I don’t want to get into the Russia/Ukraine issue here, but I find it ironic that this followed up posts that exemplified the essential unreliability of the Western media:


It is not as if the European and especially, the American media are not infamous for cranking out highly sophisticated war propaganda to demonize anyone they severely dislike.  Cf. the Iraq Wars—both of them—only as part of a very long list.

That presents an epistemological problem:  How do you know what is really going on in the world, beyond your first-hand experience and your local view of events?  I generally distrust The New York Times, the BBC, and for that matter, Die Welt/FAZ/et al.  I strongly distrust them for war reporting:  The mass-media generally have dirty histories of being propaganda outlets for whipping up a war psychosis.  When a war is ongoing, I tend to presume Saddam’s WMDs and Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies to steal hospital equipment in all of their scary headlines and atrocity stories.  They have destroyed their own credibility long ago:  “Fool me once, shame on you...”—“Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.”

But malice is not even necessary, given how sloppy and susceptible to groupthink many “journalists” are; cf. my above post on Tech Republic reporting about Bitcoin.  I did not suggest that Fernandez is an agent of some anti-Bitcoin conspiracy:  I think that he is stupid, careless, and ill-informed in his reporting on Bitcoin.  When you read mass-media stories about events in your own experience, or subjects of your own expertise, that is when you tend to notice how badly many so-called “journalists” tend to foul things up from simple incompetence.

I do not intend to engage here in an extended discussion about this.  No time for that now.  But it is a problem.  Having pondered that problem for many years, perhaps I may have an answer for myself.  If I don’t, I may as well ask Hunter Biden; I hear that he offers paid consulting, and he must know an awful lot about how news can be suppressed and manipulated.