Post by Kapitan on Jul 30, 2023 15:09:54 GMT
Lately I've been listening to a lot of Prof. Stephen Kotkin, a Russia historian with particular expertise in Stalin, both on his areas of focus and the inevitable interviews he's been giving on the Russia-Ukraine war. This morning I have been listening to a recent interview of him by political strategist James Carville and journalist Al Hunt on a PBS podcast called "Political War Room." (I'd never heard of the show, and just checked it out because of Kotkin.)
The asked the good question of "where can people go to find reliable information about the war?" His first answer was by reading and listening broadly via Telegram and other social media channels from Russian-language and other on-location services. He quickly conceded that's not an option for most of us, and so he recommended the Carnegie Endownment website, which apparently has a lot of American policy briefs with good information. And then he said something that finally gets us to the quote part:
"But you have to be careful not to watch cable television. Ah, because, um, how do I put it? We're stupid enough without cable TV. There's no need to make ourselves even dumber."
While it's somewhat striking to think our major media don't properly cover such news in a believable way--something I'd rather not think is the case--I also can't help but think that sounds right to me, not just in coverage of the war, but of everything. Not to say the media don't do a lot of great reporting everyday, but that everything is filtered or skewed in such a way as to make it highly suspect (even as we have no choice but to rely on the underlying reporting...it's just a matter of trying to identify the filters, both the ones we do and don't like).
The asked the good question of "where can people go to find reliable information about the war?" His first answer was by reading and listening broadly via Telegram and other social media channels from Russian-language and other on-location services. He quickly conceded that's not an option for most of us, and so he recommended the Carnegie Endownment website, which apparently has a lot of American policy briefs with good information. And then he said something that finally gets us to the quote part:
"But you have to be careful not to watch cable television. Ah, because, um, how do I put it? We're stupid enough without cable TV. There's no need to make ourselves even dumber."
While it's somewhat striking to think our major media don't properly cover such news in a believable way--something I'd rather not think is the case--I also can't help but think that sounds right to me, not just in coverage of the war, but of everything. Not to say the media don't do a lot of great reporting everyday, but that everything is filtered or skewed in such a way as to make it highly suspect (even as we have no choice but to rely on the underlying reporting...it's just a matter of trying to identify the filters, both the ones we do and don't like).