Creating content is the new propaganda.

[ancianita]

Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda

The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet POLITICO has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include "support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others."

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner told WSJ. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

I mean, how refreshing is that?
How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they're going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.

[jmbar2]

1. Interesting

This company also owns Business Insider, the source for the story reported earlier about the guy who applied for 60 jobs and couldn't get hired.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215965633

[ancianita]

2. Your sourcing is interesting. So you believe it? Do you have a link?

[jmbar2]

5. Sourcing

Here's the background on Business insider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider

To see the other sources reporting the story, just Google "Florida man applies for 60 jobs", and look at the other media sources that picked it up.

[ancianita]

9. But this piece didn't come from Business Insider and sidesteps the sourcing. There is

an author and she posted it on Substack. I don't think Business Insider owns Substack but is owned by the same self-proclaimed propaganda company as Politico.

I did what you said and googled that Florida man story, but don't find it in major media, just yahoo, resetera, and local FL papers.

Anyway, to me, the issue is validating our party politics as committed to truth and grounded in fact.
Which media help us do that is important.

Politico is not it. Other sources from media holding companies that are upfront about their being about progaganda are also not it. So probably not Business Insider, either.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Now post the link.

[ancianita]

7. So I thought she was making this up because I saw a Reddit deletion of her post.

Last edited Wed Oct 20, 2021, 12:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Reddit removed this from their "Arts, Entertainment & Misc" threads.

"Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/TrueReddit.
Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."

It was by caitlinjohnstone.substack.com

That's a bot deletion and there could have been other reasons I'm unaware of.

Then I saw 'johnstone's' same news posted by Haaretz and Reuters.

[ancianita]

4. ...

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/refreshingly-honest-billionaire-says

[Sympthsical]

6. It's a political magazine - they all have points of view

There's not much new here about it. And they're upfront. Just like Reason is upfront about its Libertarian bend, National Review about being conservative, etc. etc. Not really propaganda if they tell you up front they're promoting a point of view. Nor nothing particularly unusual about it.

Is it propaganda because you disagree with the point of view being promoted?

Because I don't know how anyone gets any reading done with that perspective.

[ancianita]

8. I hear you.

Is content creation really a point of view? Or trolling? To me it's the difference in commitment to information grounded in confirmable facts, not alt-facts -- not "what about this," "what about that" facts, no "the Constitution doesn't say X, so Y can exist " or "both sides do it" sophomoric thought posing as analysis.

When people gravitate toward what supports their world view, they invite content creation. So yes, reading is harder to get done.

This report turns out to be confirmable information about the acquisition of a political magazine by an upfront propaganda organization.

One DU'er called Politico "Drudge with lipstick."

But the source I used here isn't as much my point as is the reader problem of discerning about information, news, analysis and propaganda.

It IS hard to not get shifted into doubt, cynicism and jokery when we swim in a corporate media ocean.

[Sympthsical]

10. I'm currently studying this

I haven't entirely decided what I want to do with a psychology master's (was originally thinking therapy, but second guessing), but I am gravitating toward how social media affects social psychology and polarization. This semester, we're spending so much time on polarization due to online content. I just finished Ezra Klein's book the other day, "Why We're Polarized."

One study I recently worked through was about how fact checkers were good at figuring misinformation, but actual professors (historians) and academically gifted students were not. And the reason for it is, they were simply not trained to do it.

https://news.stanford.edu/2017/10/24/fact-checkers-outperform-historians-evaluating-online-information/

When very smart people can't figure out what they're reading, that's not . . . great.

What's required is lateral reading. I learned this a long time ago as part of another job, but my psychology research courses really push this, because we necessarily need to know if we're reading actual useful studies or just pop psychology/journalistic bullshit. (And the ratio there is way too high).

People don't instinctively laterally read. In the case you've provided in the OP, I'm happy for the information. Because now I know the purpose, so I know where to be more skeptical or source-check when reading an article from there.

But I read everything. I think everyone should. I read the usual stuff, but I also read right-wing blogs and news sources or Drudge or whomever. I don't have verboten lists of acceptable publications (I think DU gets waaaaay too hung up on this stuff. The Accepted List of Polite Publications is painfully small given the wealth of information out there). If you know how to read them, you can get a lot of useful information out of them.

But this is a giant topic that can go on forever. I just don't like existing in a bubble of being told only the things I want to hear or know. It's a massive trap. So many people who read a lot online and consider themselves super informed are often not. They just know a lot about that tiny corner of reality they've cordoned themselves into, whether it be from ignorance or straight up ideological bias.

So your OP is definitely useful information. Not sure I'd call it propaganda. And I'll still read over there as much as I ever did, which is honestly not much.

