By Tim Stone on November 23rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm.
2007 saw the release of two thought-provoking and remarkably even-handed games about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The makers of PeaceMaker went on to create Play The News, a current affairs prediction MMO that, sadly, appears to have stalled at the beta stage. The makers of Global Conflicts: Palestine have just put the finishing touches on Global Conflicts: Latin America, a player-as-journalist adventure that had me shaking my head in ‘Why-is-the-British-media-not-telling-me-about-this-stuff? ‘ anger last night.
In the browser-based demo (that I’m sure I could embed if I was clever enough) you’re tasked with ferreting out the grim truth behind the Maquiladoras – large US factories operating on the Northern border of Mexico. The full game sends you off to investigate racial tension and slavery in Bolivia, crooked elections in Guatemala, and the actions of American ‘Minutemen’ patrols too.
Is there seventeen quid’s worth of value on offer? I’ve only spent a single evening newshounding thus far, so I can’t say for sure, but my impressions are largely positive. Though the graphics and GUI are poorer than a Bolivian dump dweller, and the gameplay is a little thin (scamper around collecting the ‘arguments’ you’ll need to make a crucial interviewee sweat in the closing interview) the issues themselves are so compelling, and so skilfully communicated, it’s hard not to end-up absorbed.
Fascinating to see these issues raised in our beloved little medium.
If it helps more people realise who the true largest terrorist nations are, then it gets excellent approval ratings from me.
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I’m impressed that there’s a game that is actually carried by its political content… If one wanted to be cynical about why we don’t see this on the news one could say that it is because it is not sensational. People don’t have any idea about it at all contrasted to the vague knowledge they might have about other stories or, to be fair, extensive knowledge of a subject. So these stories appear – we can relate to them. Everything else is happening too far away with not enough connection.
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Palestine was a poor game in terms of mechanics and gameplay – the fact that you could only move by clicking combined with the very limited zoom made just getting around a major chore. However, I thought the game was definitely worth the time I spent playing it just for the dialogue and the documentaristic content that we so rarely see in games. I actually learned something from it.
Be forewarned that these Global Conflict games are education games – created primarily to be used as part of an educational project in schools. The idea being that games by themselves aren’t sufficient to educate in a particular topic, but that as part of a larger project, they can provide an invaluable opportunity for students to really explore the given topics.
In my opinion, it’s particularly interesting because the developers can put a lot of work into branching content that a single player will never see in a single playthrough – in Palestine, for example, you had to really take sides to get people to open up, and that in turn would close off dialogue from the other side of the conflict. I tried to stay neutral and so I never got really deep into either side of the conflict. But that’s okay when an entire class of students will play through the game and then discuss and compare their experiences :)
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I’ll try it out.
I’m very interested in these sort of games and I think games going into this direction have a lot of potential. It’s the ideal medium for it, just a lot harder and more time-consuming to make than all other media.
I’ve participated in PlayTheNews for a half year as well, it’s quite interesting, but should be a bit more entertaining. No idea how to do that myself though.
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Propaganda in game form. Finally!
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So, don’t bother playing the game, just read about the subject?
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The game takes place in Jerusalem but the song playing in their web site is about Istanbul(actually there are lines from poems “Aziz Istanbul” and “Donulmez aksamin ufkundayiz” by Yahya Kemal Beyatli). I smell orientalism.
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Boatorious: Haven’t you ever heard of Americas Army? Biggest pile of steaming propaganda ever known!
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the games as political vehicles thing does worry me a little bit, even though it’s an expanded avenue of communication for niche concerns and will probably become even more popular in the future, etc etc and so forth. it’s merely another angle for people to work on disseminating their particular views, but games kinda suck at telling made-up stories most of the time; putting them anywhere near items of genuine importance hits some kinda panic button in my head.
i can’t help but feel the answer to “why didn’t the bbc tell me this” is “you’re not doing enough work yourself” – alternately you get a subscription to the economist*. :)
*dunno how it is in the uk, but the bbc in america is largely seen as a leftist propaganda outfit by conservatives; conversely the economist is just another cog in the right wing murder machine for american leftists. i think both views are deeply off base and the product of idiotic minds – the bbc is far more about good design and relatively sedate delivery than socialism, and the economist is just about the best weekly news and business magazine in the english speaking world, far less rightish once you move off the three pages of leaderboard than its critics seem to believe.
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Dhex: We live in a country where we pay to have our news service do the job properly, so Tim’s complaints are fine. It may be viewed as leftist propaganda by America, but as a country, you’re way further to the right than us. The BBC is a pretty fluffy public service, bless ‘em.
KG
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yeah i keep forgetting you guys are in a decades long run of 1984: the musical. :)
i do appreciate the laid back quality of the bbc world news broadcast.
it’s no news hour with jim lehrer for sure, little beedy eyed muppet he is.
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Hooray! Now I can be a journalist all my waking hours, not just at work.
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I’d take Big Brother over Fox News any day and twice on Sundays ;)
Seriously though, Palestine is not propaganda. I can’t speak for Latin America, but Palestine is an even-handed piece of drama documentary where you’re cast as an American journalist sent to cover the conflict. Whether you listen most to the Israelites or the Palestinians or attempt to stay in the middle is entirely up to you.
skizelo: If you prefer reading to playing games, by all means borrow some books on the subject instead. Palestine is thoroughly researched, however, and what it fails at as a game, it makes up for as a drama documentary. I call it that because though each mission is based on witness accounts and historical research, all characters and specific events are fictional.
It’s a neat way to explore the facets of the conflict and come to understand what’s keeping it alive.
