Friday, September 08, 2017

Biased 'News'

From a recent e-conversation:


Correspondent: 'Then again, since the press is biased I hardly know what is true and what isn't.'

My reply:

That has become the big problem I see, and a huge part of that problem is that the majority of people DON'T see it. It is almost impossible for an interested person to figure out what is fact and what is lie, and the average person watching TV news and reading news and commentary will not even be aware that they might be on the wrong end of a very big and very successful propaganda campaign, like 'Trump is a virulent ant-Semite (whose son in law, daughter, and grandchildren are Jewish but don't bother me with facts, you racist. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS tell me it is true, so it must be.'

Whenever I take the trouble to find source documents on a controversial issue, such as the Google engineer's 10 page memo a couple weeks ago, I discover that the the news people have been lying through their teeth.

I frequently can't tell what the lie is. In the James Damore/Google case, did they lie by implying they had read it ie were competent to characterize/comment on it, or did they read it and deliberately misrepresent what it said? Either way, while I don't know which lie they told, I know they lied, because I read the memo and know what they said about it was not merely a different characterization, but utterly removed from what he actually said, AND I read what respected biologists and evolutionary psychologists said about Damore's memo and they said he was right about the science.

Now we have the vast majority of so-called news people and bien pensant commenters claiming that Trump is a neo-Nazi because he pointed out correctly -as did the ACLU- that BOTH the racists and the Antifa fascists went to the rally prepared to commit violence. The "news" position, as well as Trump's political critics' position, seems to be that if the white racists are bad people, then the Antifa angels who showed up with paint balloons, ink balloons, apparently with urine balloons, were peaceful civil rights advocates who were attacked without provocation. And that despite Antifa violent behavior elsewhere, which of course is routinely characterized as 'mostly peaceful', much like the Berkeley response to conservative speakers coming to campus.

It is really scary that most of the country is falling for the lies told by propagandists in the so-called news services and in high government positions. This really is not a lot different from Europe in the early 1930s, and I think it is going to get a lot worse, especially if the propagandists succeed in overturning the results of the election. Too many people are aware of what they are doing for this to remain peaceful.

Now we have Google shutting down websites -offensive ones, to be sure- based on their political positions. Where does that stop?

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