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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is the BBC state sponsored media? N. S. Lyons says yes

And while the BBC claims it can operate with nearly three-quarters of its funding coming from the government (whoops, I mean "the public”) and still remain independent in its coverage, this is clearly nonsense. Any organization that relies overwhelming on a patron for its continued financial existence will do what that patron wants. Obviously. And thanks to leaked emails and WhatsApp messages we can peruse a real time record of how the government leveraged this deference during the pandemic, with, for example, an “IMPORTANT ADVISORY” email sent from senior BBC editors to reporters informing them that Downing Street was “asking” if they could please avoid using the word “lockdown” to describe shutting people in up in their homes – and thus only “curbs” and “restrictions” appeared in BBC headlines the next day. This has hardly been limited to pandemic exceptions. As one BBC inside source told The Guardian: “Particularly on the website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.”

Edit: Paging @SSCReader per this earlier discussion

The BBC is the leading purveyor of dangerous disinformation in the UK. Disinformation like "lockdowns work", "masks work" and "vaccines prevent transmission". If to any extent the BBC changed people's opinions on these topics, they would be, in part, responsible for catastrophic levels of harm to the victims of associated policies.

If twitter is going to label RT and similar as state sponsored in an attempt to counter disinformation, then they should also use such things on the disinformation-spreading BBC. I see no reason to give the 21st century Lord Haw-Haw any respect or deference on this matter.

Wait, the BBC is pro-caring about COVID now? The people in the UK I follow on social media are pretty annoyed at them for being part of downplaying COVID, similar to how I see people on the left in the US annoyed that US media is downplaying COVID. I guess they're annoying both sides.

The only remaining members of the COVID camp are incredibly alarmist 99th percentile concern types, some of whom have essentially built themselves into a corner like Eric Feigl-Ding.

It happened, it was a hilariously gigantic overreaction and it seems like society's preferred to just forget about the era as opposed to actually delivering any real comeuppance or punishment upon the ones who architected the ridiculous response.

It's hard for me to tell exactly how much of a bubble I'm in with respect to COVID precautions. I see plenty of comments online like yours suggesting the world looks to you just like 2019 except for occasionally encountering posts online to the contrary. I believe you, I'm just trying to understand how that can be.

I understand that I'm in a city where COVID precautions were more popular; masking in public is certainly not a majority here, but I would find it actively surprising to go to the grocery store or get on a bus/train and see no one wearing a mask. Certainly at any larger (i.e. 10+ people) social gathering I'm at, some of them will be wearing masks, but that's my friends group, so even more narrow than my neighborhood/city. (I know many of my friends test regularly (... although free tests may be going away, so that might not continue...), but that's not visible. It's pretty common for weekend-long-type events I attend to request negative tests.)

Trying to cast a wider net, I went looking at rules for recent conventions. PAX East (March 23-26, 2023 in Boston, MA) required masks. Anime Central (May 19-21, 2023 in Chicago, IL) only recommends masks (their publicity photo from a previous iteration on the top of their website shows everyone wearing masks; perhaps from a previous year when they were required? I've generally noticed events wanting to downplay masks use pre-2020 photos); maybe that's part of a trend towards loosening mask requirements at conventions? Of course, "geek conventions" is its own narrow group, and very well may itself be a hot spot for COVID precautions. Maybe my hobbies and the hobbies I'm aware of happen to be outliers in COVID-cautiousness?

Maybe my hobbies and the hobbies I'm aware of happen to be outliers in COVID-cautiousness?

Having been a frequent PAX attendee in past I'd definitely say that group is on the fringes of COVID observation/some of the Enforcer chats I've been in have had some of the most hilarious 'this person has not been outside in their life prior to enforcing' reminders and questions.

Perhaps there are people who are annoyed that the BBC's lies about covid were insufficiently outrageous, but the BBC still lied in support of lockdowns and forced masking.

This is a damned good post that deserves a serious response, one that I cannot provide. But my intuition is that the self-employed class ended up dying off before they could form a class consciousness. All that remained were wage workers who, while never having known the open-sky freedom of self-employment, still knew that factory labor servitude was a shit deal, and so they embraced socialism which spoke more directly to them and their station in life.

EDIT: Definitely replied to the wrong post, but I can't find the post I had intended to reply to. RIP. : (

I think you replied to the wrong post.

Any organization that relies overwhelming on a patron for its continued financial existence will do what that patron wants. Obviously

Asserted but not proved. Here is my actual experience, it was easier to get ITV to agree to a change than it was the BBC, because the BBC is very prideful about it's Royal Charter and independence.

