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In reply to the discussion: As a Russian government owned entity, RT cannot be trusted [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)However, it has a problem with accuracy and truth, and that makes it unreliable. We're past "biased." Fox is biased. The NYT is biased. CNN and Colbert are biased.
They will blithely report utter bull, as long as they can cite somebody saying it and as a result play CYA. If reporting on a news story, they will blithely leave out not only the elephant in the room, but also the lions and the herd of thundering wildebeest, if that's what's necessary to push the right story. They less often say a lie is the truth than lead you to infer that the truth is a lie and a lie is the truth. What you build your own lie, and what you build you're attached to; it's agitprop 2.0, you construct the web of fiction that your brain is enclosed in.
But it's useful because it says what the official attitude is. Esp. when Russia is involved (contra MineralMan). If you read RT, you get a good sense of what the average Russian sees. And if you accept that over Russians get their news from sources that are ultimately governmental, with 80% or more saying that the tv news is either trustworthy or very trustworthy, you see the problem. And it's always a good idea to see the problem before trying to figure out solutions or make predictions.
It's harder to ken than Pravda and Izvestiya were. Agitprop 2.0 has learned from the dissidents. Gone are the days when you hear about the glorious harvest of 3000 bushels of wheat, knowing that these 3000 bushels of wheat come from 3000 square miles of farmland and they've masked a crop failure as a glorious victory. No more about how wonderful it is that the country's produced 1000 tractors when common sense says they need 10s of thousands just to replace the ones that are 40 years old. It's harder to read past the text to see the facts that clever editors and writers want you to see, because these are in the first decade of the revolution and are mostly true believers. You couldn't read through the text to the reality in the first couple of decades after the October Revolution, either.