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@dhex
What? People see the Economist that way? I live in Boston, the stereotypical hub of leftism on the East Coast, and yet I’ve never anything but good about that magazine. That’s among college students, too.
I’ve never heard anyone call the BBC a liberal propaganda outfit either, but I guess my location could be an explanation for that.
But I agree that seeing those publications in such an extreme way is foolish.
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There are really two schools of thought on the subject. The one thought is that games should be fun to play, and that the goal of games is to excel in their medium.
The other school is that games are worthless and that their only hope for rehabilitation is as a “teaching tool.”
I don’t have much respect for the latter. If I want to learn about something I’ll read about it. “Message” games (along with “message” movies and “message” music) are not about presenting the facts and making you think. They are about provoking a predetermined emotional response so you can avoid all that difficult and dangerous thinking.
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“Palestine was a poor game in terms of mechanics and gameplay… However, I thought the game was definitely worth the time I spent playing it just for the dialogue and the documentaristic content that we so rarely see in games.”
My feeliings exactly Jonas.
“in Palestine, for example, you had to really take sides to get people to open up, and that in turn would close off dialogue from the other side of the conflict.”
Disappointingly, Latin America doesn’t force you to cultivate contacts or approach a story from a particular perspective (you only ever work for one news organistation). Information gathering seems to be far more mechanical.
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Boat: Yeah, I can invent a point of view (or “school of thought”) and argue against it too, but it would only make me look stupid.
On topic, I think people should play Hidden Agenda. It’s old and crap-looking, but it’s very easy to play, and very effective at what it does.
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Boatorious, do try PeaceMaker or Global Conflicts: Palestine. Both games force you to do lots of “difficult and dangerous thinking”.
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I kept wondering when games were going to decide to jump on board with movies and television, and start telling us what to think. This is great for me, because i am way to busy to form my own opinions.
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Seems a little ill-informed to be calling this propaganda. From what I see this is the exact opposite; an attempt to dessimate the kind of propaganda and misinformation that is represented by most media.
I second the opinion that reading is the best way to learn about these things, but you also have to accept that a lot of people lack the incination to do just that; surely this can only help in reaching more people.
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In fact this game is meant to work in concert with more conventional education material. That means reading lots of books and then playing the game (though I’m sure the other way around would work just as fine).
Maximum Fish: Clearly you haven’t played these games. Their aim is certainly not to tell you what to think. They do not provide any answers, they simply give you an insight into the differences and the beliefs at the core of the conflict. Please do give them a try before you dismiss them as propaganda.
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Just wanted to second the love for Hidden Agenda.
It’s abandonware, as far as I know, though the programmer prefers it used as a classroom tool and sends copies to interested persons in exchange for an explanation for why they want it and a donation to a particular help-Latin-America charity.
Anyway, it’s an old choose-this-week’s-action management game in which you run a ludicrously unstable fledgling democracy in Central America, ducking threats from the Communists, who are backed by Russia, the right-wingers, who are backed by the United States, and even your own cabinet. I’ve had games where I granted too much power to the old regime’s army (there’s a power-sharing agreement between the old army and the rebels), which ultimately left me sitting powerless in my office while my ministers merrily exterminated the Communists and anyone else nearby.
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Sorry to double-post, but there’s even a priest who consoles you if you end up in a situation like that. The game gets the creeping horror of being the loser in a power struggle just right.
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Bravo!! for making widely public this kind of games… and content.
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Some people here seem to equate education/information with propaganda. I wonder where those commenters were schooled to such a paranoid equivocation. (I can hazard a guess.)
As for the games under discussion, I’m more than willing to see interactivity taken in a more critical and politically relevant direction. It seems to me that more should be attempted on that particular front in order to expand what we take to be the horizon of games as medium.
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I wonder if you get to pass off pallywood productions as legitimate news footage?
> The BBC is a pretty fluffy public service, bless ‘em
Which most UK conservatives consider to be chronically biased towards a centre left world view. In fact attitudes towards it are a pretty good indication of voting preference. Make of that what you will.
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I’m not dismissing this as propaganda, that’d be silly as I’ve never played it. I just think that the condescending preaching that’s been growing in both vehemence and regularity in Hollywood productions is annoying as all shit, and i’d hate to see the same thing happen to videogames. I ground my teeth reading about how the new Prince of Persia is going to have a topical subtext that will help players ‘grow intellectually’ or whatever (seriosly, that shit takes some gall, who are they who need to reach down and help up my uneducated ass?). I for one am definately not in favor of games going ‘relevant’, since that usually just means that everyone just acts all pompous and self-righteous. This one does actually look like a “teaching tool” though, so i guess i’m sort of off-topic after all…
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I can understand why people would be opposed to political games, but to treat the idea as if it means that all games would go in that direction seems odd.
It is like thinking that allowing Michael Moore movie/doccies into theaters means that the next Batman movie won’t get made.
Surely there is space for the ‘fun’ games and the thought provoking ones?
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I am in favour of a documentary genre of gaming. God knows what it would be like to play, but the idea is one I heartily support.
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Oarfish: Don’t necessarily disagree. But public services, by their nature*, tend to lean left. and centre/left is “Fluffy”, in my books.
KG
*Because the right would never had created them, for one.
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>But public services, by their nature*, tend to lean left.
Which is probably why they shouldn’t be tasked with delivering impartial current affairs coverage, even if such a thing were possible in the first place.
