Sub-headline from that PDF I provided:
People learn most from NPR, Sunday Morning Shows, ‘The Daily Show’
On the side of Fox, clearly it’s true. They don’t make no bones about it.
But you can be propagandic without the intention to be so. If you come from the city, were raised to think that food comes from the supermarket, have never gotten outside of that world, didn’t read a lot of history, and never had any deep and open discussions with others of wildly different ideology, you’re simply not outfitted to present a particularly good set of news.
Heck, just not being a skeptic already damns you. The number of people who could be a good journalist is vanishingly small, because you’ve got to be deeply knowledgeable, skeptical, and yourself very sane and middle-of-the-roadish.
The average journalist is someone who wants to write stories about cures for cancer, alien attacks, and deep investigations into conspiracy theories, not thumb through financial documents and add up numbers to look for fraud or business prospects.
Very few viewers are, likewise, interested in that sort of reporting. They want to know about the missing blond girl and the scary black guy that was chasing her. As such, the market forces would say that the only news with smart and knowledgeable people is news that you pay for, that is long-form with careful notes on sourcing and evidence, and the target audience is people who are interested in boring and practical knowledge.
Everyone else gets free news, where the product that’s being paid for is you.
Outside of that, and you just don’t have the talent pool. You’ve just got credulous people that look good, doing their best to act like a serious person. Intentionally or not, they’re just creating a small and very confined world view because that’s the limit of their own abilities.
And mind, I am aware that both of my previous posts are painting with wide brushes. Obviously, the reality will vary.
I really have strong doubts that professional comedians have dark horrible thoughts almost all of the time. Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart and Seth Myers give me all the news I can handle because they add some humor to it. I can’t take it in otherwise. There’s too much bad going on.
If my statement is correct, then the sense that there’s “too much bad going on” would be an expected outcome. You’d be creating a vicious cycle.
Per John Cleese: “Let me tell you a story that amuses me about professional comedians. W.C. Fields is one of the greatest comedians ever, and I don’t think young people know him as well as they should. He was absolutely wonderful. Somebody asked him about a professional comedian’s sense of humor. And W.C. Fields said, Well, for most people, if an actor dresses up as a very, very, very old woman and walks along the street like this and falls down a manhole, they’ll laugh. But to make a professional comedian laugh, it has to really be an old woman.”
That sounds like you’re conflating inherent bias with propaganda. They’re not quite the same thing.
I mean, your average proselytizing fundie just thinks that he’s being helpful and a positive force in the world.
But the stuff that he’s sharing and spouting was curated and refined by lots of other people over the course of centuries.
His intent be as it may, there’s still the practical effect of the matter. The lifestyle and culture of city folk, over decades and centuries, has produced a certain cohesive and interconnected whole that makes it a complete belief system.
And with our modern ability to monetize clicks and views, and tabulate every little thing, any American company that’s got a sales crew working with advertisers is going to be working to correlate the content with the budget, and running that up the ladder.
I’m less concerned about that with foreign news but, in the US, profit motives do have their impact and I expect myself to stay vigilant on watching for other countries to head down that path and constantly doubt my information sources.
Again, the current context is about the king trying to shoot the jesters, because the jesters are speaking truth to power. Even in old times, silencing them was not the usual thing to do.
Everyday parrhesia
Away from the lascivious lives of English monarchs and the intellectual labyrinths of French postmodernism, how can we all hope to apply parrhesia in our own lives? Here are three takeaways.
Foster openness. The reason Machiavelli believed a leader was “overthrown by flatterers” was that they would never know how things actually were. The world will burn as you dance in your imagined pleasure garden, and no one will buy your product if you don’t listen to bad reviews. In the workplace, companies need to encourage employees at all levels to speak openly about their concerns, ideas, and feedback without fear of retaliation. For example, you could introduce anonymous feedback forms or have an HR representative mediate any concerns. What can a leader do? Over on Big Think+, Jim Whitehurst, interim CEO and President of Unity, and former President of IBM, has some advice.
Embrace accountability. For Foucault, one of the more underappreciated aspects of parrhesia is not only speaking truth to power but also speaking truth to yourself./
180, now 181 posts, for an unoriginal, uninteresting troll. SOP for SDMB.
So, in other words, you are recalling something that wasn’t ever actually there. And more importantly, if it had existed, doesn’t even say what you think it says. It refers to prisoners selected to be immediately shot on the spot for being Jewish or political officers, which yes was German policy. The rest of them were to be deliberately starved to death, not sorted out into blonde hair and blue eyes and everyone else with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed ones allowed to live and the others to die. They were all Slavs to the Nazis and were all to be left to die.
For the record, I don’t think you’re actually a Nazi. You are just incredibly ignorant and immensely stupid. For anyone interested in the depths of your ignorance, stupidity and how it led you to Holocaust Denial without even realizing it, start here on that thread.
The fun trolling never stops!
Again, this is why we request cites.
I don’t really give a fuck if you want to concede a point. You were wrong whether you concede or not and I backed it up with a cite.
I’ve personally seen you repeatedly defend bigoted shitstains like magellan01, DemonTree and others with your best sea lion impression, so I’ll probably sleep fine tonight. I’m not sure that there are a thousand posters worse than magellan01 on St*rmFr*nt (not even sure if that cesspool still exists), so I don’t really give any validity to your statement that this board has worse. I mean the fucker used to use VDARE as a cite.
nevermind
And I’ll continue to defend them whenever I think they’re right, and whenever I think they’re being dogpiled by lying scumbags like you. If you don’t like that, maybe a discussion forum that invites dialogue between people of opposing views isn’t the best place for you? Maybe you’d be happier jacking it in front of a mirror in a soundproof room?
And your artless attempt to move the goalpost won’t do wonders for your pretensions to intellectual honesty. You lied about one of my posts and then didn’t acknowledge it when I corrected you. No subsequent amount of dissembling and hand waving will change that. You had an opportunity to do the decent thing and you pissed it away. Going forward, I’m more than happy to put you in the same basket as Chingon - the one for maladjusted wastes of space with no integrity and no desire for any. Have a block, you lying scumbag.
Really, can you provide a cite, perhaps? Or is this one of those “self-evident” things where no cite is needed?
And to get back on track, Gobb is a goat-felching troll no matter what the sea lion might have to say about it.
Post 61. You said that I thought magellan01 was worth “thousands of the rest of us” when, in fact, the post you were referencing made it explicitly clear that I thought magellan01 was “worth a thousand” of a couple of specific posters, not the rest of the fucking board. Either you lied about my post, or you were too stupid and lazy to go back and check what it actually said. Since you’re a proud asshole and don’t deserve charity, I’m gonna go with liar.
Right. Now you’re on block. Don’t expect further interaction.
‘White knighting’ for a bigot is an interesting take.
In other news, I think Gobb is Gonn.
< takes notes on how to get this to happen >
You’re missing the point here. You keep claiming that we’re “not listening to people”. But we did listen and simply found their values and ideas sorely lacking.
What you’re suggesting is that even if someone fails to persuade me in debate, I have to keep listening eternally to something I’ve already heard and judged to be horseshit.
I don’t have to give a hearing to horseshit just because it’s coming from a new person! Horseshit is horseshit! What you’re really complaining about here is the fact that we’re not giving endless debate do-overs to horseshit ideas from horseshit influencers.
That, and the fact that only one side is being asked to be “fair”.