[ancianita]

13. Thanks. Your posts are very helpful, too.

The way I'm seeing media these days, everything you say here reinforces my thought that dishonest media that are upfront about their propaganda goals are no more worthy of reading than misrepresenting media are.

I've only got an MA in Education, with minors in Linguistics and Psych. Lately I've been reading more about 'crowd psychology' to get a refresher about crowd behavior's effect on the loss of individual responsibility, and the impression of universality of behavior, sometimes evident with "everybody knows" and "duh, it's so obvious" responses in social media, when such behavior was manufactured and normalized over time.

And that's why people are exhausted. We on DU try harder for fact-based truth and analysis than most people and we're as exhausted as anyone. To me the root cause is that there is little to no adult commitment to fact grounded information -- or even know what an adult is; or even reading what differentiates an adult from those in arrested development who live in grownup bodies.

But I digress. Reuters consistently tries to stay informational, and so does Media Matters, Democracy Now, and Bellingcat, even though the last three are upfront about being liberal by claiming that fact and truth have a liberal bias.
Which they do.

Fabricated and withheld fact is the work of the devil (and I'm an atheist), and when content creation sits adjacent to it, nothing feels trustworthy, right or solid except with the passing of time.

Which to me explains just why justice is so slow in getting to the truth, which will always come out, just not always when we need it to. It might not come out in time to save democracy. But as old Abe said, even AI can't fool all of the people all of the time.

[BannonsLiver]

11. Are they still saying DeSantis "won the pandemic"?

If the organizational leaders had a shred of dignity they would have closed up shop after that headline. Whatever was left of their credibility as a news organization went right down the shitter after that.

[Hortensis]

12. Speaking of propaganda, "capitalist world order?"

I found this clip on geopolitica.ru whose mission is

"Portal Geopolitika.ru is a platform for continuous monitoring of the geopolitical situation in the world, based on the application of methods of classical and postclassical geopolitics. The portal follows the line of the Eurasian approach. The analytical group cooperates closely with the International Eurasian Movement, as well as the Center for Geopolitical Expertises, the Center for Conservative Studies and some ex-members of Katehon think tank.

The mission of portal is to promote a multipolar world based on the order of "Big Spaces". Our goal is the battle for a new Fourth Nomos of the Earth (in the terminology of K. Schmitt). This nomos must be radically different from the unipolar globalist model, based on the dictatorship of liberal ideology."

Anybody able to tell me what this means? Other than that they don't seem to like us, of course. And,

* "Eurasian Movement" is based in Russia

* "Center for Geopolitical Expertises" didn't bring up anything under that name

* Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University is a "proponent of the new Russian conservatism"

* Katehon is a RW think tank based in Russia. According to Katehon itself: 'New York Times has accused Katehon think tank of conducting the information war on the side of President-elect Donald Trump against the liberals, led by Hillary Clinton, and interfering into the elections. "Some of those attacks found a home on Russian websites such as the one for Katehon, a right-wing Christian think tank aligned with Mr. Putin. Katehon recirculated anti-Clinton conspiracies under headlines like “Bloody Hillary: 5 Mysterious Murders Linked to Clinton”.'

[ancianita]

15. Hah! Thank you so much for this.

Last edited Sun Oct 24, 2021, 12:41 PM - Edit history (1)

You know this is a Russia based site (.ru) and you also know that the project of redefining reality through "communications as lived experience" has been part of the Eurasian Project much longer than our media promotion of alt-fact/alt-right reality building. All the more reason we need to think through all the wtf corporate hype.

A good look at this is in Timothy Snyder's The Road To Unfreedom, the best book I've read on Russia (also Garry Kasparov's), in which he explains how Putin had cast about for a new Russian identity, and officially lionized Ivan Illyn's christo-capitalist Eurasian ideas, which Putin revived, expanded, and brought into mainstream Russian confederation raison d'etre. 'Choosing your voters' scams, and all kinds of hybrid spy and corporate trickery went into Russian electoral politics. Russians have been miserable in having to deal with it. Voting along to get along has been the result, which could happen here, too.


The information war got made official through and by Trump, and the corporate media's work to manufacture consent jumped from horse race journalism and king making to reality manufacturing. In that area, Russia was ahead of the game, passed it off to Trump and social media here. So far no fabricated evidence has been brought forward for the murderous Clinton metanarrative, because rule of law ain't havin' that, but churchy christianity fell right in step with the Russian style alt-reality, vegas house of mirrors that once you enter you'll never again find the door out of.

[Ford_Prefect]

14. One more Fascist Propaganda Outlet defending the rights of the mighty rich