Most of the BBC’s output could easily be provided by grubby commerce, genuine public service broadcasting is a tiny fraction of its output. Still, there would have to be a restoration of the regulations on cross media ownership before anything could be done or everything would end up in the hands of 2 or 3 plutocrats. I’m pretty sure a proxy bunfight between Soros and Murdoch doesn’t qualify as a reasonable range of debate.
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“grubby commerce”
Which, by its nature, leans right.
KG
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Noam Chomsky’s would argue the BBC’s itself is structurally biased to the right, in that it fails to question the normative assumptions of a fundamentally unequal society, one bound to replicate and intensify this inequality.
The Economist, the FT, make the same assumptions, but are more open about their agenda. “Grubby commerce” wins either way.
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US media is both mainly commercial and largely left of its political axis, and we have firmly left of centre newspapers in this country (admittedly cross subsided from Autotrader and public sector job ads ). I don’t object to its bias per se, merely being forced to subsidise it with threat of criminal prosecution.
I imagine being forced to subsidise the Daily Wail would produce a similar reaction on your side of the fence, what with it being distinctly not fluffy.
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RPS comments threads are lovely.
KG
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> Noam Chomsky’s would argue the BBC’s itself is structurally biased to the right
Noam Chomsky would argue that the SWP is structurally biased to the right, the issue is position relative to the nigh impossible to define centre of debate not from an ideological standpoint as pure as his. The BBC is hardly a hotbed of Chomsky’s brand of left wing ‘anarchism’. Like it or not, the Mail’s gaudy brand of populist right wing posturing represents a sizeable proportion of mainstream political opinion in this country.
Anybody on the fringes of political discourse is implicitly going to be marginalised by a mass medium, this is probably why the UK political blogging scene is massively overrepresented by raving libertarians.
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@Oarfish
Chomsky sees the 1920s populist press, produced by working class intellectuals to promote their own interests, as a high water mark for reform minded Amercian journalism. As such, he’d likely welcome the SWP’s efforts in the area, however disappointing the results.
Though the Daily Mail does indeed represent a sizeable proportion of mainstream political opinion, it’s no reason to excuse its biased partial reporting on issues like the EU (or indeed video games.)
Also centrism is politics is hardly the be all and end all, now more than ever we need another FDR or Atlee – not another Blair.
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Hmm, and I thought old school socialists disliked the EU as much as nationalists and libertarians, what with it being irredeemably corporatist and corrupt.
And lets not get started on wanting a repeat of America’s 10 year experiment with national socialism.
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“Noam Chomsky’s would argue the BBC’s itself is structurally biased to the right”
to be fair, chomsky probably thinks most baked goods are structurally conservative, if not downright reactionary.
speaking of which:
http://www.brandonbird.com/signifier_signified.html
phil: after eight years of a hyperactive imperial presidency, i don’t know if we need someone threatening to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_packing]override the supreme court[/url] and related shenanigans. the cult of personality is creepy enough as it is, though i think it will subside eventually in obama’s case. sure, i would like to go back to a time when the presidency wasn’t treated like a combination of jesus and rambo who somehow magically controls the economy and brings the sun out of hiding every morning, but my time machine is broken and…wait a minute!
ok new idea for a political game: ATTACK OF THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY
the player has to find a way to go back in time and KILL ANDREW JACKSON and – more importantly – blame it on his supporters, thus preventing the imperial presidency from ever emerging as a populist current. do you bring back a 20th century weapon to give to that crazed housepainter who tried to assassinate him in ’36? the problem being that jackson was a total badass so a straight buck buck kpow approach is nearly impossible. do you embolden the 2nd national bank, perhaps crushing jackson during a speaking tour in hundreds of pounds of specie, even if the post-assassination impound leads to further bank collapse and still ushers in economic populist reform?
or perhaps you just arm the surviving cherokee with laser rifles.
choices *and* consequences!
plus children could learn the most important lesson of all: andrew jackson was a complete dick.
edit: i realize the imperial presidency is nearly impossible to kill, if nixon couldn’t do it no one can; maybe it’s a biological thing that makes people seek out kings and christs…i dunno.
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And the winner of the thread is dhex :)
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@oarfish – I’m not a socialist though I’m flattered you think so, socialists in the UK and USA tend to be far nicer people than average. On your second point, I’m invoking Godwin’s Law (still, mega irony points for comparing FDR to the Nazis.)
@dhex – Let’s let Obama get his feet under the table before we start castigating him as constitution compromising fanatic shall we?
That said, with the Supreme Court as slanted to right as it is right now, I’d say he’s going to have to be more creative than the average exec.
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hey man, you mentioned fdr, not me. :)
still, it will take a massive public disappointment to really do any damage to the notion of president as god-king, and even then…
that’s why we need an edutainment title about assassinating andrew jackson more than ever.
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It’s a Alistair Cooke quote, he actually admired him:
“In a way, what America really did during the New Deal was have a flirtation with National Socialism. It happened to be a benevolent Roosevelt, not a malevolent Hitler, but that’s what it was. “
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@Oarfish – Nice quote, I’ve always got time for Mr Cooke, though given the overwelmingly negative connotations surrounding national socialism, and the fact you were using as a criticism, my Godwin’s invocation still stands.
According to the law of the internet, you can launch a formal appeal, though to initiate it you must get three firsties on Youtube.
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You don’t get threads like this on… well, anywhere else.
Carry on. And I want to play dhex’s game too.
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@macbeth – it is pleasant to discuss politics in a public forum without seemingly erecting a moron conductor isn’t it?
Also, @dhex, it would take some work but how about reskinning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_Reloaded ?
