As a witness of protests at Maidan square in Kiev, I was staggered by the depiction of the events in Russian medias: it was a heavily engineered and coherently orchestrated image full of humongous distortions to the point of creating a parallel reality. Their usual tool is taking an insignificant trend/event that fits their needs and blowing it out of proportions ("nazi" at Maidan, "repressed Russian-speaking population" in mostly Russian-speaking Kiev), producing emotional news about fake events ("a little boy in Slavyansk crucified by Ukrainian punishers"), carefully planned wording and dictionary ("Ukrainian junta/punishers"), flooding websites with paid trolls [1].
Having seen it myself, I will not believe a single word from Russian medias until the Russian regime and its centralized control over media is gone.
The same shit is happening here. Massive distortion of reality and epic-level propaganda on US media. We need to always be skeptical of the pushed narrative.
I can't judge that by myself, but my external impression that if there is such thing as Western propaganda, it must be incredibly subtle and seamless, omnipotent and omnipresent to be real. Russian propaganda is not a thing you are not aware of as a Russian, it's just that it gets you emotional and grows a self-protection from external believes.
Many Russian medias start to claim "look at the others, they are not better" when confronted with a clear evidence of their lie. Even more, it grows a kind of double-speak: I have an impression that the majority of Russians understood who the Crimean "polite green men" were, but they were still supporting the official narrative in public.
I strongly advise against believing in "all these media are sides of the same coin", it's a well-known instrument of propaganda.
The idea that the media in the US is pure government propaganda. There is vigorous debate on innumerable issues. Think for instance of the climate change debate, or Middle East policy. In Russia you don't have that at all.
One of the basic tactics of pro-Russian propagandists is to not deny that the media in Russia is all propaganda, but try to persuade people that the same is true everywhere else.
The idea is that people won't know what ideas to trust, and will become cynical and apathetic. Once that happens Russia can simply expand unopposed.
Absolute nonsense. There are occasional biases in the media and some level of circular information flow, but that is not even remotely comparable to the Russian shill factories and the absurd and abstruse stories created and pushed by Russian government and linked media. If you don't believe in the shill factories (which are indeed real), think of that: the Russian foreign minister going on TV to criticise a supposed rape of a young girl in Germany, days after it has been forcefully debunked and state media reporting it as a fact still. All with the intention to get people angry/scared of refugees, rile up the Russian community in Germany and overall sow distrust and conflict.
There's media manipulation, but it's more by private companies than the state. Which is definitely also troubling, but at least we get three or four different pushed narratives to choose from, instead of the true Russian reality distortion field.
Ask former classmates or relatives who went into journalism. You may hear they are reluctant to pursue some stories because they don't have enough proof to protect themselves against powerful people the stories could be construed to be slandering, but it's almost unheard of for western journalists to be worried about being assassinated at the rate journalists are assassinated in Russia and the territories it dominates.
Watch talks given by Russian journalists before they were assassinated or after they fled. Even compare them to American journalists who died in uncertain circumstances, or whistle blowers like Edward Snowden.
I wish there was some way to get objective data on this subject.
Maybe Russian journalists are indeed assassinated and western ones (mostly) aren't.
But there are a lot of effective means of coercion that don't involve killing someone, and can actually turn them into an asset rather than a liability..
It absolutely is not some abstract subject that can be summarily dismissed by saying its impossible to measure intimidation of journalists or that no one has perspective on the issue. Take a look at the exhaustive treatment by the Committee to Protect Journalists [1] of the different ways journalists are targeted and controlled around the world. For example, some like Saudi Arabia and China tend more towards censoring and jailing journalists.
Compare the numbers to see the different types of attacks on journalists in different places around the world. Then read some of the short articles, or in depth reports.
It only works when media have been monopolized. All media in Russia that have not enjoyed full government editorial control have debunked these stories quite spectacularly, but now they're almost non-existent.
This would never work in a media world with a Daily Show, for once.
It's hard for me to guess, maybe centralization of media makes it so attractive for governments to distort information. When there are at least two sides loudly confronting each other, the general picture gets much better.
A curious example: Ukrainian media channels are mostly funded by local oligarchs, but each of them has different agenda and interests, so they often fight each other, and that produces an external assessment of "partly-free" for Ukrainian media space.
Not really. You can just be sure one side is lying and, if one is, both can be. When that happens, the mainstream narratives get discredited and marginal ones gain traction.
But neo-nazis like Andriy Parubiy did play a significant role.
