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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Putin famously hardly uses the internet. He doesn't own a smartphone and thinks the web is controlled by the CIA.

Apparently he gets most of his news from spy agency briefings. These have the problem so common in dictatorships that nobody wants to give the boss bad news.

Since the beginning of war I've seen rather high levels of bureaucratic activity: officials fired and reshuffled, legislative trappings expanded, corporations merged and shuffled. I take this as evidence, that at least some information trickles down to Putin's mind.

The point is not that he is personally fond of gadgets or internet. To survive in his vipers nest, he needs a lot of information, from various sources/services, competing and being played against one another. I doubt it's as simple as "everyone just serves him rosy reports": when one official over-serves his rosy vision, his rival might undercut him by serving something closer to reality, with more details. It's more effective to compete down toward ground truth, gradually adding more details, than to race up - into more and more delirious and vague positive reports.

Is it actually the case that competition trends towards the truth? That would be ideal, but why would you be sure that a more truthful report will be looked at more favorably by Putin? How would he distinguish a truthful from a rosy report other than the truthful reporter having an easier time adding details that a rosy reporter would have to make up? Maybe the sweet spot for competition is a rosy report that is (arbitrarily) 20% rosier than the actual truth, and Putin looks badly on reports less rosy or more rosy than that. Who knows?

I mean, the western news media are, in effect, controlled by CIA. Or rather, the US nomenklatura -the elite body. whose members are usually very highly placed. Consider ECFR's (the EU sister organisation)'s own inforgraphic.

Not overtly, there editors know what to run and what not, and if someone doesn't take the hint the resident nomenklatura representative takes the case on.. When the journalist strayed too far from the approved narrative on Douma, an 'editor' who was unlike other editors during curiously little day-to-day work according to their CMS, but had spent several years working for the US nomenklatura got on his case. Of course, it ended up with the foolish journalist leaving.

Internet though, isn't, as Putin who is no doubt well familiar with the extent of Russian cybercrime because it regularly causes international incidents knows.

Is there any particular reason we should trust the takes of "Swiss Policy Research"? A cursory inspection suggests that they are generic FUD-spreaders looking to appear more dignified.

I'm not actually objecting to the premise that American interests dominate western news media, but do you really need a shadowy conspiracy to explain that?

You want WaPo ? Here's WaPo writing about the same thing.

You can check out the OPCW Newseek post I linked by the journalist fired. He specifically mentioned the most aggressive person who took him to task over the story was a suspiciously inactive editor who mostly posted jokes and only edited politically sensitive stories. And an ECFR alumnus.

As to the SWPRS article, it could really be anything, from some pissed off Swiss journalist to an unusually slick presentation by Russian intelligence. What matters is that it checks out, largely. But does it matter ? It's boring, right. Who cares that a notionally democratic republic somehow, no matter which party wins, ends up with members of a specific organisation in key posts. Who cares that nothing ever really changes, policy wise. Voters just haven't expressed their preferences!

CFR membership isn't even secret. It's just an incredibly boring topic nobody cares about. Who gives a shit that most of every US cabinet in last 100 years are members of the same pretty exclusive club ? Bores and morons like Chomsky, that's who.

Journalists don't. Some dopey professors.

“America’s single most important non-governmental foreign-policy organization”, whose primary role is to “define the accepted, legitimate, orthodox parameters of discussion.” According to Cohen, “the CFR really is what the Soviets used to call the very top-level of the Nomenklatura.”

Journalists are carefully trained to avoid touchy subjects. Hence, you will never hear about CFR unless you go to e.g. Infowars.

The point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway. () They have been through the socialization system.”

Inspite of people like e.g. J.K. Galbraith saying things such as:

“Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people.”

I have no problem believing f.ex. the local Finnish media is biased (ironically often slightly on the pro-Russian side until Russia went out of their way to burn every bridge they possibly could). Claiming that they're controlled by some US body is some next level conspiracy theory stuff, though.

You got 5 upvotes for a reply that seems to be based on a complete misreading of my post.

The link I posted doesn't claim Finnish media is controlled by CFR. It says CFR members are in every major US media organisation. Who are, in addition, owned by a very few business entities.

Although ,living in a small country and seeing the dismal state of Czech media, which is basically "publish your own takes on foreign policy stuff that are basically what WaPo / NYT said two days ago", there's really no need for control.

They (in this case 'Respekt', a leftist weekly reprint Fareed Zakaria's editorials quite often, and there's really nothing NYT prints they disagree with.

If you intend to make a claim about US media, you should say so instead of writing about "western news media". The latter clearly includes European medias and trying to claim they are "controlled by CIA" is outright conspiracy theory stuff.

What, you think that guy at Newsweek who was an 'editor' but with a suspiciously light workload is the only one European CFR alum out there ?

Depends how strongly you interpret "control". I don't know if it's CIA in particular, but it's pretty clear the Western media coordinates to hammer the same message.

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