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As much as i dislike absolutely every major American news network, i think i’d start up an armed resistance movement (call it the NSF?) before i’d pay to subsidize them. Cold dead fingers and all that.
Also, I don’t subscribe to the notion that ‘it’s not bias (or propaganda) if you’re right’, or similarly that it at least can be somehow a necessary evil . This seemed to be the unspoken mantra of ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, which though still a very well done movie, eagerly promoted the idea of activism journalism. It’s a pretty freaky concept if you ask me, as the media represents possibly the largest uncentralized and unclaimed powerbase in the modern world. From entertainment to journalism, the ‘cultural truths’ and zeitgeist (often unintentionally, so far) created by mass media can start wars or end them, kill off tens of thousands, tear down governments or prop them up, lead to financial ruin, and far more. It’s all been done.
That anyone thinks they can or should ‘use this power for good’, is pretty chilling in my opinion, I don’t care if i agree with them or not. And especially if they’re ultra-rich celebrities who’s limited worldview distills every aspect of immensly complex world events into some sort of contrived morality play.
And while were on Noam Chomsky, he comes off like he just hopped a free flight from Decent City on K-Pax and is aghast and sputtering at the realities he finds down on planet earth. I think the man just needs to come to terms.
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Also, @dhex, it would take some work but how about reskinning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_Reloaded ?
ok i like where this is going – jackson all up on his horse…wait, did they have snipers back then?
hmmm…it seems as though the anti-masons will have to invent sniping.
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Maximum Fish’s comment prompts me to plug a textbook I’ve had to read this year: The Elements of Journalism. It’s clearly modeled on The Elements of Style, it’s about as short, and it makes a pretty good case for journalism’s purpose as the backbone of a functioning democracy. It all started with a massive survey of (if memory serves, mostly American) journalists, and it uses the results to great effect. Go to the library and give it a read.
I mention it only because it makes the incidental argument that bias is not the objectively horrible bogeyman most people make it out to be, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the accurate reporting of the truth, to which journalism has its fundamental obligation.
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@Maximum Fish, rather than K-PAX I’ve always thought of Chomsky as a similarly unworldly, though conversely furious, old testament prophet. The tone of his writing (if not his physical presense) suggests an tendency towards smiting.
Equally, I think the dangers of an over mighty forth estate are dwarfed by one muzzled by either editorial and self censourship (you can only have so many stories spiked before you either cease trying or get fired) or ever greater fragmentation of the market.
By fragmentation I mean an end to collectively recognised legtimate news sources; a process that can be empowering, democratic and produce truly useful journalism, but also leads to hediously disorted facts and people never being confronted by a reality that contradicts their world view. With so much noise the signal gets lost.
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You’re essentially conflating (claimed) ‘bias’ and ‘propaganda’ here, which does you no favours. Propaganda is whitewashing/demonising/’simplifying’/whathaveyou to spread a particular view or support a particular group, and/or denigrate another, and truth be damned. The word ‘bias’, however, is hugely open to mischief. The exasperated American mantra “the truth has a liberal bias” came about because, as lunatics like Malkin and O’Reilly and Michael Savage (born Michael Wiener, fact-fans! I never get tired of that) and, god, the ones in office (RiceCheneyYooRumsfeldBushLiebermanAshcroftGonzales etc etc…) slowly drifted off into the hazy world of imagination, full of WMDs and torture-that-isn’t-torture (“if we only talk about silly little human pyramids and nudity, we won’t have to talk about the all the prisoners who got raped and throttled and sleep-deprived and beaten to death! Never mind the horrific violation of habeas corpus either!”) and warrantless wiretapping being passed off as legal, they became increasingly irate that they weren’t always getting a precisely equal shake on the networks they didn’t own. They were, of course, getting far too easy a ride from said media sources, but this was not enough — a journalist’s first duty was to give equal credence to made-up neocon crap, ‘cos goddamn it, the neocons were one of the SIDES! And if s/he failed at that, let alone had the temerity to uncover any of the previously-mentioned criminal activities (at which point it was time for said neocons to pretend that being caught red-handed was actually a VERY IMPORTANT AND SERIOUS BREACH OF NATIONAL SECURITY AND THE JOURNALIST WHO CAUGHT US SHOULD BE PUNISHED), the response was “TREE ROPE JOURNALIST LOL” (if you don’t know what that means, google it). Basically, shift the ‘pivot’ of an argument far enough out into fantasyland, and any rational analysis by definition has to be biased against you (for other examples, see the creationist sophistry of ‘intelligent design’ and the attendant complaints that ‘both sides should be told’ even though their ‘side’ has all the scientific authority of Erich von Daniken; speaking of which, see also alien-conspiracy theorists!). ‘Bias’ against fantasists is a virtue of good journalism.
As for the Goodnight & Good Luck thing… Christ! Well, quite apart from Edward Murrow’s (utterly reasonable) criticism of McCarthy being part of the openly-labeled editorial segment of the show, calling their work ‘activist journalism’ shows just how vapid, how wrongheaded the term ‘activist journalism’ is. Maybe — at a stretch — the term is useful to describe someone who would use journalistic channels to disseminate lies, but outside of that, it misses the point — the purpose of investigative journalism is to bring important facts to light; are we to believe that journalism is only ‘proper’ journalism if it doesn’t affect anything? That suddenly, if these facts reflect poorly on a politically contentious figure, the journalist in question has crossed a line of decency? That’s a disgusting attitude. McCarthy’s unethical abuse of Senatorial power ruined lives in aid of nothing, compromised civil liberties, fostered new lows of paranoid bigotry in American politics, and wasted the time and resources of American intelligence and police (not to mention what came to light with the Army/McCarthy hearings); this wasn’t some trifle the ‘See It Now’ folks decided to inflate into a witchhunt (heh) of McCarthy — it was a real, very serious issue, and their reportage allowed their viewers a comprehension of it that they might not have gained otherwise. When corruption is afoot, supposed ‘activist’ journalism is what’s needed the most.