The guy founded Social-National Party of Ukraine together with Oleh Tyahnybok. There's nothing "nazi" about them, they are nazi and they're not trying to hide it at all. Look at the logo of the party they founded, look at the Azov Battalion insignia.
Parubiy first became the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council mostly managing paramilitary units and now he is the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament. Tyahnybok made it to the top list of antisemites, published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Journalist in Kiev are being killed on a regular basis. Alexander Shchetinin was found shot dead in his apartment today. A month ago car bomb killed Pavel Sheremet.
That's actually a nice example of the very propaganda we are speaking about. It's hard to find someone farther removed from being a "nazi" than Parubiy. And yet, here this comment is, coming from a freshly registered account.
And the Azov insignia is just a stylized state emblem of Ukraine. Seeing swastikas everywhere is an important part of the approach, I guess.
It's hardly only Russian media has pointed out a connection between the Azov Battalion and neo-Nazism. Even the United States Congress, usually no friend of Russia, cut off funding in 2015 due to these connections. There's a bit of a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion#Neo-Nazi_ideolo...
Azov are kind of right-wing (although not outright "nazi"), but this judgement is not (and should not be) based on how their insignia looks. And also, Azov has no connection to Parubiy at all (Azov just reused that unlucky old logo out of the blue).
There is a cultural difference in what Ukrainians and Russians mean when they say "nation". In Ukraine, when you say "nation" you mean basically the same as what a USA president would mean under this word. But in Russia, the word "nation" is considered to be synonymous with "nazi", and is generally avoided.
The funny thing is that Tyahnybok is the one that tried to tone down the Parubiy's nazi-like styling. Parubiy was involved in pretty much all neo-nazi and ultra right groups. Social-National Party of Ukraine, Patriot of Ukraine, Svoboda, various paramilitary units, etc.
> Seeing swastikas everywhere is an important part of the approach, I guess.
That's a nice way to dismiss it, but it doesn't help the fact that they went to a great length to emulate the nazi branding. The name of the party, lovely evening torchlight parades [1], and even the decorations at speaking events [2].
I clearly do not want to support russian propaganda but as european I distrust the usa as much as russia. The usa has a way to big influence on european media. Its very nicely described in this video of german satire show "Die Anstalt" how big german media companies are financed and controlled through transatlactic companies: https://youtu.be/1ntSxZatFv8 (only german, couldn't find one with english subtitles). There is also a nice video of young journalist Tilo Jung how he asks german government about the fact that russia is renewing their atomic weapons (its bad) and then he asks what they think about the fact that the usa is doing the same inside germany with their atomic weapons (good).
Also they descripe nicely how the usa is and was destabelising the near east and we europeans have this huge crisis next to us now because of those actions. https://youtu.be/MCjeHLjyiMo
In the end for me the usa is playing this game of the good and the bad as much as russia is and as a european I see ourselfs in another political situation than good and bad, we are something third.
Based on the number of false equivalencies and specious arguments in this comment thread, it looks like the Russian trolls also have Hacker News on their roster of Western social media sites.
This comment is so typical of any story that discusses Russia these days: a flat out rejection of the idea that people who disagree might just be people who disagree. You're either against Russia or you're paid by them/are them.
It's ridiculous and just makes the anti-Russia position look piss weak, or even like propaganda itself. And I say that as a man born in western Europe who has never even been to Russia, but this business of constantly painting anyone who doesn't toe the party line as a paid troll is disgusting.
Definetly. HN may not have a huge audience, but it's a very common source of news and articles that later get republished in other aggregators; I would bet they'd use more subtle tactics there though.
The New York Times has a long history of cooperating with three-letter agencies as a state mouthpiece. The irony of their publishing this article is delicious.
Why is this ironic? I'm struggling to find a reasonable interpretation for this claim other than "The NY Times has been wrong about issues of spying and propaganda before, therefore it's not worth my time to consider the claims in this article, and I dismiss it completely." Which is a reasonable thing to believe. A little harsh in my opinion, but reasonable can disagree. However, it's definitely not ironic.
Even if you believe that the NY Times is nothing more than an appendage of the US security establishment, then it's completely straightforward that the establishment would be trying to counteract the propaganda. It's certainly not ironic for the CIA to try to identify and stop foreign spies even as it itself uses spies, or that the military builds armor even as it also uses guns, is it?
If you believe that the NY Times has an institutional position that propaganda is always and forever a legitimate tool of the government, then there's no contradiction if they also call out propaganda for the purpose of neutralizing it.