That doesn't mean the government can't pull strings of course, just that the BBC is really no more accepting of this than private media sources, which is the point. The UK government can squash any story any UK media based platform, the BBC included.

But if you want to know from someone who has been in the role of trying to manipulate the media while in politics, the BBC is more independent than some others that are not publicly funded.

All media organizations are vulnerable to government pressure because in order to exist and run the government must not ban them and allow them to use broadcasting bandwidths and get important interviews and stories and so on. See how ITV reacted after getting a word in their ear about their presenters going off script on Covid conspiracy theories.

The BBC is again in my direct experience no more vulnerable than non-public funded media to that and indeed I would say less vulnerable because of it's position. It does however still have it's own internal biases (pro establishment etc.) that are not linked to its funding status but because of who and where it recruits from.

It’s a good distinction. For instance: Al Jazeera has generally been considered good, except for when talking about Saudi Arabia.

The BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, RT, SCMP, etc are state sponsored. This may harm the idea that the employees there have about “speaking truth to power”, but it’s not untrue.

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

Twitter engagement is shit anyway (going by likes, re-tweets) anyway. NY Times has 50 million followers yet less engagement per tweet than nobodies with 50k followers. It's obvious that little traffic comes from people going to NPR's twitter page.

Zero people are going to be like "I was going to click that BBC/NPR link but since it's labeled as government media, I will read Fox News instead."

It’s an outgroup term, and one Western media has spent decades creating as an outgroup term. “State sponsored media” is quite often used to describe government sponsored media in other countries with the implication being that they’re not independent like the media in the West. There are two problems with this: first, that it falsely implies that everything produced by the media outgroup is completely false, and second that our media isn’t at least partially controlled by other means.

I don’t think controlled state media lies all the time, and in fact unless the lie benefits the regime in question to lie, they probably don’t lie any more often than other media does. If there’s a fire in a factory in China, Xinhua will probably be reasonably accurate about the event, how many were injured or killed, etc. They’re likely to report accurately on things the government says. They probably get the weather report fairly accurate as well.

And our media is controlled, not explicitly, but if you want access, you have to play the game. If you’re too negative on political figures, you won’t get access to those tips and interviews. If you report on something that you aren’t supposed to, you aren’t going to be invited to happenings and lose market share as your rivals break news first and get those big interviews and behind the scenes looks at something. You might even lose advertising if you report something that is too out-there for major brands.

NPR/PBS runs on patronage. The corporation for public broadcasting gives grants and allows shows access to their radio and tv shows. The more your content matches with stuff the inside-beltway likes seeing, the more likely you are to get funding and airtime. So almost everything on there is biased towards those viewpoints. Ben Shapiro couldn’t get on NPR no matter what he does because he doesn’t appeal to the people making the grant and airtime decisions. Things like Hardcore History won’t make the cut either.

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

Because this is a small step down the line to there not being a BBC or NPR any more, and they recognize the threat.

I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.

You're right, but as is often the case, there's a principal-agent problem here.

It doesn't matter to the institutional objectives or news-reporting teleological mission of the BBC or NPR what Twitter label they get. But to Terminally Online journos who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter and rely on it desperately for personal-brand-building? For journos who are working a job that pays them in status/prestige more than money? The cognitive dissonance is gonna cut deep when that hard-earned status is publicly threatened, traduced by their engagement platform of choice equating them to the very Kremlinoid fake-news trollfarms that the journos have been dunking on since 2016. It's like water suddenly declaring war on the fish. And so the journos (agents) will furiously burn the organisations' (principals') resources in a campaign to defend this slight on their own honour.

Not to go full Uncle-Ted-posting, but the oversocialised leftist is extremely vulnerable to this kind of attack.

It's literally funded by the state at the point of the sword. The idea that it would be anything but a propaganda outlet is preposterous.

This is one of the most idiotic hills the media has decided to die on, and nothing but great PR for Musk.

That said, there is basically nothing that isn't a propaganda outlet for the managerial technocracy at that scale anyways. Where they get their funds from is ultimately of little relevance when they're branches of the government in their own right in effect.

That's the thing, it is propaganda but mostly propaganda for the values and self interest of the BBC, it's employees a d their class; not the government. These can coincide and the government can put their thumb on the scales, but in general doesn't.

They are the government though.

The guy in Westminster is just a figurehead. The BBC and the functionaries that actually decide meaningful policy are on the same side because they are the same class of people with the same interests.

Was reading NakedCapitalism on this and they made a good point that “State Media” isn’t inherently bad and most is probably ok. But it’s used as a slur against say Russian state media.

