WiseOne wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:48 am
Moda (and maybe others), you need to spend some time overseas. It really opens your eyes to the problems with the American press.
I've had extensive stays in both the Soviet Union (i.e. pre-breakup) and Kenya. In the USSR I was traveling with a Moscow native, and got to see some samples of Pravda (which means Truth, a very orwellian name). We usually think of Pravda as the ultimate propaganda tool, but it was in fact very similar to any American newspaper. I remember being surprised at that, I was expecting heavy handed government pronouncements and little actual news.
I've lived in Moscow and I had the opposite experience, although my command Russian is not great. Pravda and Novosti- they say there is no news in 'Truth', and no truth in 'News.'
I tend to agree with "them" (Russian residents).
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It's where my deep distrust of the press comes from. So no, I don't think the press is indispensable. Genuine reporting is indispensable, but that's not what they do.
WiseOne, you sound a little bit like stuper here, reclassifying what you do like as something other than the press. The Kenyan papers are the press. Stuper's non-mainstream sites are the press. Reporting is a subset of the press.
If you all feel cynicism about mainstream media like CNN and the NYT, fine. Maybe we're just talking past each other. But stuper, those pictures you saw of people in cages, they come from the press. You can see images from non-news-affiliated individuals these days, and that's an important check against mainstream media. But any words they write are going to have a spin of their own.
It's fine to be cynical and critical, but I think people are taking what they have for granted. Without it, we'd be back in dark, living off rumors. Flawed as the media is, it's better than the dark.