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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Example, please
-
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.
-
Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
-
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.
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.
-
-
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.
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.
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.