They are state funded. But it doesn’t really tell you if it’s good or bad. But traditionally the label has been used as a slur to indicate propaganda/misinformation.

Does it matter that NPR is state funded if it's is indistinguishable from NYT, or for that matter genuinely 'independent' local journalists or substackers? Even with no financial incentive besides direct subscriptions, the most popular substack is still heather cox richardson. Is she going to say anything that NPR wouldn't? And (afaik) the UK govt's influence over UK media, officially independent or not, is generally larger than in the US.

NPR isn’t NPR because of government funding, it’s NPR because of who the people who work for NPR are, and because of who the people who listen to NPR are.

I don't think they'd appreciate being referred to as "deep state media" or "Left, Inc. media" either.

agree. same thing. same people/ideology/ bias

I largely agree, although I still think there’s some value in holding these people to the same standards that they hold their counterparts in Bad Countries like Russia and Iran to. If you were to make this argument as a defense of Russia Today, saying, “The fact that they’re funded by the Russian government is irrelevant; the viewpoint advocated by RT is due to the kinds of people who work for RT, and the people who listen to it,” there is no chance in hell that the NPR audience would consider that defense remotely credible.

So, if they want to believe that “state-affiliated media” is a valid and useful category, then pointing out the obvious parallels is a useful way to humiliate and undermine them. I’m not necessarily saying this is the best approach - I think that maintaining intellectual coherence and actually having good arguments is probably more important than “owning the libs”, although my confidence in that view is fraying - but I do think it’s probably the best thing that Elon Musk can do, because these people are actively trying to destroy him, leveraging every bit of sophistry and media manipulation that they can muster; for that reason, Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible.

But NPR's quality is leagues above russian and iranian state media. And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against. There really is a kind of "state-run media" that the soviets had, and that Russia today has, that the US doesn't have today. Trying to pave over that distinction as an 'own' makes your concerns, even when otherwise correct, look silly and easily dismissible.

Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible

... It's just musk doing yet another epic musk thing, like "legacy verified. may or may not be notable". Robbing power? NPR continues to post exactly what they did a month ago, the same people as last month trust it or don't trust it, etc. Nobody's been demoralized.

(I didn't expect NPR to ragequit twitter though, that was dumb)

Trying to pave over that distinction as an 'own' makes your concerns, even when otherwise correct, look silly and easily dismissible.

It's correct! You agree it's correct! Letting people who hate you lie to your face and doing nothing, not even calling them liars, because you don't want to look 'silly' is cuckoo.

I agree that [NPR bad], although I'd phrase it more generally in terms of progressives/universa/etc. I do not agree that [NPR is state media implies NPR is bad] is correct. A smart liberal will just respond ... like above, "NPR often criticizes democrats, chinese media doesn't criticize Xi, my standards are reasonable". Is Xi Jinping said the COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the data says otherwise one of the top duckduckgo results for "site:globaltimes.cn Xi Jinping"? It is for biden / npr! Yeah, 50 stalins, but that's not the argument either elon or grandparent comments are making. You can't kill anything by striking at shadows!

Yeah, NPR is offensive to me in two independent ways, one of which is related to it being state-media and one of which is not: First, I don't like its political and cultural biases, which NPR happens to share with almost all other sources of news media regardless of funding source. I don't see NPR as significantly more pro-state than most of its privately-owned peers. Removing the public funding is not likely to improve NPR's reporting in any noticeable way.

But I also strongly object to the fact that I'm forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values. It's not that state funding is necessarily corruptive of the final product (though it almost certainly is, to at least some extent), so much as the American people should not be forced to subsidize a news network that seems to actively despise them. Subsidies are bad regardless of whether the recipient feels obligated to the subsidizer or not.

These are two bad things about NPR, but only one of them has anything to do with its source of funding.

But I also strongly object to the fact that I'm forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values

A fact check I skimmed implies that, generously, 23% of NPR's revenue is apparently ~ $309M. US federal govt revenue $4.90 trillion. That's 0.001450408163265306% of federal revenue - if you paid $50k in taxes, 72 cents of it went to NPR. Given half of the US loves NPR's values, "my tax dollars!!" isn't a good objection here. It's better for something like welfare

All you've done is demonstrate the pernicious problems associated with the distributed costs and concentrated gains of government subsidies. It may not be much individually, but in the aggregate, a lot of good/harm can be done with $309 million. At what point am I allowed to start caring about my tax dollars being spent on things I morally disagree with? Am I not allowed to oppose the government torturing people in my name (water boarding and attaching people to car batteries isn't exactly expensive)? It's not really about the money, it's about not providing implicit support to things I oppose. The government shouldn't be spending any amount of money producing politically charged propaganda aimed at its own citizens; the fact that I'm not personally bankrupted by it doesn't make it any less objectionable.

