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‘Fake news’ and internet/political regulation

Not to waste time on this, but 75% of the material on RT is as Tony describes, mostly presented, it has to be said, by crumpled US Academics who never made it to the big time. The other 25 % does cover some material that the other channels do not, as in, for example, Belgian politics, or sport, where the coverage isn't bad as long as you don't catch one of the Russian doping moments.

It is funded by the Russian government, and does indeed represent the views of its president. To pretend otherwise is to be blind to the truth. That doesn't make it necessarily a bad watch, in the way that NCIS, a piece of US propaganda, isn't a bad watch either.
 
I judge it from channel-hopping through the various news channels. I obviously don’t have the American variants of either BBC or RT, just what is broadcast on Freeview in the UK. I suspect it is much the same thing. From what I have watched the direction of spin is pretty obvious. It fits very well with the destabilisation theory of Russian influence and to my eyes does much what I’d expect it to. As such I’ve never felt the need to stay tuned for long.

I also judge it from its employing the likes of George Galloway as presenters, a self-serving leftist troll who is never far from sycophancy toward deeply authoritarian states or accepting a dictator or tyrant’s pay-check (he worked for Iran’s equivalent, Press TV, before taking a job at RT and is probably most famous for some truly extraordinary sycophancy toward Saddam Hussain, oh, and Big Brother!).
 
The Real News Network, Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk, The Jimmy Dore show, and often The Young Turks are all good, honest left-wing oriented alternative media channels, and most of the time RT covers the issues of the day in much the same way.

A far cry from the brainwashing shite we're fed by the mainstream (Ch4 News sometimes aside)..

EDIT: thinking about it a bit more, the Young Turks don't deserve to be in that company. They used to be, but not these days.
 
Oddly enough Tucker Carlson of Fox 'News' has been doing some great anti-war pieces of late. Here's another one, albeit totally free from mention of the huge role of the Zionist entity in it all (I guess even his job wouldn't be safe....). But he does at least castigate the Neocons and the sick Saudis:

 
young turks focus too heavily on "identity" issues (sorry to use the term -- alternate suggestions welcome).
 
3 is the radical solution to the problem that gets almost no mainstream attention: we need public alternatives to these privately owned platforms. Negative regulation isn’t going to cut it.

I could get behind that idea. Especially since the BBC, which is meant to provide this, has had such a bad Brexit and Austerity.
 
Oddly enough Tucker Carlson of Fox 'News' has been doing some great anti-war pieces of late. Here's another one, albeit totally free from mention of the huge role of the Zionist entity in it all (I guess even his job wouldn't be safe....). But he does at least castigate the Neocons and the sick Saudis:

You’re putting forward a Fox News piece and telling us it’s a balanced view of anything?
 
One that smacked me in the face was Amazon providing the software and platform for anyone to write and publish a book. The more savvy of these instant authors are already established on social media, and so once the book goes live scads of SM 'Friends' leave glowing reviews and rate-pump the book. BOOM! Instant expert, while most of what's in the book amounts to aggregated information from ... that's right, the Internet. It becomes a circle jerk of mediocrity.

That's not really how Amazon works and such a strategy would most likely just show said book to lots of people who already think exactly like the author and are likely to read/buy the book. It's actually extremely hard to get any traction on Amazon as an new / independent author and it's more of a full time job than the actual writing.
 
young turks focus too heavily on "identity" issues (sorry to use the term -- alternate suggestions welcome).
They've totally swallowed Russiagate too.

I don't know if the $20m investment they got from these elites - all big Democratic Party donors, some of whom serve on the Council Of Foreign Relations - made any difference...

 
I could get behind that idea. Especially since the BBC, which is meant to provide this, has had such a bad Brexit and Austerity.

I remain convinced the BBC is conceptually fit for purpose, it has just been structurally eroded and outsourced over recent decades, arguably for partisan political ends. It is an entity with a history we should all take great pride in IMHO and we should force the powers that be to return it to core function. I would like to see this as manifesto pledges come the next election. No need to reinvent the wheel here, just flush-out and service the one we have.
 