If you believe that the NY Times is more or less a legitimate news organization that maybe has made mistakes in the past, then I think the article is newsworthy and relevant.
I keep seeing discussion of Russian involvement in other countries' politics dismissed as ironic, which seems to just be a rhetorical trick to make it sound like there's a more sophisticated argument than just "I don't believe that source".
I did not dismiss the notion that Russia produces propaganda; Russia produces propaganda.
Generally, I expect that those alleging wrong doing are not engaging in the same; and so it appears ironic when an exposed agent of state propaganda alleges that a state is engaging in propaganda. It's a, "well yes, and you would know" sort of humour.
Let those without sin cast the first stones, and all that.
The root of the disagreement seems to be that you read the article as condemnation and I read it as a news story. In any case, I stand by my reading that this a piece of news and any heavy moralizing is a gloss you've imposed.
> so it appears ironic when an exposed agent of state propaganda alleges that a state is engaging in propaganda. It's a, "well yes, and you would know" sort of humour.
I'd say it's more of a "rain on your wedding day" sort of irony.
If the article were planted by the CIA, that would be ironic. If the article were planted by the FSB, that would be even more ironic. But "NY Times reports on foreign propaganda" is not ironic.
I am attempting to argue for shades of grey; the American and Russian media narratives evoke a polarized situation.
In that manner of thinking, I think it's fair to question the messenger who brings accusations of wrongdoing during a politically sensitive time. That is to say, this reporting came at a serendipitously good time for certain politicians.
That everyone does it doesn't mean that everyone does it to the same extent, or with the same impact, or that doing it is at all justifiable.
This was not relevant to my point. 4 comments (in 2 places) without touching my point... :-( You are not serious, bye.
You argue also in the other comments that there are small differences between USA and Russia -- my repeated point is that the whole Western democratic world don't agree with your assessments here.
(In Sweden, a good part of the ex communists do agree with you -- at most 5-10% of the population-- but those guys have never supported a democracy in military conflict with a non democracy...)
I responded to that several times. It does not matter who agrees with whom about their allegations of another's wrong doing when that is not questioned.
"Russia makes Propaganda."
"That's ironic for them to say, as you're complicit in making American Propaganda."
"These countries agree that Russia makes propaganda."
"Russia makes propaganda. So does America."
And so on.
Hell, America makes propaganda wholesale with its military advisors program and huge logistic and financial support of Hollywood.
You started by agreeing that there were different levels of gray, now you really argue the same position as Putin's propaganda -- there is no real difference between the democracies and the dictators.
Without doing any real discussion of all the liberty indexes and freedom of press etc...
I'm not claiming that there's no real difference; I'm claiming that it doesn't matter who agrees that Russia engages in propaganda. That doesn't change that America does as well.
Is Russia or America worse? I don't care which is worse, that doesn't matter. They both do wrong things.
It's not just a matter of the moral equivalence of propaganda, but of credibility. When a major media outlet is pushing a narrative that supports a government agenda, skepticism is warranted.
We are not talking just "a government agenda" -- as far as I've seen, the whole democratic world (not only USA and Sweden) say something quite similar regarding Russian propaganda.
How are you measuring what the "democratic world" says, exactly? What it's media says?
Isn't Donald Trump making waves right now for having improbably high support despite thinking Putin is not so bad after all? Dumb though Trump may be he is without a doubt a key part of the "democratic world" right now.
1. Can you condemn Putin for starting wars and annexing area in Europe, just like Hitler in the 1930s? If you refuse I will assume that you work for the Russian junta. (To _only_ condemn USA instead is not an answer.)
2. My sources are e.g. what is said by common EU institutions and by state chiefs in the EU. Like here http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-31932005 BBC is just part of the anti Russian global conspiracy..?
(And you contradict that "the whole democratic world" is saying the same thing -- with what one of the newer populists (that isn't even elected yet) said about something else... Is that REALLY the only argument you have...?!)
Which area are you talking about? The war in Georgia?
Cuz if you are talking about Crimea then no. "Annexation" doesn't tend to have support of the people and the referendum and repeated opinion polls by western research groups afterwards show very clearly that the Crimeans wanted to join Russia (and believe the referendum was fair).
If your entire logic boils down to "you either agree with X or you work for the Russians" where X is a highly subjective and debatable thing, then you're always going to see shadowy operatives everywhere. That's just a ridiculous way to debate things.
2. The BBC is not a part of any "anti-Russian conspiracy" (there is no conspiracy). That story is just reporting the views of EU officials.
