The inflation-adjusted median income of U.S. households rebounded last year to roughly its 2019 level, overcoming the biggest price spike in four decades to restore most Americans’ purchasing power.
AP Newswire is generally a good source of information yes, and while the person you are responding to is being bombastic, they’re not materially wrong.
Everything AP presents here is presented in the tone of “this is the best we can do” and the idea that bringing us barely back to sustenance levels we were at before (there was certainly a big homeless problem in my city before COVID) is a “great” thing to be presenting as a winning campaign issue belies the real suffering many, many US citizens are currently suffering.
It’s also choosing to make measurements and metrics that benefit the status quo instead of choosing different metrics that do show the real picture for citizens on the ground in the USA.
Does that mean it’s fully propaganda. No, but it’s inability to talk about the issue outside the prescribed accepted discourse presents a problem as it does not show the full picture. It’s much like the Clinton campaign in 1992 pushing protestors at campaign events outside of the view of the television cameras. As long as it’s not in the picture, it effectively doesn’t exist.
Chomsky said it best:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion
Case in point for for enforcing the limits - I just heard the head of the corporate landlord association in Canada suggesting that the government buying old buildings instead of them would be Marxist and that would be like East Germany. Keywords strictly outside the acceptable spectrum.
I was wondering when APnews would be suspect in this sub… turns out it’s when it veers outside the accepted discourse on lemmy… or doesn’t appease them enough.
Status quo, hiding the “real” picture… unreal. All of this while providing absolutely no evidence contrary to anything in the article. Quality discussion.
I think you missed the point. The parent comment explains it well. It’s not that AP specifically is suspect. It’s a comment on the wider discourse where AP is but one participant. Perhaps one of the best ones. AP is generally a good source. The whole discourse on the topic is propagandist in the way that it works in favour of firms, not labor.
No I understand the point, it’s that good news about the economy must be down played because of various unsourced opinion A, B, and C that don’t dispute anything in the article but do still manage to accuse AP news of presenting information with an agenda.
This scrutiny is not applied when the reported information is in line with what the community believes. The article even discusses caveats to the good news:
The data showed that while the typical American household regained its 2019 purchasing power in 2023, it essentially experienced no rise in living standards over that time. That is a sharp difference from the preceding four years, when inflation-adjusted median incomes rose 14% from 2015 through 2019.
But that isn’t enough. The whole article needs to be cast with doubt, not because contrary evidence was presented, but because users feel AP news is shilling.
Ridiculous.
Edit: It’s evident that, once I posted this excerpt, it was clung to like a life raft considering how many times it was spammed, and is somehow self disproving the premise of the article. Kinda sounds like the article wasn’t read completely before first (down playing) opinions were cast. But hey, who reads the article? :)
A “compelling indictment of the news media’s role in covering up errors and deceptions” (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction.
In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.
Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance.
Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.
Apnews…?
AP Newswire is generally a good source of information yes, and while the person you are responding to is being bombastic, they’re not materially wrong.
Everything AP presents here is presented in the tone of “this is the best we can do” and the idea that bringing us barely back to sustenance levels we were at before (there was certainly a big homeless problem in my city before COVID) is a “great” thing to be presenting as a winning campaign issue belies the real suffering many, many US citizens are currently suffering.
It’s also choosing to make measurements and metrics that benefit the status quo instead of choosing different metrics that do show the real picture for citizens on the ground in the USA.
Does that mean it’s fully propaganda. No, but it’s inability to talk about the issue outside the prescribed accepted discourse presents a problem as it does not show the full picture. It’s much like the Clinton campaign in 1992 pushing protestors at campaign events outside of the view of the television cameras. As long as it’s not in the picture, it effectively doesn’t exist.
Chomsky said it best:
Case in point for for enforcing the limits - I just heard the head of the corporate landlord association in Canada suggesting that the government buying old buildings instead of them would be Marxist and that would be like East Germany. Keywords strictly outside the acceptable spectrum.
I was wondering when APnews would be suspect in this sub… turns out it’s when it veers outside the accepted discourse on lemmy… or doesn’t appease them enough.
Status quo, hiding the “real” picture… unreal. All of this while providing absolutely no evidence contrary to anything in the article. Quality discussion.
I think you missed the point. The parent comment explains it well. It’s not that AP specifically is suspect. It’s a comment on the wider discourse where AP is but one participant. Perhaps one of the best ones. AP is generally a good source. The whole discourse on the topic is propagandist in the way that it works in favour of firms, not labor.
No I understand the point, it’s that good news about the economy must be down played because of various unsourced opinion A, B, and C that don’t dispute anything in the article but do still manage to accuse AP news of presenting information with an agenda.
This scrutiny is not applied when the reported information is in line with what the community believes. The article even discusses caveats to the good news:
But that isn’t enough. The whole article needs to be cast with doubt, not because contrary evidence was presented, but because users feel AP news is shilling.
Ridiculous.
Edit: It’s evident that, once I posted this excerpt, it was clung to like a life raft considering how many times it was spammed, and is somehow self disproving the premise of the article. Kinda sounds like the article wasn’t read completely before first (down playing) opinions were cast. But hey, who reads the article? :)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78912/manufacturing-consent-by-edward-s-herman-and-noam-chomsky/
And AP news is clearly guilty of this because… Oh wait I missed the evidence.
I recently got dumped on for suggesting that budgeting is smart. Lemmy is disappointing, sometimes.