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Reddit's going to Reddit whether or not NYT posts that kind of article. Reddit would not Reddit in this way if the NYT posted a front page news article specifically highlighting how this particular claim was not just true, but clearly documented and well-established basic fact. Don't get me wrong, they might do something different, but barring a pretty specific sort of Darwianian troll, most of this type of personality doesn't like to actively invite people to correct them, and despite Reddit-the-org's best efforts the sort of personality who get aroused at the opportunity to post a one-line link debunking someone, regardless of political alignment, is not zero.
The 'prospiracy vs conspiracy' model falls apart when we're talking an organization the size of the Times. These articles have two different bylines, from two different parts of the organization. The people with the bylines weren't the only people involved in writing them, they have layers of editors and fact-checkers, there may have been some level of legal review, supposedly they have a bunch of varied expertise specific to various domains.
The Times is -- at five thousand employees -- on its own an enormous propaganda machine. Not every employee, not even a sizable portion of those employees, is involved in this particular propaganda; there is no explicit 'you must lie this many times per article' metric; many would do the same for free if they had the opportunity. But neither are people unaware of whether they work at the Times, or unaware that the Times misleads and demands that they mislead. Its personnel talk at length about these goals, publicly and privately and in every option in between, both internally to the Times and to many other often sizable organizations that have similar priorities. Whether this falls into some other category of coordination in besides the point.
Sorry. I think there’s two parts: “an enormous propaganda machine” and “manufacturing public opinion.”
I concede that the NYT has agency, sells a narrative, and thus counts as a propaganda machine. At the same time, I don’t believe it qualifies as the propaganda machine, because I don’t think it actually manufactures much at all.
I think both the NYT and Reddit comments are explained by convergent evolution. They share enough assumptions that, when asked for an opinion on anything, they come up with something pretty similar. Same for the other left-leaning outlets. Same for the largely separate cluster of assumptions on the other side of the Culture War.
Steve used Reddit comments as evidence for the propaganda machine. Under this model, that doesn’t really hold, because I’d expect similar comments even in a vacuum. That’s why I assumed Jesweez was acting in good faith.
I don't think we know, or can know, what people would do in a vacuum. Your question was how people would react without the Times writing those two articles, not about a world where the Times didn't and hadn't existed as the paper of record for literal lifetimes and spent much of that time both papering over this sort of behavior, and stigmatizing any organization that would report on it.
The Times isn't the only part of that, or even the biggest part, fair. But that just kicks the problem up one level. Whether you call the ecosystem that the Times swims in and creates a conspiracy or prospiracy or The Free Market Modulo All The Law And Gov Funding Involved, it's still a giant machine of giant machines, often heavily coordinated, of which many or most of its components have explicit or not-exactly-vino-veritas recognition of what they're doing and how they're coordinating with other components. The degree to which that might be coordinated or naturally evolved is an interesting question, though one that I think has far more evidence against your position than you'd expect, but it's still besides the point. A machine that evolved fully organically is still a machine that would be fully compatible with :
A fully headless organization could still produce a million articles about the counter-narrative that had the exact same notes, they could still aim massive amounts of emotional blackmail through every available institution, they could call everyone that disagreed with them maga nazis, they could still ban a ton of people who try to link things.
And that makes it pretty clear that whether or not Jesweez was acting in good faith -- perhaps they haven't seen any mainstream media coverage on this topic, or haven't read any of the actual coverage, or prosaically don't realize the ramifications of the words they're using -- they either don't or shouldn't actually believe their claim that this literally just "a few people you disagree with in a comment section."
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