US is one of the most effectively censored country in the world, and it's funny that it's able to pretend to be a beacon of the free-speach. It's just the censorship is more subtle and soft-handed - and thus way more effective than crude and primitive censorship that minor governments can implement.
In Poland an anti-government song disappears from the playlist, and it's a huge scandal. In US a convicted pedophile with own pedo-island, and connections all over the elites, media and government disappears from the prison cell in a dubious suicide where all cameras stopped working and many other "coincidences" happened and not much happens about it.
In US the government is the puppet of the ruling class so there's really no need for it to do any fighting. It just does what it was told (paid) to do. And the media have almost full control over the public opinion, so there is no need for any silly black-listing censorship. All they have to do is to gently steer the attention of the public elsewhere.
> In US a convicted pedophile with own pedo-island, and connections all over the elites, media and government disappears from the prison cell in a dubious suicide where all cameras stopped working and many other "coincidences" happened and not much happens about it.
i know what you're talking about tho. pretty much, this means the topic is well discussed and not subject to censorship.
While I'm not sure that Epstein is the best example, US media has certainly been known to indulge in fairly dramatic soft self-censorship. I actually think this is less common than it used to be; the internet breaks it a bit.
A notable case was the unraveling of the whole Iraq WMD story, and especially the yellowcake affair. I suspect that this was notable precisely because well-informed Americans could see BBC et al covering it via the internet while the US media largely ignored it, though; pre-internet cases of media self-censorship would have been far less visible.
In an environment where the Guardian, Daily Mail and various other foreign papers have massive US market penetration via the internet, this sort of thing is probably way less useful; media self-censorship will only be useful for the section of the population who get their news solely from TV (or where the entire global media colludes to censor something, but that seems far less likely).
A pro-war pundit then outed Wilson’s spouse as a CIA employee and there was a widely publicized special counsel investigation into the matter of the outing that was discussed a lot at the time.
So I don’t really understand the idea that the US media as a whole was self-censoring this...
I don't see any signs of that narrative being successfully controlled. In fact, I've yet to see any discussion where "didn't kill himself" didn't manifest immediately.
It's a cute little "conspiracy theory" for the masses to play with, nobody in power is threatened in the slightest. In many ways it's self-neutered by turning that phrase into a mindless meme.
The soft censorship means we've seen effectively zero mainstream investigation into any of the glaringly obvious questions.
And "conspiracy theory" in general today means: pothead crazy garbage, as if politics isn't a histories of small and big conspiracies.
No need to censor any truth anymore, if it simply does not reach anyone because it is burried in a huge pile of garbage information, most people have not the time sorting it through.any
"Conspiracy theory" is set equal to "pothead crazy garbage" because 99% of conspiracy theories are just that. An instance of Sturgeon's Law, if you will.
What you're saying is that it doesn't matter that information does get around and everybody knows, because we can't do anything about it. That's not "soft censorship", though - that's lack of the need to censor, because the population can be kept in check even while informed.
a quote on this topic, during the early days of the Afghanistan, was "CNN shows us where the missiles are launched and Al-Jazeera shows us where they land"
a More concrete example is "On February 8, 2018, it was reported that Qatari leaders had reassured the leaders of Jewish American organisations that Al Jazeera would not be airing its companion documentary series on the Israel lobby in the United States. According to Haaretz, the Qatari government had reportedly hired Republican Senator Ted Cruz's former aide Nicolas Muzin to open communications channels with Jewish American organisations. Earlier, the network had sent letters to several American pro-Israel organisations informing them that their employees would appear in the documentary. These letters generated speculation that the Qatari government had reneged on its earlier promise to block Al Jazeera from screening the controversial documentary which, like the earlier British series, had utilized clandestine footage and recordings of pro-Israel activists."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobby_(TV_series)
Poland is just a young democracy, so they haven't learned how to use it properly yet. Once it sinks in that universal suffrage includes a lot of gullible people. Then you realize that with good propaganda the percentage of the population that are gullible to your influence rises to the point and manipulating them is the optimal way to rule. Sure you occasionally get other people pulling one over on them in a way you don't like, but that just means it's time to up your propaganda game.
Of course it wasn't a democracy in a modern sense, but sejm had legislative power. The system is even called szlachta democracy [0] (although that may be a bit biased name). Compare it to most of Europe (except England, Netherlands, Venice etc.) where you'd have a rise of absolute monarchy up until the French Revolution.
yes, that's what he is trying to say, interesting view that's impprinted to us in school and culture, but your comment got me to think that it doesn't make any sense
In Poland an anti-government song disappears from the playlist, and it's a huge scandal. In US a convicted pedophile with own pedo-island, and connections all over the elites, media and government disappears from the prison cell in a dubious suicide where all cameras stopped working and many other "coincidences" happened and not much happens about it.
In US the government is the puppet of the ruling class so there's really no need for it to do any fighting. It just does what it was told (paid) to do. And the media have almost full control over the public opinion, so there is no need for any silly black-listing censorship. All they have to do is to gently steer the attention of the public elsewhere.