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Best end to a thread evar!
(Not this one obviously, but the one just before it. Doh! I have ruined it.)
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@James T
First off you’re approaching this entire issue from an absolutist stance that I would say undoes your argument. Essentially what you’ve done is taken the statement, ‘it’s not bias if you’re right’, and reworded it into two paragraphs with some Bush-lied-thousands-died flavor tossed in for good measure. You’ve effectively pinned the center around yourself, and thus those farthest from you are “lunatics” and “fantasists”. I should clarify that I’m not defending the Bush Whitehouse (or indeed was not even talking about it), but by doing this you’ve failed to recognize that in a democracy of ideas, the midpoint is the mean (an ever-shifting mean), and not you. In other words, if half the people in your country believe something you think is crazy, you or your views are not the sane and rational anchor from which these crazies have drifted too far, you are the one drifting. We are after all talking about values here, and not observable, empirical fact. I could (and would actually) argue until I ran out of words that morality is a made up crock of shit, and you would find it impossible to scientifically prove otherwise. This then is the only way to do it.
I’ll agree that bias is often misunderstood. Bias, apart from the obvious exceptions (Fox and MSNBC), is not often shown in the way facts are presented, the credibility of those facts, the sources, the tone or approach of the speaker, etc., but it which facts are deemed important, which facts are presented. You say that “the purpose of investigative journalism is to bring important facts to light”. The key word there is ‘important’. Who decides what facts are important? You? Katie Couric? That’s a value judgment, and has no objective answer.
I’m not saying that good journalism is only that which has no impact, what I’m saying is that bad journalism is that which intends to have impact. You’re definition of propaganda is something intended “… to spread a particular view or support a particular group”. This is precisely how I would define bias, and this is precisely what Fox and the rest of them do every day. They do it by how they define “important”. Just because Ed Murrow may have found the same things important that I do, doesn’t mean I support the notion of journalists evangelizing their own values. Journalism should mirror the values of society, not attempt to alter them. Not because these values are always healthy, or never in need of change, but because I don’t trust these assholes enough to do that. I don’t trust the government, but understand the carefully constructed checks and balances on their power. This however is unchecked power, and just because it right now is leading someplace you want to go, does not mean it always will.
Just as McCarthyism was used as the allegory in that film, the romanticized notion of a brave journalistic establishment standing up to tyranny has been repeated again and again until it has become cultural truth (and groan-inducing cliché as well). The heroic underground press disseminates the “truth”, a cut-and-dry simplified and objective MacGuffin, that aids the inevitable defeat of villainy, when any rational analysis of the underlying historical realities would show two sides spewing their own propaganda with nothing more virtuous than victory in mind, one side of which being ideologically similar to us, and thus “good guys” by default.
From this has derived the similarly idiotic notion of journalists as our, and democracy’s, white knights; correct-thinking champions who spread the “truth”, challenge corruption and enlighten the masses. It’s an absurdly paternalistic and arrogant worldview, one that paints the average citizen as witless and incompetent pawns in the greater ‘battle of values’, and hopes to convert as many as possible before ‘the other side’ get’s to ‘em. If we don’t tell them that creationism is stupid, how will they know, the miserable bastards? What it is, is Whiteman’s Burden re-imagined for the 21st century, an imperialism of thought, bolstered by this cultivated fiction and by catchphrases and careful justifications like “the people have a right to know”. …What we want them to.
If you really wanted to shoot my argument down, the way to do it would have been simply to pose the question, ‘what would you propose instead’. Because I have no suggestions, I’m obviously not in favor of censorship or of the lack of a free press. The only thing I could propose would be far more skepticism on the part of viewers and citizens. We all notice when news programs are covering topics we personally deal with in-depth how amazingly inaccurate and wrong they can be. We (on this forum) all collectively roll our eyes when videogames are put under the medias spotlight, and ask ‘how can they get it so wrong’. And then, fifteen minutes later when the piece has ended, we go back to taking them at face value, as ‘experts’ on some topic we have no firsthand experience with. We trust them, and that right there is the problem.
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This is why I take such issue with the representation of political morality as this linear left-right bar to which people ascribe themselves in light of their particular views. If I state myself to believe in basic human rights and equality and express a desire for absolute honesty in reporting, then people can call me left-wing, and consider my thoughts skewed due to supposed bias, whereas I consider those things to be a solid and neutral basis for reasoning. Honestly I’d consider anybody who takes the middle ground on a scale of left to right wing to be apathetic rather than neutral.