Guess what - I don't trust EU officials. Quite a few of them also believe the entire British population was brainwashed by tabloid propaganda and that's why they rejected the EU in their own vote: the idea that maybe people can genuinely understand the EU and dislike it is unprocessable to them.
So you can't criticize Putin's wars... I don't know of any reputable political party or media which support invasion wars and annexations in Europe today. (No, Putin's own media are not reputable. :-) )
Elections with more than 95% for any side are obviously fake. It smells of Soviet and North Korea. I've only seen people obviously working in St Petersburg argue that could possibly be true. And you...
And my argument is that on one side there is Putin's paid propaganda -- and on the other side there is more or less the collected western democracies of the world. Those countries usually don't agree on much, but this united us.
You think that position of all the democracies is "highly subjective and debatable" -- after believing that any election result over 95% is real!!
That stretched my ability to give the benefit of a doubt far beyond breaking.
My main point here is: The whole Western democratic world is more or less saying the same thing about Putin.
You have answered two comments of mine without touching that.
(Also -- check the democratic peace theory. USA don't start wars against democracies. Putin just don't want to have prosperous democracies as neighbours.)
The Americans absolutely overthrow Democratic governments[0]; they justify it by quibbling that perhaps the governments weren't the right kind of democracy.
I do not take issue with the notion that Russia engages in propaganda, because they obviously do. I believe I've said as much in this thread.
Whether or not I agree with your statement of the existence of a plurality of agreement among the "Western Democratic World" (why not all Democratic nations?), it is no matter. I would expect cooperation among the Five Eyes, for instance.
Ah, it was a mistake to mention anything else with you, even in parenthesis...
You are not going to touch that the international community, not only US and Sweden, agree that Putin's Russia is much worse.
(As you are certainly well aware of: The democratic peace theory discuss wars, not involvements in coups during the second "great game", that of the Cold War.)
4 comments (in 2 places) without touching my point... :-( You are not serious, bye.
To go from "no country is perfect" to "all countries are equally bad" is Putin's propaganda position -- and the whole democratic world disagrees with your and Putin on this.
It's not a competition; there is no objective yardstick by which to measure which country is worse. Both do wrong, and none can objectively say whether one does more wrong than the other.
What we can do is call a spade a spade whenever we see one.
There is no objective yardstick because the ethical conditions are subjective. For instance, in this very thread it is evident that agreement cannot be found upon whether or not cooperating with Government agencies on messaging is an unethical journalistic practice[0].
There are many metrics, but very few of them are objective; that doesn't mean that those which are not objective are not meaningful, but it means that finding agreement is likely impossible.
To be clear: I do not believe that Russia is in the right, in terms of their concealed use of propaganda. That does not mean I must hold my nose and accept that the Americans engage in clandestine propaganda in collusion with private media.
I have not talked about the "international community", I talked about that the democratic countries agree, regarding Putin's propaganda. Elegant rewrite, by the way.
You claim -- just like Putin's employees -- that there are no real differences between dictatorships and democracies anyway.
And you won't touch if human rights, freedom, media freedom and so on are irrelevant... (The academic measurements of them are part of the conspiracy against Russia?)
Edit: Enough. I'm not going to get my account banned over a 350 karma troll. Bait away, making more weird claims. :-)
In 1976 George HW Bush declared that the CIA wouldn't manipulate the media anymore but this NYT article from a couple months later shows the feds backpedaling on that promise, along with some specific examples of media manipulation from the time:
http://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/27/archives/cia-will-keep-mor...
I haven't found any evidence of post-Cold War media manipulation of this sort, but I don't think American trust in the media has ever fully recovered since those days.
It's likely that the state agencies have learned to better avoid the exposure of these sorts of programs.
Regardless, The Intercept has more than a few stories[0], and Chomsky has shared his opinion[1]. Then there's the small matter of this[2]. And on and on; much of it is hard to verify, like Eglin Air Force base and its Reddit links.
Spreading propaganda is not the same as cooperation with the TLAs. If you read Chomsky in detail, he is describing exactly how this works, and it does not involve spies telling the NYT what to write. It's a lot more gentle.
Seriously, if you're so keen to criticize the western media you might as well do it right. Chomsky wrote several books (E.g. Understanding Power) documenting and detailing how it works.
Now, back to where we started. Where is your evidence specifically for "The New York Times has a long history of cooperating with three-letter agencies"?
