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Soft censorship in the US

Craig234

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There is a serious danger of 'government' in general serving its power over its citizens by depriving them of information - as seen in extremes in China and now Russia. So, we have in the US a different approach, supposedly, putting citizens rights above government, except in cases of legitimate security needs - in theory.

In practice, not so much. We DO have systems much better than others, that have more of that freedom, but we have a lot of soft censorship making us a lot closer to the others than we'd like to admit.

As background, there's a paradox on this, that when people are successfully propagandized, they tend to become defenders of the propagandizer; China and Russia are filled with people who strongly support their governments' actions, just as the 'trump cult' or Fox viewers are very loyal to them. But put that aside.

The US has a history of problems on this. When the CIA was created, for example, it did a lot of things to 'build relationships' with US media; Alan Dulles would hold regular meetings with top owners and media figures where he would share classified information to build chummy relationships and a sense of 'team' and obligation where he could get favors.

The CIA has maintained media programs ever since. The military has looked out for its interests, offering very valuable services to movies that have a message it supports, and denying them to films that do not.

The US has long had a huge problem with over-classification, where there seems to be little enforcement of any restraint in classification or check on over-classification.

This has resulted in critical information the public should have being hidden, and exposed only through illegal leaks by principled people who make huge sacrifices to do so, from lies about the Vietnam war exposed in the Pentagon Papers, so illegal surveillance operations exposed by Edward Snowden.

In an extreme example, an independent journalist who received and published classified documents showing truths that embarrassed governments, was targets by the US government for assassination and in schemes to abuse criminal justice systems of allies in attempts to get him imprisoned for life for journalism, that have successfully jailed him for nearly a decade, most recently in horrific 'supermax' conditions.

There are people in the US who 'have concerns' about these actions, but that has done nothing to stop them, under three presidencies now, of both parties.

In particular, this week, another act has taken place. One of America's leading commentators, Chris Hedges, who is often critical of US actions as well as others, with a background of being the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and on a team winning the Pulitzer Prize, found it hard to find a platform in the US. He's raised the issue that many voices have from Seymour Hersh to excellent historian Stephen Kinzer.

For six years, the platform Hedges found was RT - controversial as Russian state tv, but unlike China, they sponsored high quality, independent content given freedom - for whatever motives Russia had, I suspect because they wanted to promote the left-right split in the US.

Now, with the Russian invasion of the US, RT has been shut down - but youtube has gone a step further and removed all six years of Hedges' shows - including the recent one in which he condemned Russia's invasion as a "criminal war of aggression". So, now, we the American people are deprived of that information on the top outlet for such videos.

We need to be aware of this danger of 'soft censorship' which goes so far down the road toward actual censorship. For example, where just making things harder to find is effective at reducing the numbers who see them, which is often enough - just as Putin is seeing where despite thousands of protesters, an estimated 80% support him and his war.

We should support outlets who provide good information. Here's an article on the removal of Hedges' show on one of those outlets, commondreams.org.

 
What independent journalist did the US government try and assassinate.
 
You have to read. You can't rely on TV or radio or the movies for information. Even if they wanted to give you the full story time constraints and short attention span of the public at large won't allow it. You need to get the books. I read a mix of fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction and biographies. Even poetry can teach you truth. Keats' work on the Irish Risings is a good example.

If you rely on mass media you really don't have a clue. It's much more difficult to employ soft censorship and overclassification on subjects so old they're now declassified. Get the book. Once you get grounded in the truth of those you pick up much more reading about more current topics.
 
Chris Hedges = hard hitting journalism


Chris Hedges | Americans Who Tell The Truth​

https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org › portraits › c...

Chris Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born on September 18, 1956 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He graduated from Colgate University with a BA ...

Chris Hedges's Articles at Salon.com​

https://www.salon.com › writer › chris_hedges

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at ScheerPost.

Digitally Disappeared: YouTube Has Deleted Six Years of My ...​

https://www.commondreams.org › views › 2022/03/29

20 hours ago — Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as ...

Chris Hedges: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle​

https://www.amazon.com › Chris-Hedges

Chris Hedges is a cultural critic and author who was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, ...
Works written: America: The Farewell Tour, Am...

Meet the Censored: Chris Hedges - TK News by Matt Taibbi​

https://taibbi.substack.com › meet-the-censored-chris-he...

1 day ago — This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact ..
 
His books are all available on Amazon. They drove him off the NYT and Youtube but you can still find him if you look, which is my point. Not that I agree with everything he says.
 
It is rather comical watching some here complain about a private business censoring what content they allow on their site especially when those people were all for private business's censorship when it was not thier tribe that was getting censored.
 
It is rather comical watching some here complain about a private business censoring what content they allow on their site especially when those people were all for private business's censorship when it was not thier tribe that was getting censored.
The OP calls it "soft censoreship." As long as the media is a business enterprise outlets will find an audience and cater to it. Even PBS and NPR rely on individual and corporate contributions. Ken Burns is a good example. He's immensely popular and does deep dives into his subject matter, but he remains very soft. None of the really controversial, dirty, shameful things get much time from him.
 