Arguing that morality is “a made-up crock of shit” seems nothing more than a particularly narrow existentialist line of thinking. Morality exists, and proving as such scientifically is an irrelevence; we haven’t the resources or understanding of the human mind and body to prove nor disprove that or any other aspect of our humanity. When people see others suffer, they either justify that suffering through their own knowledge, regardless of the truth behind it, or wish for it to stop. Examples of basic human empathy or prejudice are all around us, from which I take all arguments against the existence of morality to be void. With that said, I would agree with the point that morality is the real issue when it comes to one’s political leanings; How you view, for example, sweat shop labour really boils down to whether you adopt and empathic view that it is exploitative of those in poverty or working as immigrant labourers lacking legal rights, or whether you consider that these people suffer through their own inability to affect change of their situations. I would most certainly argue the former, but the reasoning behind these issues would take hours and, well, I do have computer games to play at some point tonight ¬_¬
Having said that I would wish for complete honesty in reporting, I should express that I realise that is a naively idealistic standpoint to take. As stated by others, often it takes nothing more than the reiteration of certain truths accompanied by the omission of others to create an incredibly biased picture. One need look no further than most British and American media representation of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to see evidence of that (some oh-so-subtle “bias” of my own for you there). Despite disagreeing with you on the subject of morality Fish, I do have to agree whole-heartedly with your final statement. The very real and substantial issue remains to be that a genuine representation of many world issues is simply not present in the mainstream media, and nobody watching the news is going to have anywhere near the time needed to research anything they might disagree with. The presence of disinformation and propaganda in a supposed democracy (some more bias there :D) is a huge obstacle for anybody to overcome, especially as it takes the fairly massive step of realising that the sources of information that you’ve been raised to believe as solid and impartial are generally not, and that all your views may potentially change completely were you to take the time to look into them. And in most cases, the amount of time required to do so with exacting thoroughness is huge, and in some cases, arguably impossible…
What this leaves us with is little choice but to take the words of those we believe we can trust, which is an inherently dangerous thing to do.
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@Noom
I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but for the record, I don’t think morality is nonexistant, just entirely subjective. I see it as the end result of the classical conditioning we all get from day one, triggered guilt responses, associations and all the subconcious extrapolations our mind makes from this. Feel good when you share with the other kids, shame when you punch them around or take their candy, etc. (and it plays off of inate empathy, sure). I’m not saying it’s not valuable, just that it’s not an objective force handed down from on high or whatever. It’s essentially just brainwashing if you want to be really cynical. It may be necessary for the functioning of society, but in the end it’s a combination of the same impulses that made little albert afraid of rabbits. I just didn’t want to leave it with me sounding crazy (maybe i still do?).
The presence of disinformation and propaganda in a supposed democracy (some more bias there :D) is a huge obstacle for anybody to overcome, especially as it takes the fairly massive step of realising that the sources of information that you’ve been raised to believe as solid and impartial are generally not, and that all your views may potentially change completely were you to take the time to look into them. And in most cases, the amount of time required to do so with exacting thoroughness is huge, and in some cases, arguably impossible…
Well said, i couldn’t agree more. With the more widespread availability of information, should come an increased degree of skepticism. A perfect microcosm would be the internet as approached by professors and teachers once they finally decided it was an acceptible source for research papers. “Be skeptical, verify everything,” they all said, “anyone can say anything on the internet!”
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“The ones farthest from me“? You plead that there’s a ‘democracy of ideas’, but I’ve got bad, fascist news — reality itself does not submit to democracy, and it is the midpoint. The reason I brought up those particular ‘lunatics and fantasists’ (ie, liars or wilful ignorami with an apparently sociopathic agenda) was because they’re recent examples of people who drifted away, not from me, but from what actually happened in the real, existing world, (plus what could rationally be expected to happen. Which then happened). The role of journalism is to report on that real, existing world. To ascertain and distribute fact. This sudden idea that “we’re talking about values here and not facts” is worthless — to disregard the value of facts when discussing journalism is like disregarding the toxicity of cyanide when discussing what happens if you drink it. If you want to boil down my post to a “bias” sentence, it would be: “bias in journalism is exactly as important as its influence on truthful reportage”. And allow me to ‘do’ your stance in kind. You conflate ‘bias’ with ‘propaganda’, and oppose the notion of “it’s not bias if you’re right”; judging by your closing paragraphs, you deem that the truth is not relevant to a message’s worth (otherwise you wouldn’t dismiss the reportage of facts as ‘propaganda’ out of hand, like you do with Murrow’s); Therefore, your position is: “information is propaganda whether it’s right or wrong”. And propaganda can be dismissed out of hand. Ergo, “All information is worthless” (even firsthand information — wouldn’t want to be swayed by your own bias!). It’s empty nihilism. As is the apparently-irrelevant morality remark, but noom covered that.
The utility of journalism is to give its audience a more informed, accurate perception of its subject. Like science, its concern, its gamut, its ‘anchor’, is observable phenomena. The real world. Public opinion and ‘the values of society’ should influence journalism only in the decision of which things to investigate (“people like having Widgets in their house, warn them if Widgets are dangerous”). You (quixotically) complain that these facts need to be selected at all, but… well, welcome to the real world! We don’t have Helios up on high telling our journalists where they should wait with a camera and a notebook. News organs do not have unlimited resources. And the selection process of the news is open to human ills, but so are a great many things in life, and that’s where journalists and their audience have no choice but to rely on a little thing called ‘judgement’ — exhibit rational skepticism, place evidence above all, and if the facts bear out the report, then it was worthwhile, completely irrelevant of whether the reporter hoped for change or had no idea of the consequences.
Wow, I see why you got the idea that we’re “discussing values, not facts”. As I was saying above, your definition of bias is incorrect — bias is a preference, an inclination, and can lie anywhere from the overt to the subconscious, without propaganda’s inherent, definitive aim to deceive.
