Philomathes2357

Pro-US propaganda and covert influence operations

• Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations

"Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia. The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over aperiod of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation. These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging."

• Propaganda for foreigners reaches US public: Pentagon

"The Pentagon acknowledged in a newly declassified document released on Thursday that the US public is increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations. But the document suggests that the Pentagon believes the US law that prohibits exposing the public to propaganda does not apply to the unintended blowback from such operations."

• Twitter Aided The Pentagon in its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign

"Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond."

• Let’s Get America Out of the Propaganda Racket

"I also anticipate objections from those who might cringe at the VOA and its sister institutions being called purveyors of propaganda. The people will bend over backward as they explain how the VOA “firewall” and charter preserve the service’s independence and journalistic credibility. This, of course, is a crock. With one swift swing of his leather-soled shoe, Trump has breached the firewall and smashed its alleged independence, although a lawsuit to block Pack is in the works. As Ralph A. Uttaro wrote in a law journal in 1982, “The Voice of America, no less than Radio Moscow or Radio Prague, endeavors to change the attitudes of its listeners.” Yes, it informs, but the main idea is frame the news to the U.S. government’s benefit. If the only goal was to inform, the government could save everybody a lot of money and bother by rebroadcasting The Associated Press."

• We are all propagandists now

• Propaganda in America: How to Recognize and Defend Against it

• USA Today - Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

Manufacturing Consent, the propaganda model, and media studies

• Understanding Media Propaganda in the 21st Century: Manufacturing Consent Revisited and Revised by Simon Foley. Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

"...the election of Trump in 2016 constitutes the proverbial ‘year zero’ for fourth estate journalism. As a result of the ‘journalistic’ cultural revolution that ensued, it argues that the Propaganda Model needs to be overhauled if it is to retain its epistemological bona fides."

• The Propaganda Model and Manufacturing Consent: U.S. Public Compliance and Resistance by Anthony R. DiMaggio. Published by Cambridge University Press

• Governing The News: The News Media as a Political Institution by Timothy E. Cook. Published by University of Chicago Press.

"This book seeks to show how the news media are recognizable as a political institution: because of their historical development, because of shared processes and predictable products across news organizations, and because of the way in which the work of newspersons is so intertwined with the work of official Washington that the news itself performs governmental tasks."

• Mass Media as Political Actors. by Benjamin I. Page. Published by Cambridge University Press

"I want to focus, however, on a different way in which media organizations might seek to influence policy: the indirect approach of using their publications or broadcasts to try and change the beliefs and policy preferences of mass and/or elite audiences, which would presumably affect subsequent policy decisions. This indirect approach might be especially attractive to media organizations because of their special positions as key disseminators of political information. Its use could have important implications for the nature of democratic deliberation." - pg. 20

• The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism

• Self Censorship: How Often and Why - Journalists Avoiding the News

Wikipedia

• Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth. Published by MIT Technology Review.

"Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It’s not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards–standards that aren’t especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy."

"So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice, Wikipedia’s standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it’s the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject. That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press–or if it appeared on Dr. Who"

• WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, and Other Stories Wikipedia Tells Us: A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia's Epistemology. Published in Science, Technology, & Human Values.

"Wikipedia has become a ubiquitous source of information and, subsequently, the layperson’s reference: it is a concrete representation of common knowledge. Interrogating Wikipedia then can also be a way of interrogating a manifestation of how “facts” are made in the public sphere."

"To begin, many analytical philosophers have considered the epistemic effects of Wikipedia upon readers, particularly concerning reliability (e.g., Fallis 2008; Magnus 2009). Reliability has been a primary topic of investigation and concern for scholars writing about applied epistemology: the study of whether systems of investigation purporting to be seeking the truth are engineered to lead to true beliefs about the world (Laudan 2006). Other scholars have considered how Wikipedia functions as an example of group testimony (Tollefsen 2009) and, yet, has a different epistemic culture of knowledge production than, say, science because contributors have different goals, collaborate under different norms, and have different motivations (Wray 2009). In our critique and reimagining of the five pillars, we are concerned with reliability as it relates to the processes by which knowledge is produced on the site and who is excluded from these processes. We ask similar questions about Wikipedia as others have. However, we are interested mostly in Wikipedia’s mismatch in explicit and implicit values and how this mismatch impacts the ability of the site to function as “the sum of all human knowledge.”"

• Has verifiability become the new truth?

On the term "conspiracy theory"

• Conspiracy Theory: Truth Claim or Language Game?, published in Theory, Culture & Society

• Enacting polyvocal scorn in Covid Conspiracy tweets: The orchestration of voices in humorous responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, published in Discourse, Context, and Media

"Even though some authors allow for harmless conspiracy theories (Byford, 2011; Dentith, 2014), the term "conspiracy theory" is typically regarded as a loaded, pejorative one (see Wood, 2016; Bjerg and Presskorn-Thygesen, 2017; Martin, 2020)."

• Some Dare Call it Conspiracy: Labeling Something a Conspiracy Theory Does Not Reduce Belief in It, published in Political Psychology

"'Conspiracy theory' is widely acknowledged to be a loaded term. Politicians use it to mock and dismiss allegations against them, while philosophers and political scientists warn that it could be used as a rhetorical weapon to pathologize dissent."

• Conspiracy Theory in America, published by University of Texas Press

(applying the label 'conspiracy theory' has) "the effect of dismissing conspiratorial suspicions out of hand with no discussion whatsoever”

Sources regarding NYT misinformation and propaganda

Iraq WMD Story

• Journalism Studies - Judith Miller, The New York Times, and the Propaganda Model

• The Journal of International Communication - The propaganda model: a test of human rights reporting in The New York Times

• The Guardian - New York Times: we were wrong on Iraq

• Rolling Stone - 16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

• PBS - The New York Times WMD Coverage

• The Intercept - New York Times Makes Glaring Error About Iraq War — Then Corrects it Incorrectly

• Media Matters for America = How The Iraq War Still Haunts New York Times

• The New York Times - FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq

• Observer - Judith Miller Carried Water for the USA's Worst Debacle Since Vietnam

• The New York Review of Books - Now They Tell Us

• FAIR - 20 Years Later, NYT Still Can't Face Its Iraq War Shame]

Israel/Gaza

• The Nation - The Nixonion New York Times Stonewalls on a Discredited Article About Hamas and Rape

• The Intercept - Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists To Avoid Words "Genocide", "Ethnic Cleansing", and "Occupied Territory"

• The Intercept - Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

• Al Jazeera - The unravelling of the New York Times 'Hamas rape' story

• Yes! Magazine - Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation

• Coverage of Gaza War in The New York Times And Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows

• The Hill - NYT pulls Hamas rape story from podcast over internal turmoil over shoddy reporting: Max Blumenthal

Trans Issues

• Nieman Lab - The New York Times Failed to Quote Trans People in Two-Thirds of Stories on Anti-Trans Legislation

Some Thought-Provoking Quotes

• "We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations." — Frédéric Bastiat

• "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, former CIA Director

• "“It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in the first place or in the second place.” - Richard Whately

• "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

• ""Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."

• "People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred." - Scott Adams