Slop.

sry for blasting you with copypastas, last one

Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as "facts" and "common sense". They don't even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.

It's why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans "talking about politics", but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a "fact" with no political content.

It's why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not "political" but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as "bringing politics into my video games!"

The word "propaganda" in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it's often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see "propaganda" as "something foreign countries have" and not something they have to worry about.

No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an "anonymous" source maybe you shouldn't take it too seriously.

This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It's like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.

It's also why they call us things like "wumao" and "Russian bot", because since they believe their media is simply "fact", they legitimately believe it's not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!

It's even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to "liberate" them.

It's why they say "I support the people but not the government of China", because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be "liberated" by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don't agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a "brainwashed ultranationalist" simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/

When I moved out on my own I never bothered getting a cable subscription. It's been several years now. On my PC or my phone, I use ad blockers. On the TV we pass around account credentials for streaming services. I almost never even see advertisements any more (in media, anyway), aside from when Mike Duncan is hawking razor blades or mattresses at me for the first minute of his podcast.

On rare occasions my wife turns on a stream of CNN, John Oliver, the Super Bowl, the Olympics or whatever, or when I go to see family or somewhere in public where cable news is playing, I begin to feel physically ill. It is all just so fucking slimy and duplicitous. They literally cannot go a minute without reinforcing some sort of big lie about American exceptionalism, empire, or the innate benevolence of American institutions, the global free market, or their new favorite term, the American led "rules based international order."

It is, as Zizek would say, pure ideology. It is nothing but ideology. Doesn't matter if it is MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, local broadcast TV. It is always like fucking astrology. It is always working backwards from the assumption that the United States is legitimate and justified in all circumstances to explaining how domestic and world events uphold that assumption. It is never an investigation into how or why crises take place, what the root causes are, or how they might be avoided or mitigated. It is never about holding powerful people accountable.

Then after 6 minutes of that slop, it is time to cut to the advertisements so you can learn about what new Tide Pod flavors just dropped, some new TV series about being Black in America which frames all problems of living in the inner cities on a bunch of yokels in the hills and prescribes unity as the solution, how the newest Ford pickup is bigger and stronger than all previous iterations but we care about the environment, or some patriotic spiel from Bruce Springsteen about how great America is, followed by a sales pitch for the new Jeep Wrangler, and then three or four ads about the newest prescription psyciacric drugs with animations of sad bumblebees turning into happy bumblebees while someone reads an entire page of disclaimer copy.

It is fucking bleak. It is worse than any picture they try to paint about the conditions of propaganda in our Official Enemies(TM) like China or DPRK. It is like a very bad methamphetamine-enhanced acid trip.

US media are state propaganda. They have merely managed to create an illusion of independence because the methods by which they are controlled are sophisticated and embedded into the system itself via class interest. The control mechanisms are so omnipresent that people in the west don't even notice them, much like a fish doesn't notice the water around it because it is completely surrounded by it and has known nothing else its entire life. This is what the Nazis called "Gleichschaltung", a complete and total ideological alignment of all mainstream media, educational institutions and big capital with the ideology of the state, they are all in lockstep with the neoliberal imperialist agenda. There is no major institution of American society that dares contradict the official line when it comes to the political or economic system, or the United States' global imperialist project.

Eugene_V_Dabs@hexbear.net

the American people are simultaneously the most propagandized people on earth, and yet believe themselves to be more immune to propaganda than any other group of people on earth. This monumental achievement of tyranny over the people can be attributed to the privatization of media. By making sure media is packaged under several different "brand names" like Fox, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, AT&T, Viacom, CBS, Walt Disney, etc. it ensures that the consumer of American propaganda believes themselves to be a curator of diverse sources which disagree with each other. But in reality these sources are neither diverse, since they are traceable to a handful of media monpolies which themselves receive a significant bulk of their non-investigative information from the US State Department, nor are they in any disagreement when it comes to the details most useful to American foreign policy and intelligence objectives. They are all state propaganda masquerading as independent media. Conservatives and liberals, imagining themselves to be opposites, vote for a single capitalist party masquerading as two opposition parties, and they drink media from the same trough, only slight hints of biased flavor has been added to satisfy their instincts. Both Fox and MSNBC will engage in pro-war propaganda, but one will do so with a xenophobic and fascist glee, while the other will appeal to the so-called humanitarian instincts of the liberal. Between these two extremes, which are not extremes at all, are a litany of "centrist" outlets that mix fascist glee with pseudo-humanitarianism.

—@Eugene_V_Dabs@hexbear.net