I’m well aware of the ‘bias’ element in selecting what to report, but the idea that the very existence and inescapability of bias means that journalists should do nothing but ‘mirror the values of society’** just in case bias affects their output is simply misguided — namely, it’s a whopping great example of the perfect solution fallacy: “The investigation and reportage of facts require human judgment. Human judgment is affected by personal desires and inclinations. Therefore, facts should not be investigated and reported, only the ‘values of society mirrored’ (somehow).” Again, the utility of journalism is to give its audience a more informed, accurate perception of its subject, not to just tell them what they want to hear. Bias, like so many human weaknesses, may be one of the factors that causes journalism to fall short of a Platonic fantasyland ideal of 100% accurate omni-reportage, but it is only corrosive to journalism if it causes the journalist/news organ of choice to mislead its audience (and no, the mere act of choosing what to report does not inherently mislead one’s audience). I can see why someone labouring under the abovementioned fallacy would turn to nihilism, but you’re much better off going back to the drawing board.
**(good luck deciding upon how they should do this, or what ‘the values of society’ actually ARE, without being influenced by that accursed personal bias, by the way — I guess they’d better not ‘mirror society’s values’ after all, huh? Incidentally, why do you think that Murrow, for example, was not ‘mirroring the values of society’? Did the people of ’50s America crave Senatorial corruption? And if his ‘bias’ was deceiving viewers by blinding him to a really important story, what was said story? A frog jumping into a pond? The Space War of Star-System Perseus 8? From certain perspectives, they could be far more important than McCarthy — pardon my outlandish leap of guesstimation if I, like Murrow, would rashly presume that his audience of American citizens might have an interest in a US Senator’s misdeeds).
Suggesting a fingers-in-the-ears, ignore-it-all stance to journalists because of their lack of formal accountability is, again, the ‘perfect solution’ fallacy; I hardly need to point out the benefits of good journalism and the pitfalls of the ignorance that flourishes without it (well, apparently I do, but I can’t be bothered). Initially the idea was that multiple independent investigators allow for a better idea of the truth (as seen in the scientific method). This has been dangerously compromised with the corporate consolidation of news media, but this is a shortcoming of corporate and media law, and a reason to call for their reform, not an argument against the existence of journalism (which is the kind of absurd argument that nihilism will frequently herd you into).
Consciously eliminating truth from the argument (by reducing Murrow/McCarthy to “two sides spewing propaganda”) is the opposite of ‘rational analysis’; it’s the kind of ridiculous subjectivism that people don’t usually bother accusing each other of, since it’s so patently worthless in any discussion that it beggars belief anyone might posit it. You complain that journalists are patronising you by not letting you work out for yourself that creationism is stupid, forgetting that education does not end with childhood (never mind that the unfolding of history itself continues as well). You probably didn’t need journalists to give you the low down on creationism vs evolution (although I hope the Darwinists haven’t made you biased — they’re just another side spewing propaganda, after all), but who the hell else was going to tell you about My Lai? Watergate? CIA secret prisons? The government? Whistleblowers? Where would the whistleblowers go? Pirate radio? The Speaker’s Corner? Would that not turn them into amateur journalists themselves?
Meanwhile, who are you accusing of taking for granted that all journalists are heroes on the side of justice, telling the truth? ‘Hollywood’? They make movies like ‘Good Night’ and ‘All The President’s Men’ because the movies are focused around stories and characters people are interested in; guys supporting a dangerous truth against a formidable foe (cliche, but the freshness of the idea is irrelevant unless you place zero value on truth — mind the nihilism!). A bunch of crap journalists transcribing everything the State Department tells them as Cheney beats the war-drums doesn’t make for lucrative drama (yet).
Outside of the movies, people already admired Murrow, Woodward & Bernstein, and others like Seymour Hersh, Gary Webb, etc etc because out there, in real life, they uncovered important truths and often faced adversity in doing so (they’re only reducible to “just the side you agree with” if you place zero value on tru– oh, we’ve been there). Some people find one or more of the above characters distasteful because the discoveries did not gel with their agenda, but this doesn’t mean that everyone who admires them does so out of zombie-like ideological allegiance (which would also assume that all these journalists’ findings map easily to a given ideology). Many people may harbour a particular respect for the journalistic profession, but this is no more objectionable than harbouring respect for, say, nurses. Do you think everyone who professes to ‘admire nurses’ thinks that there are no bad or incompetent nurses? That stories about Florence Nightingale and John Simpson are corrupt hagiographies of the very profession itself, which give insufficient weight to the nurses who are a bit shite? You’re raging at windmills. Is this why you posted? You thought everyone else was blindly swallowing everything we see and hear on the news? That “we go back to taking them at face value, as ‘experts’ on some topic we have no firsthand experience with”? That’s hilariously pompous — “mere healthy skepticism can never hope to filter out 100% of misinformation — only my all-negating nihilism can do that! You guys just believe any old thing!”
I’m supposed to think you’re “obviously not in favour of censorship or lack of a free press”? Why? If we dismiss all journalism out of hand as you suggest, then what use is a free press? Why are you against censorship? Your description of Murrow/McCarthy suggests that truth is not relevant, therefore censorship shouldn’t even matter.
You seem to think that your lack of ‘a solution’ is just an incidental tic of your posts, but it undermines you totally — why make quixotic, pie-in-the-sky complaints about the universally-accepted existence of human fallibility unless you have some sort of point? It’s not like you’re breaking any news here.
I’m sure, when it comes down to it, you’re not in favour of censorship or lack of a free press, but that’s not where your reasoning takes you. Work on it!
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“bias is a preference, an inclination, and can lie anywhere from the overt to the subconscious, without propaganda’s inherent, definitive aim to deceive.”
I’d hate to think we were circling an irrelevant argument on the basis of semantics, so let’s clear this up. As I said before, i don’t object to journalism on the basis of it having an impact, only on the basis of it’s intent, or “definitive aim” as you say, to have impact. Which is by your definition propaganda. So no “conflation” then.
