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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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The real question is who funneled the journalists these numbers. When lots of papers start using the same made-up numbers all at once, it's time to get suspicious.

Jamal Khashoggi, the 'journalist' who got chopped up by Saudi Arabia, was a mouthpiece for Qatar, pushing propaganda against Saudi Arabia in one of America's top papers. So I wouldn't be surprised if this campaign against Qatar is largely driven by Saudi Arabia. If they are willing to chop up a journalist, I'd imagine they are happy to twist facts and feed them to the media. And western media, particularly Americans (imo), seem to be quite lazy. If you just do their work for them, they'll happily publish it, as long as it doesn't go against their personal biases (and if it reinforces those biases, they'll fall over themselves to oblige).

That's why so many news articles are basically a copy & paste of press releases.

I think he was payback for an attempted coup on the prince. Remember about a year before all the VIPs who got rounded up and got a long stay in the Ritz before singing over vast chunks of their wealth to the crown. I suspect he was a common theme in many of the interrogations.

You come at the king, you best not miss, and they missed.

Aren't there only like a couple of "newswire" sources (e.g. AP) from which all journalists get their first facts from?

Also, most stories are cribbed heavily from interested parties' press releases.

Much of media works on narratives. "Wealthy petrostate spends an obscene amount of money on prestige sporting event" is a nice bite-sized one.

If the journalist mentions that the official numbers might be made up, it adds complicated nuance to the story. How expensive is the World Cup really, if you can't trust the numbers? This leaves the reader uncertain and mildly confused instead of thinking they have learned something about the world. Easier for the article to just print whatever BS amount Qatar says and move on; the vast majority of journalists have tight deadlines and wouldn't have time to investigate it anyway.

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