I have gotten the exact opposite impression. Maybe 25+ years ago when many Westerns on the hard left naively celebrated communism and the Soviet Union, but the only people who seem to sympathize with Russia are those on the alt-right who wish that the POTUS had the chutzpah of Putin when dealing with foreign adversaries.
The irony of using "alt-right" in this discussion is also delicious, considering it's turned into a pit for people to be thrown into by the media rather than a label for those who adopted it.
It would be fair if the source of the allegations wasn't likewise tainted.
Russia engages in propaganda, and this is abundantly obvious; it would be nice if those claiming such were forward and honest about their own ethical deviancies and the actions of their own state. It is tiresome to hear but one side of the concern from the media.
As Chomsky says, propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. The NYT is very much an American pro-establishment paper staffed by upper middle class ivy league graduates. If the NYT isn't intentionally slanting the news in its favor, then it is merely reflecting the slant that is rather uniform among its journalists and editors.
That story is pretty extreme, but I (yes, an anon account on a random website) can confirm much of this is true based on some reasonable in-depth network analysis.
Take a look at the Incirlik story on twitter https://twitter.com/search?q=Incirlik and note the weird patten many have of reposting thing like emergency response accounts in between pro-Trump messages, and weird conspiracy theories (although [1]).
No it doesn't, and in a scientific setting this approach would suffice. But in a social and political setting, implicature is also relevant. At the very least, there is an undeniable irony about the article.
From the US communist parties of the 1930s to the overleveraged anti-American sentiments of US citizens in the 1960s to the massively expanded and nebulous academic rush to redefine oppression in the 1990s to the "European socialism is so perfect" fantasies of the American lower class in 2010s, Russian propaganda has long been the bedrock of modern America leftism.
It isn't even necessary here. The "propaganda" the article opens with can be rephrased as this: some people in the Swedish government wanted something controversial, and social media i.e. their citizens talking to each other reflected the usual mishmash of true, half true and not true things people often believe about more or less anything controversial.
However, because this time the controversial thing was to do with NATO, it's obviously all the Russian's fault. They have no evidence, and nobody is willing to put their name to such a claim (it's all "analysts"), but no matter, it's definitely the Russians.
Besides, whose word do we have that these beliefs were false? The defence minister!
From the WSJ we learn this: "Swedish lawmakers formally backed an agreement Wednesday that allows the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to more easily operate on Swedish territory during training or in the event of a conflict or other crisis."
That doesn't sound so very different from the supposedly false claim that "NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval". thelocal.se says:
"Originally signed in September 2014, the HNSA with Nato would allow the alliance to transport helicopters, aircraft and ships across Swedish territory, but only upon Sweden’s invitation.
As the agreement involves changes to Swedish law in order to give Nato personnel privileges and immunities with regards to areas like tax and custom rules, it required parliamentary ratification."
It's only a tiny step from that description (NATO soldiers have immunity from some areas of law) to the one apparently circulating (NATO soldiers have immunity in some other areas). Does this really require the invocation of Russian propaganda, or the Facebook telephone game sufficient?
After the Crimea takeover, the Swedish internet was filled with comments with very, very bad Swedish who defended Putin. There were some articles that interviewed the people in St Petersburg employed to write these comments.
The main difference with the Putin supporters today is that the Swedish language is excellent....
(And for a fact -- even in the ex communist party, few Swedes support starting wars in Europe again, in 1930s style. There are obviously lots of Putin propaganda online.)
Ah, typical whataboutism. Because the Russian propaganda is so extreme in distorting the truth, everyone else must do the same. Reminds me of people who compare the political movements they don't like to ISIS, because "both are bad".
True, one must not only remember differences in kind but also in degree, though frankly the difference between Russia and the US is historically one of kind, though certainly not to the degree that the Cold War high school history books would suggest.
Governments do this, almost everywhere. But the Russians have been mastering these techniques for over a century now, and Maskirovka is a significant aspect of Russian military doctrine, which we in the West - while we are tuned into our own variety of it (the Pentagon are really good at this too) - are not necessarily prepared to understand, especially the Russian variant, completely:
It has relevance to us here on HN because after all, these same techniques can be de-weaponized and re-industrialized, and such actions have legitimacy in the marketing world in which we all play. It is indeed wise to learn the variants of deception that major governments - and other world-oriented bodies - enact upon us, the populace.
Because the people it is targetting are so siloed, and so angry at the other side they don't really look past the information. The two sides that they are appealing to are not doing any sort of source evaluation on things that make a person they distrust look untrustworthy. They want that information to be true soooooooooo bad they are failing to do basic information literacy.
