this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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MeanwhileOnGrad

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Original Post:

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I asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us. Most of them just berated me, one user claimed the Syria conflict to which I provided a link to a recent UN Statement on which quite accurately reflected the conflict start to finish. Another user claimed that the recently declassified Nixon era documents about the Chilean revolution and coup, but I was able to find a 1973 archived Newspaper accusing the Nixon Admin of having a hand in it from Times Magazine meaning it was already a mainstream theory at the time.

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https://feddit.online/post/1341994

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[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (32 children)

I am not a tankie, but I can help you out - there are many many examples of this

  1. Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism "socialist". This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.

  2. In mainstream press, criticism is focused on individuals and policies, rather than the system itself. In any kind of financial crisis, there is never much mainstream media coverage suggesting that capitalism itself is at fault, it's always little cracks in the system. There are always going to be more cracks because it is a deeply flawed system.

  3. The media often refers to the democrats as "left wing", despite democrats being very decidedly right wing. This serves capital by shifting the overton window and preventing people realizing there is no left wing alternative in the United States.

  4. Any economic policies which acknowledges the reality, that taxes being spent on things like healthcare and education are always a net benefit to the economy, are dismissed as somehow delusional or wrong. In the mainstream press, the national budget is treated as being like a household budget, which it clearly isn't.

The mainstream media is owned by billionaires. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times (UK) are all owned by the Murdoch family. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times, the Atlantic, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe, are all owned by billionaires. It's obvious that it is in their best interests to mislead us into thinking that capitalism is the best system.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 4 days ago (6 children)

The media often refers to the democrats as “left wing”, despite democrats being very decidedly right wing.

Nope, they're a big tent party with centrist & leftist factions. Divisions between factions clearly show up in their voting patterns.

The leftist modern liberal & progressive factions & their caucuses have been a major part of the Democratic party since the New Deal, and their influences trace back to the late 19th century in US politics.

Britannica summarizes the 19th century emergence of modern liberalism to address broader social & economic obstacles to equal access & liberty than the classical liberal focus on excesses of government power.

liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

  • Classical liberalism: minimal government to eliminate traditional obstacles to individual freedom
  • Modern liberalism: positive government intervention to address social & economic inequalities in the cause of individual freedom
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[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

Exactly. They're not hiding things in the sense of conspiracies, I don't think, rather journalists are also believers of capitalist dogma and won't question it because it never occurs to them. We need to remind people "A better world is possible" because mainstream society and media are telling them it isn't and we're just naive.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 11 points 6 days ago (11 children)

Two things are happening, I think:

  1. It's not anymore, but the cartoon when it was printed was pretty accurate. Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems. Or that global warming was a problem. The magnitude of the catastrophe-on-purpose that resulted from that distorted media is still with us to this day. It's why we still don't have a functioning health care system, for example, because everyone in Washington's picture of the world froze in around 1995 when their brains reached the age where they stop making new worldviews. I actually don't think it's fair to blame that on capitalism specifically, since powerful people seizing the methods of media and distorting them to prevent the people from figuring out what's going on is a pretty universal problem in any economic system, but it is certainly accurate and in the US it takes the forms of capitalism (and is still going on today, just in a different form; it's why no one published the whistleblower's warning about the US invading Venezuela for example.)
  2. What the .ml contingent means by posting that is that the capitalist press is hiding the truth that Ukraine started the Ukraine war, that Biden was the biggest threat to world peace and it was therefore important not to vote for Kamala, and so on. They're adopting a time-honored very effective propaganda technique of reversing the roles, and then screaming the role-reversed framing of reality with so much vigor that it's hard for anyone within the bubble to point out that the truth they claim is being censored is readily available to literally everyone, and that they are the ones constantly banning people who don't agree with their carefully curated worldview. Because EVERYONE KNOWS and then they get an inch away from your face and start aggressively repeating what it is that everyone knows.
[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 13 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems.

what

Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet. Israel's supremacy in US foreign policy didn't even come about until the mid-80s, universal healthcare was one of Clinton's main running points in '92, and the private funding floodgates didn't open until Citizens United in 2010, and was deeply controversial with the public.

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[–] stylusmobilus@aussie.zone 2 points 4 days ago (7 children)

I’m not sure why people waste their time on these subs.

These aren’t places for useful discussion on improving society, especially in the US. They are full of people who don’t even really share or uphold socialist views, but are engaging to disrupt and affect the vote or contaminate the outlook of younger progressives.

They’re on Team Trump, Netanyahu and Putin and if they aren’t operatives themselves, they’re farmed useful idiots. I hate saying that about the latter, because they’re essentially good people led down the wrong path. That said, they’re also quite irresponsible.

There’s no space for genuine discussion in those places. You’ll first be bullied by fools then removed when you present arguments. Don’t waste your time.

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