There is a serious danger of 'government' in general serving its power over its citizens by depriving them of information - as seen in extremes in China and now Russia. So, we have in the US a different approach, supposedly, putting citizens rights above government, except in cases of legitimate security needs - in theory.

In practice, not so much. We DO have systems much better than others, that have more of that freedom, but we have a lot of soft censorship making us a lot closer to the others than we'd like to admit.

As background, there's a paradox on this, that when people are successfully propagandized, they tend to become defenders of the propagandizer; China and Russia are filled with people who strongly support their governments' actions, just as the 'trump cult' or Fox viewers are very loyal to them. But put that aside.

The US has a history of problems on this. When the CIA was created, for example, it did a lot of things to 'build relationships' with US media; Alan Dulles would hold regular meetings with top owners and media figures where he would share classified information to build chummy relationships and a sense of 'team' and obligation where he could get favors.

The CIA has maintained media programs ever since. The military has looked out for its interests, offering very valuable services to movies that have a message it supports, and denying them to films that do not.

The US has long had a huge problem with over-classification, where there seems to be little enforcement of any restraint in classification or check on over-classification.

This has resulted in critical information the public should have being hidden, and exposed only through illegal leaks by principled people who make huge sacrifices to do so, from lies about the Vietnam war exposed in the Pentagon Papers, so illegal surveillance operations exposed by Edward Snowden.

In an extreme example, an independent journalist who received and published classified documents showing truths that embarrassed governments, was targets by the US government for assassination and in schemes to abuse criminal justice systems of allies in attempts to get him imprisoned for life for journalism, that have successfully jailed him for nearly a decade, most recently in horrific 'supermax' conditions.

There are people in the US who 'have concerns' about these actions, but that has done nothing to stop them, under three presidencies now, of both parties.

In particular, this week, another act has taken place. One of America's leading commentators, Chris Hedges, who is often critical of US actions as well as others, with a background of being the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and on a team winning the Pulitzer Prize, found it hard to find a platform in the US. He's raised the issue that many voices have from Seymour Hersh to excellent historian Stephen Kinzer.

For six years, the platform Hedges found was RT - controversial as Russian state tv, but unlike China, they sponsored high quality, independent content given freedom - for whatever motives Russia had, I suspect because they wanted to promote the left-right split in the US.

Now, with the Russian invasion of the US, RT has been shut down - but youtube has gone a step further and removed all six years of Hedges' shows - including the recent one in which he condemned Russia's invasion as a "criminal war of aggression". So, now, we the American people are deprived of that information on the top outlet for such videos.

We need to be aware of this danger of 'soft censorship' which goes so far down the road toward actual censorship. For example, where just making things harder to find is effective at reducing the numbers who see them, which is often enough - just as Putin is seeing where despite thousands of protesters, an estimated 80% support him and his war.

We should support outlets who provide good information. Here's an article on the removal of Hedges' show on one of those outlets, commondreams.org.



The government did not remove RT America from youtube... Chris Hedges is free to find another platform to host his show
 
You have to read. You can't rely on TV or radio or the movies for information. Even if they wanted to give you the full story time constraints and short attention span of the public at large won't allow it. You need to get the books. I read a mix of fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction and biographies. Even poetry can teach you truth. Keats' work on the Irish Risings is a good example.

If you rely on mass media you really don't have a clue. It's much more difficult to employ soft censorship and overclassification on subjects so old they're now declassified. Get the book. Once you get grounded in the truth of those you pick up much more reading about more current topics.
Read the second to last line of my posts.

It makes it clear that reducing the numbers of people who see information has a great effect on hiding it. When 5% of the public know something important, it's a lot like 0% know it. That's just how it works in a democracy. You might think 'well if 5% know it'll explode for many to know'. Not how it usually works.
 
The government did not remove RT America from youtube... Chris Hedges is free to find another platform to host his show
That's part of his point that the good commentators - I could list many - are finding it hard to find platforms. Maybe you should red the article.
 
That's part of his point that the good commentators - I could list many - are finding it hard to find platforms. Maybe you should red the article.


I did read the article... If they can't find a home, maybe they are not as good commentators as you think...
 
I did read the article... If they can't find a home, maybe they are not as good commentators as you think...
Idiotic comment, which you don't usually make. By your logic, anything censored in China isn't worth being published.
 
Idiotic comment, which you don't usually make. By your logic, anything censored in China isn't worth being published.
Why do you suppose they are having a hard time finding a platform?
 
That's easier than facing the fact the market is rejecting your content...
Tough for the market to accept your content if it can't see your content. You have to get the book. Not many get the book which goes to comment 9.
 
Tough for the market to accept your content if it can't see your content. You have to get the book. Not many get the book which goes to comment 9.