Who are you to decide how much @thorouglygruntled needs to pay for taxes before he can object? How much of his money goes into other people pockets, by force, before he can be against that?

It's not a numbers argument but a moral one.

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What i find interesting about your second paragraph is that it applies really well to people who want to defund the police. People shouldn't have to pay the government for the government to buy guns and train guys to come point the guns at you. Maybe worrying about government programs that literally entail pointing guns at citizens is more salient than being upset that the state is funding propaganda, gesturing in the direction of some theoretical gun being pointed.

You're allowed to oppose the government funding more than one thing at a time.

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[NPR is state media -> NPR is bad]

I don't know what an arrow means grammatically, but those are two separate statements. Npr is bad, and Npr is state funded. Which do you disagree with? If your concern is that progressives can easily dismiss it, my response is so what? Ideologues can dismiss anything which makes their ideology look bad, and a post modern ideologue barely has to even think about it for two seconds.

Besides which, regardless of how they could respond, they have chosen to respond by getting bent out of shape about it! The media is the progressive shadow, it covers for all their shenanigans. And accurately labelling these media organisations isn't striking at it, it is merely adding more light.

Sorry, the arrow was supposed to mean 'implies'. People say 'NPR is state media' to imply that that state-medianess is bad, causes bias or corruption. But that's not true - NPR would be just as bad, and self-censor just as much, if it was subscription-funded. There's little similarity between the ways US and chinese media are 'bad'. If you actually want to hurt NPR, believing that 'NPR is state media' just misdirects you - as elaborated above, removing their state funding wouldn't change anything! It's like, if you hate guns, saying "school shooting! assault rifle!" - it riles up the base, it convinces people, but the only thing they're convinced of is murky, non-actionable ideas.

I mentioned progressives easily dismissing it because Hoff said elon was doing good work by 'humiliating' and 'demoralizing' progressives. It being trivial to dismiss means it doesn't do that very well!

There really is a kind of "state-run media" that the soviets had, and that Russia today has, that the US doesn't have today.

It has, it's just for external consumption: VoA, RFE/RL and other USAGM operations are exactly the kind of "state-run media" RT is.

But you're right about the media for internal consumption. If the first thing Biden did after his inauguration was have the FBI arrest Murdoch and let him leave the US only after he sold his stake in Fox to Bursima Holdings, this would be comparable to the level of control over media Putin had even back when almost everyone considered him a reliable partner.

And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against.

NPR completely and explicitly buried a story about major corruption from a presidential candidate and his son's overseas business dealings, in order to hand that preferred candidate the election. I'd challenge to to find a more-impactful example of corruption censorship from any other news media in world history.

"Completely and explicitly"? Huh? Chinese reports on corruption of Xi's son wouldn't look like (pre-2020 election) this - or explicit coverage of a biden sexual assault allegation

Because political leaders in China can have stories, or entire topics, pulled at their discretion!

I'd challenge to to find a more-impactful example of corruption censorship from any other news media in world history

:/ Not sure how to respond to this? Chinese media reporting on Xi's consolidation of power? Saudi media reporting on MBS's purges?

"Completely" as in zero coverage. "Explicitly" as in they came right out and said "We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listener’s and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions”

Accusing Biden Sr of sexually assaulting a grown-woman is not exactly damaging when he's recorded on camera grooming multiple little girls.

If anything it helps.

Regarding Hunter, why write he was paid 50k a month instead of the actual number? Oh, just 50k?

What about his actual qualifications? What makes him worth 50k a month? Is there anything that connection to his father would bring to Burisma?

They asked Burisma for comments, not Hunter?

Here's a piece from the NYP about the media's undying support for Biden

And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against.

I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away. Oh, and also, those refugees? Doctors, lawyers, scientists. White People are only 56% of the births now? Nah, that's not important news, no need to report that.

Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.

I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away

Oh, you can get both, except that the Chinese government might literally lock you in your house (or rather apartment building) because you might catch a cough.

Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.

Chinese/Saudi media does that too. You might be surprised how much people in China trust state media.

How sure are you that China's approach to lockdowns are any worse than in the west? Most western countries had universal lockdowns, often long, and often multiple of them. China tended to have shorter regional lockdowns. When it comes to time spent under lockdowns, the average person in Europe likely faced a greater level of lockdown than the average person in China. Perhaps more tellingly, the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them. Both are utterly despicable, but the CCP was already regarded as illegitimate pre-2020.

