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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Example, please
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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.
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Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
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There are countless, literally countless, articles and studies talking about the beneficial aspects of social programs in addition to aversion of suffering.
Example, please
Obamacare, social security, medicare for all, et cetera
Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
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.
Obamacare, social security, medicare for all, et cetera
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:
- 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.
- Example, please
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”.
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.
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 asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us.
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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Two things are happening, I think:
- It’s not anymore, but the cartoon when it was printed was pretty accurate. Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems. Or that global warming was a problem. The magnitude of the catastrophe-on-purpose that resulted from that distorted media is still with us to this day. It’s why we still don’t have a functioning health care system, for example, because everyone in Washington’s picture of the world froze in around 1995 when their brains reached the age where they stop making new worldviews. I actually don’t think it’s fair to blame that on capitalism specifically, since powerful people seizing the methods of media and distorting them to prevent the people from figuring out what’s going on is a pretty universal problem in any economic system, but it is certainly accurate and in the US it takes the forms of capitalism (and is still going on today, just in a different form; it’s why no one published the whistleblower’s warning about the US invading Venezuela for example.)
- What the .ml contingent means by posting that is that the capitalist press is hiding the truth that Ukraine started the Ukraine war, that Biden was the biggest threat to world peace and it was therefore important not to vote for Kamala, and so on. They’re adopting a time-honored very effective propaganda technique of reversing the roles, and then screaming the role-reversed framing of reality with so much vigor that it’s hard for anyone within the bubble to point out that the truth they claim is being censored is readily available to literally everyone, and that they are the ones constantly banning people who don’t agree with their carefully curated worldview. Because EVERYONE KNOWS and then they get an inch away from your face and start aggressively repeating what it is that everyone knows.
Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems.
what
Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet. Israel’s supremacy in US foreign policy didn’t even come about until the mid-80s, universal healthcare was one of Clinton’s main running points in '92, and the private funding floodgates didn’t open until Citizens United in 2010, and was deeply controversial with the public.
Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet.
I’ll ask you the same thing I asked Diplomjodler: Show me one article in the mainstream press that simply reports the objective truth that Al Gore is right about global warming.
They were “popular” ideas, sure. What I’m saying is that the media’s unanimous opposition to them was very effective at preventing them from getting real traction by distorting the thinking of a lot of people in the country. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993
The effort also included extensive advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous “Harry and Louise” ad, paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan’s complex, bureaucratic nature.[18][19] Time, CBS News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor ran stories questioning whether there really was a health care crisis.[20] Op-eds were written against it, including one in The Washington Post by conservative[21] University of Virginia Professor Martha Derthick that said,
“In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete… with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.[22]”
The 1994 mid-term election became, in the opinion of one media observer, a “referendum on big government – Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape”.[31] In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the 83rd Congress of 1953–1954, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive health care reform in the United States was not seriously considered or enacted by Congress until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and the U.S. remains the only developed country without universal health care.
Nothing of this indicates that it’s in any way urgent. That was my point. The closest it comes, way way down after it’s talking about some flowers maybe doing some weird things, is:
A warming of 3.5 degrees, according to experts, would cause widespread climatic and environmental dislocations, producing more extreme weather, raising the global sea level, causing precipitation patterns to change and shifting climatic and agricultural zones.
Doesn’t sound too bad. What Gore said, during the election while the press criticized him for it and later when he found financing for a platform of his own, was:
There are good people, who are in politics in both parties, who hold this at arm’s length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable. … unless you fix the biggest damn crisis in the history of this country.
Tony Blair’s scientific advisor has said that because of what’s happening in Greenland right now, the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen to San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, one of the low countries. Absolutely devastating.
The area around Beijing that’s home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta, and to the east, Bangladesh. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they’re displaced by an environmental event. And then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more.
Here’s Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center memorial site. And after the horrible events of 9/11, we said, “Never again.” But this is what would happen to Manhattan.
All emphasis is mine. I just picked random stuff from his movie’s script. That’s the reality. I think people still don’t really grasp it, because the “business as usual” malpractice press got replaced with getting your news from Facebook instead of being replaced with something better, but it is at least possible to broadcast that message to a mass audience now without having to finance your own movie. In 1999, it wasn’t, and the news was refusing their duty to as the only ones who could do it.
Nonsense. There was a free press that freely discussed all the topics you mentioned. It’s true that the mainstream was pretty supportive of the status quo but even there you’d find, for instance, plenty of warnings of climate change and open discussions about it.
Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press’s coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That’s why I used Israel as one example.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a “debate” and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a “viewpoint.” He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.
It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we’re making it up, like of course it couldn’t have been like that.
You mean the guy who was all buddy buddy with Epstein? Well, in that case it must be true, of course.
