don’t have universal health care and we couldn’t get the first iteration of the IRA because the Democrats don’t agree with those things (among many other massively mainstream ideas) because they are left-wing policies which will anger their donors. The only left-wing people in American politics are random isolated hotspots like Bernie or AOC who constantly have a target on their back in the media as a result.
The Republicans are far worse than the Democrats, and oppose those fairly basic left-wing policies rabidly and unanimously instead of only being wishy-washy about them enough so we don’t have them, but in almost any Western democracy, the Democrats would be the right-wing party, and a lot of the problems we have are because the vast majority of Democrats are complicit in all sorts of crimes against the people.
All of these things have been covered by the media in overwhelming detail nonstop for over a decade.
I’m saying that those are things that were described as “socialism” to scare people away from supporting them (the point #1).
They are socialism, but there are also many articles that only talk about their good points as well. Are you proposing that all western media refuses to say nice things about Obamacare and Social Security? Because I can bring up some examples for you if that’s what you’re saying.
I feel like this is some kind of friendly fire because the tankies got you all spun up to look for enemies lol
There’s a specific point I am answering here:
There’s a separate conversation about what are the issues that no big media in the US is willing to talk about, and how that list was in the year 2000 versus today, but that isn’t this conversation. I’m literally just answering examples for point number 1, because it definitely is accurate that some (emphasized) journalists (to use the word a little bit loosely) will cover any middle-of-the-road normal Western democratic policy as “socialism” because they are wildly capitalistic. I feel like you are responding to some different point than that here, which again is fine if you want to talk about that, but it’s separate from this conversation. Right? Doesn’t that make sense?
Edit: To answer your specific question, no I don’t think that it is universally true that the media unanimously refused to say anything good about social security or Obamacare. I do think that it was pretty much universal that they refused to say anything good about universal health care in the mid-1990s when Clinton was trying to do it, which led to its defeat. That’s sort of my central thesis in some of my other comments here, that up until about 2000 big business had a total monopoly on media in this country which led it to be pretty easy for them to defeat anything to the left of Thatcher or Reagan that tried to rear its head. When Obama tried again in 2008, they had maybe about 60% control, which was enough to lead a lot of people to hate Obamacare even up to the present day but their control had slipped sufficiently that he was able to do some weakened and distorted version of health care without it being just completely vetoed by the insurance companies because of their and their friends’ control of media.
When I said “Example, please” I wanted an Example of a subject that the “Capitalist Media” has completely kept the USA in the dark about.
Obamacare was not a valid example. Here, have a look:
Huffpost - “Health Care Costs Skyrocket For Millions Of Americans As Subsidies Lapse”
“Capitalist Media” has articles saying all kinds of nice things about that “socialism”.
Sounds good. You gotta be more specific then, you were answering a point number 1 with a response numbered number 1 that had nothing to do with that specific question.
(I made an edit to my answer BTW to answer your specific question with some details and comparing it to health care in the 1990s, check that out if you didn’t see the edit yet.)
This new question, I addressed here:
https://piefed.social/comment/9553470
And then there’s some back and forth about whether or not there actually was the type of embargo on these topics that I’m claiming there was, which still didn’t come to much of any conclusion, but I laid out my side of it at least. I won’t say they kept people completely in the dark, but enough so to prevent any useful action from being taken on it until their monopoly broke up in the early 2000s (and still to heavily heavily mute a useful response from taking shape). Other examples include the deaths of Iraqi children under American sanctions or American sponsorship of torture and anti-democratic movements in South and Central American all throughout the late 70s and early 80s.
They aren’t socialism you dingus are you serious? That’s literally just spending taxes, what’s what every government does. Decides how to spend taxes
Spending taxes on goods and services for the public is socialism’s barest definition. Roads are socialism. Libraries are socialism.
You want to know what’s not socialism? The USSR.
By this logic all governments thought history are socialist. So what’s the purpose of the word? Without meaning to sound rude, you are simply incorrect. Socialism is not “spending taxes good”. The barest definition might be economic democracy. My own barest definition would be workers controlling the means of production.
Socialism isn’t just when the government “does stuff” bucko. It involves the restructuring of political economy to one where workers are in charge of state apparatus
I’m not going to waste my time arguing with someone who clearly has their mind made up, if you want to be a slave to daddy capitalism, don’t let me get in your way.
So you have no examples? What a surprise.
Believe it or not, I don’t wander the fediverse with receipts for propaganda in my back pocket. If I really wanted to, I could spend a few hours putting together a response to your comment with relevant citations, but unfortunately I don’t have all day to spend arguing with people on the Internet, and I didn’t come here for a debate in the first place. I saw you post this:
I responded, concisely and simply, with a few examples of mainstream media acting defensively on behalf of capitalism which I suspected that most people would have personal experience of noticing themselves. I don’t want to waste hours of my time on this, either accept the truth or don’t. It’s not my problem, it’s yours.
You provided no examples. The media is a diverse spread of firms across the political spectrum, the examples you gave had examples of the opposite as well, meaning nothing was effectively hidden.
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