Big Brother and his MSM acolytes, together with Big Tech, have got it in for "alternative news."
You know, those news sites mentioned in the Propornot expose as being fronts for Russian propaganda.
I long ago gave up the belief that I was going to get the straight skinny from CNN or the rest of the "mainstream" media.
It wasn't always that way.
I remember driving through the northeast states back in the Gulf War One days, on my way with my family to a new job at the shipyard in Saint John.
If you put a ruler on a road-map, you'll see that the shortest route from Guelph to Saint John runs through the US northeast.
Every little town you drove through in upstate New York, in New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine, had yellow ribbons on all the big trees in all the front yards along all of the main streets.
Every hotel we stayed at had 24/7 Gulf War Shock and Awe on the CNN channel in the front lobby.
When we got to Saint John I made a point of getting CNN in our cable package.
But, that was then.
Times have changed.
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I don't want to write a dissertation on the decline of "news" over the last thirty years, but here's a little experiment. Compare the "news" you get on CNN to what you get on Fox. One is allegedly right wing, the other is allegedly progressive.
Both have a bedrock belief in this thing called "American Exceptionalism." That's the belief that the USA is always right and just in whatever calamities it gifts the rest of the planet. We wrecked Viet Nam? Laos? Cambodia? Most of Central America? Most of the Middle East?
The exceptional nation is currently working overtime to overthrow the legitimate governments of Iran and Venezuela, not to mention Cuba and Nicaragua, even though America's democracy promotion initiatives have a track record of unmitigated disaster for the last seventy years?
But America is a force for good?
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Here's another experiment.
Read this "analysis" of the current Ukraine election from Canada's state broadcaster, the CBC.
Then try this one on the same topic from an "alternative" news site called The Vineyard of the Saker.
Read them both. Decide for yourself which one is more objective and better informed.
And even better, read everything out there on every side of this topic... that's how informed opinions are made.
Informed opinions are not made by having Facebook and Google block sites that offer countervailing opinions to claims of American Exceptionalism.
A year ago a post on this blog, insignificant as it may be, would have had a few looks withing ten minutes. With the fine-tuning of politically biased algorithms,this post has had zero views in two hours.
ReplyDeleteWhen "Artificial Intelligence" determines who gets heard, we've got a problem.