I’m going to need you to look up “ad hominem” in the dictionary, it’s not just for internet insults
Also let me know if you find one of those climate change articles or anything
I’m actually old enough to remember reading those back in the day. And if you go to any library that has old magazines or newspapers you won’t have any trouble finding stuff. As for Chomsky, this motherfucker (note the ad hominem) has lost every bit of credibility he might ever have had for associating with the kind of people he’s been arguing against all his life.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Just a bunch of shit, from beginning to end. Not a whisper of the idea that this might actually be an emergency. In fact, it’s kind of treated as a liability for Gore that he keeps saying that it is.
About as good as it gets is this:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/121898sci-global-warming.html
… which, even if we’re not going to take any points off for “While there are dissenters who believe the warmer climate can be explained by normal variation,” doesn’t really address even to the slightest degree why this kind of thing might actually be important let alone a globe-spanning catastrophe.
That’s what I mean about why Gore had to make his own movie. The media was simply violently opposed to the idea of telling anyone the truth about it, limiting itself to sometimes making a grudging acknowledgement that maybe some of the most basic facts about the present might be true, with nothing at all indicated about what it meant for the future.
Okay, your turn. Where’s the newspaper article where they made it clear that it was an emergency? You said anyone could find them without any trouble, so it should be easy.
Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.
Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.
Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.
Yeah. He went off the deep end once he got elderly and his viewpoint of the world ossified. It doesn’t invalidate his earlier scholarship, though.
(Also, his support for Russia is overblown by the disinfo machine. Mostly what he’s saying in things that I have read is that NATO and the West have done ten times worse than Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, so the freakout is a bunch of hypocrisy, which is of course completely accurate. The disinfo likes to spin it like he’s saying Russia is the good guys, which isn’t at all what he’s saying. But yes, I also think he’s missing the central point in Ukraine because it doesn’t fit with how he likes to look at things.)
Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.
Well… the US doesn’t have state-sponsored censorship like most socialist countries. That part is true. My point, and I think the OOP cartoon’s point, is that because our media is capitalist, it was more or less impossible before non-big-business media developed out of the internet for certain messages to get out. I do think that’s a fair point. Just the fact that one academic was able to get one counterculture message out (and generally be regarded by 100% of the external political spectrum as a terrorist as a result) doesn’t invalidate that to me.
We had those beliefs in print and more, actually. For example, people used to think our supply of oil would have been completely used up by now, it caused a lot of fear and panic back in the day. Al Gore was running a presidential campaign on a Climate Change platform starting in 1999.
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I’m not sure why people waste their time on these subs.
These aren’t places for useful discussion on improving society, especially in the US. They are full of people who don’t even really share or uphold socialist views, but are engaging to disrupt and affect the vote or contaminate the outlook of younger progressives.
They’re on Team Trump, Netanyahu and Putin and if they aren’t operatives themselves, they’re farmed useful idiots. I hate saying that about the latter, because they’re essentially good people led down the wrong path. That said, they’re also quite irresponsible.
There’s no space for genuine discussion in those places. You’ll first be bullied by fools then removed when you present arguments. Don’t waste your time.
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The state want to take my wife away from me
Well, that’s sad.
and you’re calling me a Trumper Does the
Does the shoe fit?
Go fucking die…
Lovely.
If you didn’t vote I don’t have any sympathy for you. Your wife yeah and doubly so because she’s got to put up with…how did you put it…a piece of shit like you as well as watch you (not) vote to deport her.
Unless of course you did vote and vote Harris, in which case I don’t know why you’re mouthing off.
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all Americans deserve death
I never said that at all, nor do I believe it.
bombs people for breakfast
Well perhaps if irresponsible people such as yourself learned the limits of your political process and voted accordingly people your country wouldn’t be there and others wouldn’t think that.
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My friend died in Beirut
I’m sorry to hear that
you American piece of shit
I’m not an American.
I’ve got a nice one too. Some olympic level mental gymnastics there.
A little of column “I don’t know what ‘nominally’ means,” a little of column “Under no circumstances do I plan to address your question head on, I’ll start up some tangential nonsense instead.”
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It’s Media which is available to the West. The original post’s logic takes some hoop jumping but if I flat out said that “capitalist media isn’t state controlled and therefor cannot actually block ideas, literally every opinion is present” the stupid Tankies wouldn’t be able to clump up enough braincells to process that concept.
Literally every opinion is not present though
Can you give me an example?
Is your contention that there is no censorship whatsoever in American media?
Look, mate, we both know you don’t have an answer, just like the dozen people before you who tried and failed.
I’m not really trying to argue what they are, I just am genuinely asking. How could that possibly be the case is your view? Cops are arresting journalists without cause lol
The original post above and the discussion at hand is that the Tankies claim Capitalist Media is hiding the Truth from the USA, and I simply ask what they are hiding.
Personally, I’m not sure a capitalist media system is capable of hiding something, because that would imply nationwide coordination, which simply doesn’t exist in a free market. It’s one of those “Jews Control the Weather” level of conspiracies.
