[alansammarone]

While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder:

> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

[whatamidoingyo]

This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true.

We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.

[dumbfounder]

I don’t think it’s some master scheme. They are trying to make money more than anything else. So they distort the truth to what sells the most. That just happens to be one of two major ideologies that hate each other. The effect is the same, but the motivations, and thus how you counteract, are different.

[pixl97]

Known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

[throwaway894345]

I would expect to see conflicting narratives in any country with free press. Why would we expect different outlets with different biases to run consistent narratives?

[hamburglar]

One thing that’s interesting is that if you intentionally consume media with different viewpoints, you can often glean what’s true and what’s not by comparing how they each spin the story, because the opposite sides will almost never be in coordinated collusion about their misrepresentations.

[nostrademons]

> I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively.

The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.

[terminalshort]

But what if you don't know the facts? And how can you if you don't have eyes on the situation or know someone who does. I'd rather go with Mark Twain:

> It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

[fidotron]

The important point is to distinguish between truth and the co-ordinated release of information in the NYT, BBC etc. The latter is very much intended to send a message, but it is not to be taken as literal truth.

[hnlmorg]

I cannot about the NYT, but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.

So much so that the left and the right accuse the BBC of biasing the other in equal measures!

If you want to talk about bias in the UK press then you’re better off looking towards The Sun, The Mail and anything owned by Murdoch (that guy has done so much damage to the world it’s unreal).

[zenmac]

>the co-ordinated release of information

That hit the nail right on the head, with ONLY 6 companies controlling all the mainstream media. News are just like coordinated company memo.

[phkahler]

>> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

During covid the Governor of Michigan banned shopping for gardening supplies. This raised a big fuss. One of my FB friends shared a reporters story saying the ban was fake news and that the order did not include anything like that. He even provided a link directly to the order itself so you could see for yourself. Most people would not bother because hey, he went to the source! I followed the link, found the paragraph - which was super clear and explicit about the gardening thing - and posted a direct quote of it in response. I lost a FB friend that day. Facts are hard to find (you must do it yourself) and just piss people off when they don't like them.

[tw04]

> That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does.

Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.

[fasbiner]

I can’t think of a worse person to cite that principle; Snyder has lied and evaded historians with basic inquiries about his work.

As we speak, his official position is that Russia and China are both engaged in genocides and another state categorically is not and you should be punished for inquiring. I don’t think that position is going to age well, for him or for you.

The propaganda is so effective because the propagandists can rely on your lack of basic rigor and media bubble to present abstractions as a real moral position. And there’s no way to say this without hurting feelings and causing people to get defensive. Look up what any historian who isn’t on tv has say about Snyder’s work on libgen, it’s not sensationalist or context-free, it’s just someone going through and documenting mendacious claims and poor historiography: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer...

What is telling is not that one reviewer can be authoritative, but more that the response is "Shut up and go away, I'm trying to have a media career." Pretending to be a controversial truth-teller speaking for principles is how Americans like to be propagandized to and how we like to become niche celebrities instead of doing work that requires accuracy and rigor.

[chrisweekly]

Fantastic quote. Spot on. Thanks for sharing it!

[ynniv]

[flagged]

[brookst]

It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies.

That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”.

I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.

[stogot]

relativism is indeed wrong, but thinking that because knowing the truth is somehow “hard”, that you should throw out objectivism is also wrong.

[T-A]

Thank you for reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299539

[runlaszlorun]

Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true".

Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true".

Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one.

Lord help us all... Lol

[snickerbockers]

That is actually orwellian as fuck.

[suddenlybananas]

Well, Snyder himself is a bit of a propagandist with his ridiculous double genocide theory.

Here's a longer discussion[1] with examples of how he is an ideologue. (I would have liked to post a reply to the people responding to me but alas, I cannot.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comm...

[ImPostingOnHN]

Could you please stop repeatedly editing multiple comments to respond to replies? The "reply" function exists for a reason, and your backedits disrupt the directional read of a thread, confusing the discussion.

If the HN system tells you that you're posting too fast, and you need to slow down, that also exists for a reason: you are, and you do. You can still reply (so please stop saying you cannot), you just need to slow down, be patient, and wait. It's ok to wait. Don't try to evade the restrictions. Wait.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'.

I, on the other hand, am always right.

[gedy]

> drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust.

That's a propagandist?

[stronglikedan]

> I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme

That applies to anything, when taken to an extreme.