RT is available on rumble...

 
The 'Soft censorship in the US' continued on unabated.

“to keep the public from knowing about the President’s wayward son and his sketchy financial and foreign dealings”​
Posted by Mike LaChance Tuesday, March 29, 2022​

What a coincidence that it is strictly along political lines.
 
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RT is available on rumble...
As much as I pay attention to info, for example I have had many of Hedges' books for years, I don't remember hearing of rumble before. That's the point and you're missing it.
 
Why do you suppose they are having a hard time finding a platform?

The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the “establishment” media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorthey Parker once said about Kathrine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast.

The Ukraine war, which I denounced as a “criminal war of aggression” when it began, is a sterling example. Any effort to put it into historical context, to suggest that the betrayal of agreements by the West with Moscow, which I covered as a reporter in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with the expansion of NATO might have baited Russia into the conflict, is dismissed. Nuance. Complexity. Ambiguity. Historical context. Self-criticism. All are banished.

My show, dedicated primarily to authors and their books, should have been, if we had a functioning system of public broadcasting, on PBS or NPR. But public broadcasting is as captive to corporations and the wealthy as the commercial media, indeed PBS and NPR run commercials in the guise of sponsorship acknowledgements. The last show on public broadcasting that examined power was Moyers & Company. Once Bill Moyers went off the air in 2015, no one took his place.

A few decades ago, you could hear independent voices on public broadcasting, including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Noam Chomsky. No more. A few decades ago, there were a variety of alternative weeklies and magazines. A few decades ago, we still had a press that, however flawed, had not rendered whole segments of the population, especially the poor and social critics, invisible. It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media press, but it no more longer exists on YouTube.
 
The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the “establishment” media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorthey Parker once said about Kathrine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast.

A Dorothy Parker reference. My respect for this guy just went up a few notches. And, although I'm inundated with things to read, I subscribed to Common Dreams. They seem worthwhile, I'll give it a go.
 
It is rather comical watching some here complain about a private business censoring what content they allow on their site especially when those people were all for private business's censorship when it was not thier tribe that was getting censored.
The issues raised by the OP reflect trends which have been widely recognized - mostly by left-leaning folk - since at least the 1980s, as for instance detailed in Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Concentration of media ownership and structural biases in presentation and omission of information caused by models of funding and access are and always have been legitimate, serious concerns. I myself have noted in response to complaints about 'censoring' (ie, deplatforming) of Trump's dangerous misinformation and violation of terms of service by Twitter, Facebook etc. that the only problem, such as it is, lies in the extent to which many of us have allowed particular media or social media sources to influence our lives and shape our worldviews: Even if such deplatforming were arbitrary or politically biased (which in that example obviously is not the case), it would be a serious issue only inasmuch as it actually deprives people of one 'side' to the story so to speak, which would only be the case in a scenario where the flow of information is dominated by those few sources; where Trump or his ilk have no other easy way of disseminating their views. But as we all know, there are vast platforms for Trumpist misinformation on Fox and other far-right networks and newspapers, as well as associates still using Twitter etc. to spread the same ideas while being a little more careful to remain within terms of service.

By contrast, the example of Chris Hedges highlighted in the OP appears neither to be dangerous misinformation/violation of terms of service, nor (perhaps more importantly) information for which comparable alternative platforms exist. Allegedly, at least: The complaint seems to be that since those perspectives come from a highly credentialed journalist but lie outside the mainstream pro-American narrative, they constitute bona fide political discourse worthy of at least consideration which is heavily curtailed by the arbitrary withdrawal of access to such a major platform. Can you understand those distinctions? Pretty much everyone agrees that a line needs to be drawn somewhere by those involved as to what should be granted a platform and where: The distinctions we're talking about here are between dangerous misinformation versus highly credentialed journalism - which of those might more reasonably be expected to have a platform? - and actually having a platform on Fox, NY Post, associates' accounts on Twitter etc. etc. versus having a marginal platform on fringe outlets like 'CommonDreams' and 'Rumble.' For obvious reasons, it makes far more sense to be concerned about the latter than the former.

Of course even then, I don't think anyone is saying that YouTube should be forced to provide a platform or that their decision not to constitutes actual censorship violating freedom of speech (both of which were vociferously argued by Trump's fans): They're saying that these issues of concentration of ownership and structural biases going back to the 1980s and beyond remain serious issues - perhaps even moreso now, and even on internet platforms - which intelligent media consumers and politically engaged people should be aware of and actively try to mitigate by seeking out and sharing worthy content from those fringe outlets.
 
A Dorothy Parker reference. My respect for this guy just went up a few notches.

Have you ever watched a speech he gave?

And, although I'm inundated with things to read, I subscribed to Common Dreams. They seem worthwhile, I'll give it a go.

Great to hear. Post your opinion. It's not really a site with their opinions though there's a little, it's a site that publishes good progressive commentary, probably the best such place I've seen.
 
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