They have much better control of media. Social media can be attacked this way, but, like China, it's relatively trivial to push the public towards a "friendly" competitor.
I use a simple method to recognize Putin's propagandists:
Ask if someone is willing to condemn Putin for doing similar invasions as Hitler did in the 1930s.
If the only answers you get to that question are personal attacks and attacks on USA, the person writing is probably working in St Petersburg and paid to write things on the internet.
Edit: 1. I am not American "pabloski", at least get the unserious personal attacks correct. 2. USA generally don't annex territory, unlike Hitler and Putin.
Edit 2: I would ask "pabloski" if he was willing to condemn modern invasions and theft of area in Europe, but it isn't really needed, after he behaved just like I described and he even gave an rt-link.
Are you sure they are not the USA who are doing similar invasions as Hitler? Do you remember? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria ( through Al-Nusra aka Al-Qaeda, yes Al-Qaeda! ).
It's entirely possible to be opposed both to US and Russia foreign interventions. And yet you chose to presume the opposite about berntb post. Why is that?
Well since the first part of the argument is "The USA is like Hitler so Russia is flawless", I'd give the post 0 out of 10 and conjecture that 4chan must be down right now
I didn't mean to imply that you did, just wished to point out that the entire post was absurd not just the conspiracy theory part but the tu quoque part too.
It doesn't need to be. It is implied. Sort of how food manufacturers make favorable and technically correct claims about their food but with the implication that competitors lack the claimed positive trait. Talking about someone else's flaws is also a way of distracting from one's own.
Nowhere is it implied in this article that "America always has other countries' best interests at heart, even if the policy implementation is sometimes misguided".
Both Russian and American medias are two sides of same coin. Both are expert in spreading propaganda, only difference is American media is convincing and Russian media appears to be fake and there is no freedom of media in Russia and freedom of media is rarely used in the US.
I follow RT and NYTimes, and I can say both have left journalism long back.
Whatever anyone's qualms about the New York Times, I find it hard to take seriously any argument that puts it on the same level as RT. The New York Times is not in fact an instrument of the US Government.
As a non-American who follows US politics closely, the NYT might as well be run by the US Government: as far as I can tell the worldviews of the people who run the NYT are identical to those who run the USA and so it's not surprising that it's so often viewed as a mouthpiece. This specific story being a case in point.
Just look at how they handled GWB's "War on Terror", or NSA revelations etc. They just sat on them, despite how newsworthy they were. Too often it was foreign media that broke the stories.
It is unlikely that NYT is ordered to produce stories according to the current administration's liking. Broadly in the West we don't go in for that sort of thing and one hopes we never will.
We don't like being told what to think. The trouble though, is that all ideas have to come from somewhere.
The power of Western style propaganda is that the government does not have to orchestrate it as intensely as in autocracies. It happens automatically because they live and breathe the same air. The relationship is more symbiotic.
If you have real power, you can afford not to be petty. That is the same deal as with the Joker in the medieval court with the King. A government official only kills journalists were they a real threat to his power. If you punish people for a small degree of insolence it is because you are not secure in your power and any provocation could be used to coordinate an attack to displace you. Being 'above' that is a tacit demonstration of power and stability (a good thing!).
What is the practical difference between the information printed by the New York Times and the opinions of the State Department?
I cannot think of any. Any divisions I see are also expressed within the government itself. So they must be coordinated. But is it really from government to media?
The neo-reactionary take is basically the exact reverse of this:
"The New York Times is not in fact an instrument of the US Government."
That's not as whack-a-doodle as it at first sounds. The New York Times is the mouth of a much larger network they refer to as the Cathedral, just as Christianity is not just the physical Vatican City.
This is not necessarily an 'evil' to vanquish, but it does mean if the NYT is misguided on some subject, then it invariably also means the government too is running into the same dead end.
The long and short of it is that the press and the government sup from the same pool of propaganda while they generate it, they believe in their own manufactures. I hope this makes sense to you.
Correct. The NYT is an instrument of the Democrat party, just as Fox News is an instrument of the GOP. Journalism has abandoned the pretense of impartiality, and it is especially notable during this election cycle.
Fox News may very well be an instrument of the GOP, but the same cannot be said of the New York Times and the Democratic party. There are no serious observers who believe the two publications are equivalently rigorous.
Having seen it myself, I will not believe a single word from Russian medias until the Russian regime and its centralized control over media is gone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolls_from_Olgino