Murrow’s was propaganda, selective information used with the intent to elicit change. Positive change i’ll grant you, but i don’t subsribe to the idea that we need or should have people abusing a postition of perceived authority to spread their own baseless interpretations of the truth for ‘the good of everybody else’ (as they define it). You treat truth like a discreet readily available good, just waiting to be seized. But no one has the whole truth, or anything more than an infinitely small percentage of it, wrapped in personal bias and preconceived notions. Under these circumstances, objective “truth” is functionally subjective. If a tree falls in the forest and all that.
Meaning not that we should censor the press, all news or all information is worthless, or any other weird deductions (and just because i didn’t provide some suggested state-run authoritarian control to prevent people from doing something i don’t support, doesn’t mean i’m just bitching for bitching’s sake), just that all “truth”, especially that provided second hand, should be treated with a good degree of skepticism. You can after all “mislead your audience” simply by convincing them they now know something, when they really don’t. Not everyone maintains this skepticism, we have a natural tendency not to, especially when society (in the ‘information age’) expects use to “know” all of this stuff, which is the reason why i don’t support it.
As for the rest, and maybe i’m just stupid, maybe i’m tripping over the ‘ergo’s and ‘quixotic’s, but you’ve lost me. You did what now?
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In shorter form; all truth is tentative. Anyone who’s followed history should have figured this one out by now.
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Unfortunately, evaluating journalism on this basis misses its purpose. A journalist can feel any which way about their subject — they can be delighted at letting the cat out of the bag, or regretful at having to present something that counters what they believe — but the utility of journalism is not, as you said, to “mirror the values of society” (in which case it would be redundant by definition, so you may as well ask for its abolition — but you insist that you’re not…), but to give its audience a more informed, accurate perception of its subject. Strictly speaking, the definition of propaganda does not specify that it be a lie, but it is worthless as a pejorative (as you use it) without assuming deceitfulness. You complain about people who would say “it’s not propaganda if you’re right” (ie, “it’s not propaganda if it’s accurate” — for any quibbles over the word ‘accurate’, I direct you to the links in the final paragraph, and these two), but the word ‘propaganda’ is absolutely worthless as a pejorative unless it addresses misleading material (otherwise it has no positive or negative value on its own — “Two plus two equals four” could be a propagandistic statement). So, if a report is misleading by omission/emphasis/etc because of the author’s intent or personal biases, then it isn’t accurate, and can be (for argument’s sake) dismissed as propaganda. And you can still dismiss accurate information as propaganda too — as you propose to do with Murrow/McCarthy — but you’ll have given the idea of “propaganda” (which you reject) and the idea of enlightening “information” the same value. In other words, you’ll declare that information has no intrinsic value over misinformation, and should be rejected (you underline this with your ‘subjectivity of truth’ talk later). With that in mind…
“Selective information”? That implies that there must be countering information which exonerates or diminishes McCarthy’s misdeeds (otherwise there could be no ‘selection’ involved, as Murrow would have no other reportable information to ‘select’, whether he wanted to or not). Tell me what information Murrow knowingly concealed so as to misrepresent the situation. Or tell me what information has arisen which might suggest Murrow unknowingly misrepresented the situation (despite that not meeting the definition of ‘selective’), and would thus lead you to rationally dismiss Murrow (ie, on the basis of worth). Or has every journalist and person with access to high-level info since the 1950s had the exact same biases and propagandistic tendencies as the See It Now team, and they’ve all conspired to cover McCarthy’s long-denied virtue up? Comedy!
And “baseless”? You really leave yourself naked with that one. “Murrow’s Boys” saw the basis for their reportage with their own eyes (plus a lot of it was publically available material; must’ve been a helluva job falsifying all those transcripts and tapes, and corralling all that testimony!), and it’s all out there to be looked at today; you can say it could all have been mischievous lies, and that history hasn’t really supported them because you can’t trust mere history — but there comes a point where a rational person blessed with perspective and healthy skepticism looks at what has and has not accrued over the past sixty years in one of the most intensely-examined and thoroughly documented scandals in American history, and draws that most ridiculously naive of things — the reasonable conclusion.
(Incidentally, Murrow was one of the first group of journalists into Buchenwald as well, so please, let’s extend this out-of-hand rejection of all information (as opposed to rational skepticism) to his non-McCarthy exploits too — the fireworks should be spectacular!)
I love that you call “all information is worthless” a ‘weird’ distillation of your outlook when you essentially say it outright in the preceding paragraphs (truth is so unattainable that the See It Now reports can be described as baseless? How can you claim information has worth after that?) See the links below…
…I don’t think you’re in favour of censorship — the problem is that your antirealist theory of truth gives you no reason to be against censorship or propaganda; it also gives no license to healthy (ie, ‘a good degree of’) skepticism — only the practically worthless radical skepticism (I mean ‘practically’ worthless not in the sense that it’s ‘almost’ worthless, but in the literal sense that it has no practicality at all, and thus no place in evaluating, well… anything that exists — it arguably has some worth in philosophy). Since information has no worth (truth is “functionally” subjective), it (a.) doesn’t matter if censorship is rife, because censorship would merely change the quantity of a worthless thing (b.) doesn’t matter if propaganda is rife, because ‘propaganda’ has no more or less worth than information, and (c.) specifically discourages rational skepticism because the whole basis of radical skepticism is that nothing is true, so information has no merit for one to rationally gauge. You talk a good talk at the end of your posts, it’s just that it contradicts what you write above it.
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