It feels to me that the rot set in during the Birt era, and subsequent DGs have done little or nothing to alter the direction of travel. What the BBC needs, is a Director General who will look beyond the issues of charter renewal, and put the BBC back where it belongs, at the pinnacle of public service broadcasting. If it occupies that high ground, it seems to me that it would be better equipped to survive political assaults than if it capitulated to that pressure. The current compliant regime is misguided, and is failing the public it is supposed to serve.
 
Oddly enough Tucker Carlson of Fox 'News' has been doing some great anti-war pieces of late. Here's another one, albeit totally free from mention of the huge role of the Zionist entity in it all (I guess even his job wouldn't be safe....). But he does at least castigate the Neocons and the sick Saudis:


as much as i hate to admit it, tucker carlson has done some fairly decent reporting over the past year -- at least based on 3 or 4 segments that i have seen (after the fact, of course).
 
It feels to me that the rot set in during the Birt era, and subsequent DGs have done little or nothing to alter the direction of travel. What the BBC needs, is a Director General who will look beyond the issues of charter renewal, and put the BBC back where it belongs, at the pinnacle of public service broadcasting. If it occupies that high ground, it seems to me that it would be better equipped to survive political assaults than if it capitulated to that pressure. The current compliant regime is misguided, and is failing the public it is supposed to serve.

I’d also defend the non-news output as-is. There is a near endless stream of high quality documentary and arts programming on BBC4, a lot of quality output on BBC2 and Radio 3 and 4 have retained very high standards. Viewed overall the BBC is still seriously good, it is just the news and current affairs programming that has slipped somewhat.

PS Episode 2 of ‘Secrets Of Silicon Valley’, which was repeated tonight on BBC2, is highly relevant to this thread and a good example of a good yet approachable documentary. The series was originally broadcast last year so pre-dates the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but gets remarkably close to the bone on this whole topic. Well worth a watch if anyone missed it.
 
I think that in politics anyone who blatantly lies and dissembles in anything vaguely resembling a functioning democracy with a decent forth estate will get their comeuppance in the end. The problem is the amount of damage that is caused prior to that happening.

The MMR debate was eventually resolved and found to be one lone doctor in the pay of a pharmaceutical company preying on the grief of parents vs. all of the rest of the expert opinion in the world. It is disappointing that it took such a large amount of time for that to become clear. And we came close to having hospital car parks containing emergency morgues full of dead children.

I think the next decade or so we will get some of these issues ending up with car parks full of dead children, or their equivalent, and that will start to change the perception of the populace at large. Imagine if Brexit does lead to food shortages, unemployment, medical emergencies, devaluation and significant drop in living standards. Plus the reduction in social care and medical care from a reduced GDP and hence government spending. The people responsible will be held accountable by the electorate. Or possibly by an angry mob. But there will be more dead people.

We have effectively invented printing press 3.0, which delivers intelligently targeted data - true or false - designed to sway individuals to buy, vote or behave the way someone else wants. Given the low likelihood of un-inventing or prohibiting the use of such technology, we are just going to have to become better - as a species - at processing the information intelligently.

There are a lot of minor issues. Most politicians are PPE graduates, lawyers or similar who basically majored in moral relativism. Most journalists do not understand science, being humanities graduates who also can only deal in relativism and not analysis. These things may need to change in order to provide a source of news people can trust, and even pay for, based on a track record of good journalism. They won't pay for it yet, but after the next MMR kills people and a Hard Brexit impoverishes them they might just start looking around for someone to trust.



Also - Putin is playing a blinder. Love him or loath him, he is both taking over and destabilising the west. Brilliantly.
 
There are a lot of minor issues. Most politicians are PPE graduates, lawyers or similar who basically majored in moral relativism. Most journalists do not understand science, being humanities graduates who also can only deal in relativism and not analysis. These things may need to change in order to provide a source of news people can trust, and even pay for, based on a track record of good journalism.

bingo!
 


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