News
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1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
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4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
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10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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It's not a free pass. Something doesn't have to be propaganda to be bad.
I didn't say it did? I didn't even say that propaganda is universally bad?
Sure, but propaganda has to have intent. The article itself cannot be propaganda without it. It may advance a claim of COVID being trivial, but those who advance it must bend the article in some way. What they say then is the propaganda.
The choice of what to publish at all, is intent. News outlets are not just firehoses of all facts. They choose what to publish.
There is no need for the article to be "bent" in any way.
So to you propaganda is a synonym for news, and that is simply incorrect.
No. Not a synonym. But the line between news and propaganda is not clear-cut. Especially in the case of a self-contained article. A news outlet may serve as a source of propaganda, based on the editorial decisions they make. The individual articles are still news, even as they serve as propaganda for their audience.
You've kind of arrived at the point while ignoring it.
Propaganda requires intent. You are correct that we can't know their intent directly, therefore we can only use evidence to try to determine the authors intent.
Admittedly I did not pick the article a part, but I saw no tell-tale signs of propaganda. It was primarily interviews with doctors. I saw no signs of manipulative wording, attempts at persuasion, or unsupported opinions of the writer.
While I can't definitively say this article is not propaganda, it probably isn't.
So it's not propaganda until you can provide good evidence that it is.
And editorial choice clears the bar for intent.
You are ignoring what I'm saying. You are trying to look at a single article for evidence of propaganda. But that isn't the whole picture.
A news desk picks what articles that they publish. If they publish a whole bunch of articles saying "the average case of covid has become more mild" that is furthering a specific viewpoint. If they instead publish articles about "people are still suffering from long-covid", that is furthering a different viewpoint.
And crucially, both "the average case of covid has become more mild" and "people are still suffering from long-covid" can be true. Both types of articles can be written with absolutely zero bias, and still serve as propaganda.
Ok, but now you are assuming intent of the news desk still without evidence. I get where you're coming from, but without actual evidence showing a clear organizational bias for a certain narrative, making that assumption isn't anymore valid than assuming the actual reporters intent.
And again, furthering a viewpoint does not make propaganda. Virtually all news is going to further one viewpoint or another, even if the organization and writer are 100% unbiased. Facts usually don't maintain a neutral ground on a topic.
You mean like how they and others keep publishing articles saying, or intimating, that COVID is less severe now even though there's really no evidence for that?
It's the fact they keep doing it that makes it propaganda.
Ironic considering you've presented no evidence to support that.
So your own comments here are propaganda? If everything published by choice is propaganda, then everything is propaganda, because everything is published by choice. Nobody just dumps a bunch of rocks on the keyboard and publishes whatever it types out.