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hey antiyanks you’re stupid, you can’t stab someone through a computer you silly boy
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People who speak seriously about “tankies” are not serious people.
agreed, Tankies are jokes and largely passive
“Allende was overthrown because of capitalist media” is a new one.
Theres actually some truth to the Chilean coup claim, according to declassified documents about funding a Chilean Propaganda Magazine and cooperating with the copper mining companies, but the point is that newspapers of the time were openly talking about that claim.
For example, this TIME magazine article from October 1973: LINK
“Even though the Nixon Administration was unmistakably delighted at Allende’s downfall, the U.S. took no diplomatic action. In part, the cautionary stance may have been a response to continuing accusations that the U.S. had had a direct hand in triggering the coup, a charge that Washington denied.”
While it’s certainly flattery for the Nixon admin, it’s clear that this was a mainstream idea.
Theres actually some truth to the Chilean coup claim, according to declassified documents about funding a Chilean Propaganda Magazine and cooperating with the copper mining companies, but the point is that newspapers of the time were openly talking about that claim.
That was for the 1970 attempts, though, which were miserable failures and did not continue past '71 to my knowledge.
The successful 1973 coup caught the CIA off-guard, and was largely predicated on hostility from the military brass - including internal discussions among them of possible leftist involvement in the post-coup government. Allende chose to trust, in particular, Pinochet, who had successfully cultivated an ‘apolitical’ reputation (but apparently was one of the furthest right of them all).
It would be difficult to argue that Allende’s downfall owed much to media of any kind, much less capitalist media.
You got banned because you are full of shit and asking everything in bad faith cos you’re a fucking magat
Okay, but what would you tell someone who was asking in good faith? Like if a 10 year old asked, what would you tell them?
See, the thing you have to understand is, they’re not interested in that question. They’re trying to “win.” That’s why ad hominem is so important: They can just say you’re bad-faith, and then strut off victorious. It’s actually a disadvantage if they engage factually.
Why that is, is an exercise for the reader…
I do actually understand that, but someone who doesn’t can see this exchange and learn it for themselves.
quite well put
OP was quite poorly behaved in the post that they are referencing, acting in bad faith as a troll completely uninterested in thinking or learning about the topic.
The ignorance and incuriousity is exemplified by the irresponsible use of the term “tankie”, seeming to be a conflation with all socialists or leftists, or simply everyone whose position they personally fail to understand and refuse to respect.
Some bullishness is generally warranted as a response to those who refuse to examine their own behavior.
Feel free to answer the question. “Tankie” is by absolutely no means a conflation with all socialists or leftists. Tankies are right-wing, which is why we don’t like them.
Again, feel free to answer the fairly basic question, IDK how you can refuse to do that and preemptively accuse any and every listener of being obviously incurious about the answer. You have no idea who’s reading this who you now have the opportunity to make a sensible argument to.
You seem confused.
My best suggestion is that you reread the thread from the beginning, preferably when your head is more clear.
Sounds like you’re incurious
Did you reread the thread from the beginning?
And also dont be stupid and think this is the first or last time fhey will do this.
You would answer a 10 year old child’s question with a link to an article with a statement that would leave them feeling like you think they’re stupid? If you can’t explain something in terms a child could understand I don’t think you fully understand it either.
Some things arent simple enough for child minds. Such is the problem with all the flat earth and anti vaccine shit going around. Just because you dont understand something doesnt mean it isnt right or that you have any grounds to question it.
As I stated in the original comment of what OP posted, the cartoon isn’t ambiguous
I see you aren’t interested in answering the question.
Bingo
So you’re engaging in bad faith? You have no intention of having an actual discussion, you just want an argument?
Your conclusion is completely unsound.
OP is a troll whose questions were addressed despite their complete lack of sincerity.
No one should feel compelled to continue engaging such a bad actor with any earnestness.
Your conclusion is completely unsound.
No, I don’t think it is.
OP is a troll whose questions were addressed despite their complete lack of sincerity.
OP got banned and called names for asking a question.
No one should feel compelled to continue engaging such a bad actor with any earnestness.
That’s how I feel about the people who banned someone for asking a question.
Yawn
I’m Donald Trump’s biggest hater, unlike you fuckin Tankies who looove and cheeerrish him so much.
Quite a childish, troll response, just to reinforce how I’m right that you are only in here to waste everyone’s time with bullshit and I’ll keep letting everyone know it.
You came here to lie and talk shit, but I’m the troll?
That’s why you’re on lemmy in the first place. Your bullshit will work better back over on Reddit with the rest of the dumbass wet blankets.
I am not on lemmy, at all. I am on PieFed because the PieFed devs are NOT pro-war, pro-genocide, pro-Russia, and Transphobic like the Lemmy Devs are.
So you’re admitting you have a vendetta and were commenting on that post in bad faith, as I have been saying. You were never interested in an answer in the first place, you just were looking for a fight.
I asked knowing you couldn’t answer, and I was proven right.