I have to wonder how much of "China lifted lockdowns in reaction to outcry" is a result of optics, where even the CCP realized "this looks really bad" WRT things like Shenzhen(?) going hungry and the government having to deploy drones that broadcasted stuff like "please control your soul's desire for freedom." I imagine even the Bluest parts of North America wouldn't think to write something that sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang.

Why would China have worse optics for, approximately, doing the same lockdowns that many other places around the world have seen, complete with hunger and nigh-satire levels of totalitarian imagery?

the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them.

Western repression is a sieve, Chinese repression is a dam. A dam fully contains dissent until it reaches emergency levels. Canada could treat its protestors roughly because they didn't reflect a level of discontent that could threaten the regime.

My point is about media, not policies.

but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed

Does it make sense to attribute the lockdowns to 'censorship and propaganda' being 'deployed'? It seems to have, much moreso, been a 'decentralized consensus' among national, state, and local experts, media, bureaucrats, etc. It was bad, but the cause of the bad thing wasn't censorship and propaganda. Anti-lockdown censorship was bad, but it wasn't load-bearing. Being against lockdowns (and vaccines, etc) became pretty partisan, and I don't think less censorship would've made blue people change their minds back then. Would Rs have become more anti-lockdown?

Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'. You make an argument for the former, but nothing for the latter. The media is bad, but bad in an entirely different way!

When it comes to whether lockdowns depended upon censorship and propaganda to exist is not relevant to whether we should regard organisations that were paid to put out that propaganda by states as state sponsored.

They actually admitted to using propaganda several times. They decided as policy early on, to imply that masks don’t work (they later reversed course). They have admitted to trying to scare people into compliance by playing up the deaths (which is why there was major reporting on hospitals being overwhelmed, nurses and doctors nearing burnout (and dancing), and the ubiquitous “death clocks” in every major news outlet). It was a master class in narrative creation, down to the anti-opposition propaganda (misinformation!, anti-science, killing grandma) and the videos of people being thrown out of various stores for refusing masks.

I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu. And tbh, had we treated flu to the same level of propaganda, the results would’ve been roughly similar. People would absolutely panic, because more people than you think die of flu every year. We just don’t put up giant deathclocks on the nightly news.

I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu.

This is false.

We can argue over exactly what rate of death and severe side effects is acceptable and what mitigations are acceptable to reduce those rates, but COVID-19 causes a lot more of both than any flu we've seen other than the 1918 one, including among the young and healthy. Previously young and healthy people becoming majorly disabled by Long COVID is something that happens, albeit rarely. I'm not sure where to get the best data on this, but the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season, but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure, partially because studies vary widely in their definitions. And it's unclear how to define a fair comparison because getting the flu rarely happens more than once a year and usually significantly less often while COVID-19 infections happening multiple times a year is common.

Mind, the flu poses very little danger to the young and healthy, so even a lot more dangerous than the flu can quite reasonably fit inside your acceptable risk profile. But treating them as the same is not accurate.

(And, uh, maybe it wouldn't be terrible if we took some measures to strengthen our protection against airborne pandemics like improving ventilation and accidentally reduced flu prevalence as a side effect.)

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

Which puts it in the range of the Hong Kong Flu and Asian Flu, two mostly-forgotten pandemic flus in the latter half of the 20th century.

but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure

We know no such thing.

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.

It just turns out

This is the wrong phrasing, since we already knew all that by February 2020. Propaganda and so-called opponents of disinformation instead propagated disinformation that it was otherwise.

Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'.

Didn't government agents (FBI and/or state department) request Twitter censor specific antivaxxers?

Hard to believe this was decentralized.

Perhaps a better word instead of 'government controlled media' is deep state.

In the US it's not state-owned media, it's media-owned state.

And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against.

How much coverage did NPR have of Hunter Biden's adventures?

But NPR's quality is leagues above russian and iranian state media.

How bad are Russian and Iranian non-state media?

NPR is horribly biased.

For a month they will run dozens of times a day the same jingle/trailer with half a dozen quips that they think best represent their content.

One of the quips they had was 'accusatory voice talking about Trump' about his impeachment or something like that.

If you listened to it for a couple hours you heard several times somebody implying authoritatively that Trump did something bad.

Point taken, but I don't quite agree. Establishment organs defend the establishment, which is large part defined by state apparatus. Add funding to the mix, and the bias is obvious and inevitable.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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