In France, there is a powerful left-wing politician named Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
He was senator for decades. He was previously a minister. He has run for President multiple times. People close him describe him as a political beast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Mélenchon
On october 3th 2023, the newspaper Le Monde published an absolutely astonishing investigation into his girlfriend. They reveal that his girlfriend SCREAMS and HUMILIATES ordinary people. And he knows that.
3 days later, on october 6th 2023, Melenchon took a trip to Morocco.
Believing he was far away for any camera, he made a cynical confession to moroccan university students:
“I really don’t care what newspapers reveal. The vast majority of voters don’t read newspapers. They watch online videos”
"We are now in the great era of social media"
Elon Musk regularly attacks the New York Times.
On social media, he urges people to not read it.
That’s because the New York Times has published incredible stories about him.
Elon Musk knowingly lied about the safety of self-driving vehicles. Multiple people were killed
Musk is sexually harassing SpaceX engineers
The Musk Foundation is breaking the law:
When powerful politicians and businessmen tell you “don’t read newspapers”, they aren’t trying to give you good life advice.
It’s a manipulation attempt.
Forgive me for having a different view but even us as regular people know not to trust anything we read without good reason to, so someone important saying not to read newspapers is as interesting as someone saying not to approach a wild dog. Elon musk regularly attacks the new york times because the new york times regularly reports as divisive content as is reasonably possible because the reports that make the most noise get the most attention, that isnt exclusive just to Elon but most people they report on, though tbf it is still a semi useful signal as someone who they couldn’t write bad things about is probably not doing anything too crazy but that could also just mean a great cover up, you never know.
Keep your thinking caps on.
Your post contains zero examples of anyone telling anyone not to read newspapers. The Mélenchon example (according to your own words!) is him pointing out that voters already don’t read newspapers, not that they shouldn’t. The Musk examples are about one specific newspaper, and even there he isn’t telling us not to read it. (FWIW, I would never have known or cared about any of these examples before reading this post.)
So what exactly are you trying to tell us with this post?
I don’t know a lot about French politics and have no opinions about Mélenchon, but if he said something to the effect of “we are now in the great era of social media”, then I agree with him on that. It is, in my mind, enormous societal progress that lots of people now get their news from other ordinary people on websites/apps (“social media”) in addition, or even instead of, legacy media which sees it as its job to enforce an “Overton window”. It’s democratization of knowledge and information sharing, why should I think that is a bad thing?
It’s kind of ironic that you’re posting this to a social media site, TBH.
in my mind, enormous societal progress that lots of people now get their news from other ordinary people on websites/apps (“social media”)
Yeah. About that…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/facebook-overseas-alberta-separtism-9.7223966
What about that?
You see, I grew up in the era of “You” being Time Person of the Year: https://time.com/6258607/you-time-person-of-the-year-2006/
I don’t see why, 20 years later, I should now think that the same phenomenon is a bad thing, but maybe you can explain that to me.
I disagree ! You can found informations through other ways. Blogs, small websites, forums, specialised newsletters, twitter, facebook, Instagram, lemmy, mastodon, youtube, every fediverse website/community.
What you will learn is that you should have multiple point of entry to get your fresh news.
My issue with this is that it seems to imply that the elites don’t want us engaging with any media at all (probably partially true- an uneducated/apathetic population is easier to govern). However, it seems that you assume that the media itself has integrity, which I would argue is flat out not the case, except for maybe one or two outliers like AGNB/Channel 5 (and even he has bias and some skeletons in the closet).
I would argue that this collective loss of media integrity, in America at least, goes back to at least the 1880’s, and the point of no return could marked to a few years before 1974, when Christine Chubbuck killed herself on live TV in protest of sensationalism in the press.
This does not mean that going the way of the ostrich is the right way, however. It just means that I think we can get a better result out of honing our powers of discernment and logic so we can figure out what exactly we believe, and then carve the bullshit off whatever the media is trying to feed us so we can figure out what’s actually going on. Or, even better, not even seek out the information, but allow the information to come to us, where we can apply these same tools and get a good answer.
Sorry, the smoking gun on Melenchon is that his girlfriend is rude to people sometimes? That’s some tabloid shit, and kind of a counterexample to your overall point. People should ignore politically motivated gossip.
Multiple sources mention harassment. People crying.
But I guess you are okay with that.
Imo reading that the other details make it somewhat worse, it sounds like she is their boss, and her media company espouses values that make that kind of abuse hypocritical. I’m going by the auto-translation though so could be misreading.
It’s a scandal for her, not for him. And it seems like gossip and hearsay at that.
What about if some rando on the intertubes tells you to read newspapers extremely critically?
NYT isn’t three articles, it’s a force, and one that has done immense damage to America by deftly supporting conservatives while appealing to liberals. Hell that’s NPR’s whole brand. But I digress. I suppose if someone said I should get my news from social media, I’d run screaming too.
Choose ‘your’ newspaper wisely, even then don’t trust it blindly, seek the opposite viewpoint. Form an opinion.
That’s why I use today’s sponsor, Ground News!
… /s? I don’t even know anymore.
“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.” - Aneurin Bevan
Yeah, sure, and journalists are entirely objective people with no editorial line and personal beliefs, and every corporate newspaper is a total truth machine completely independant from their investors’ interests and agendas.
I find that setting my morning alarm to play NPR Morning Edition on KCRW helps avoid that corporate pressure, especially now that it’s completely listener-funded and doesn’t even have the threat of losing government money because they already cancelled it.
They do and they are wrong. Most newspapers and magazines employ journalists that do quite a good job; people that are honest and believe in what they do. The same is true for most television news channels. On the contrary, social media channels are extremely biased, and fact checking is close to zero. (Sure, don’t believe Fox News, and Bild, Welt, politico etc belong to springer; so always compare multiple sources; never trust a single source).
I can go back to the origin of Hurst in the late 1800’s and show where they knowingly lied to push their agendas.
I can’t give any form of media as much credit as you are - I’ve read too many lies and half-truths.
Hearst was a newspaper magnate from the … USA! The USA is a different story, as news is and always was business in the USA; look at all the television channels with all the commercial breaks, even during the news! They even tried to ruin the World Cup 26 by introducing these constant drinking breaks in between, so that sport isn’t the main item anymore, but the ads are. Distilling the news from these US businesses was challenging and has become worse. Lucky for you, there are still some good newspapers and channels in the USA (PBS. CNN), and naturally you can also subscribe to European news sources: the Guardian, English version of El Pais, DW from Germany, BBC is quite ok too. Le Monde. Al Jazeera, Euronews. (I read all of them; not in full naturally, I need to earn money)
When politicians start a sentence with “People do this…”, “People think that…”, they’re lying as well. They don’t know what people do or think, they don’t research the facts, they just tell you whatever they think. Best case scenario, they are exposed to a few “people” who support them.
Generalization is a lie, like I just did. in generalizing what politicians do. Of course I didn’t research this, it’s just what I think.
When politicians start a sentence with “People do this…”, “People think that…”, they’re lying as well. They don’t know what people do or think, they don’t research the facts, they just tell you whatever they think.
Or worse, they tell you what they want you to think. It’s them saying “this is what i want you to do, say and believe”.
Also when someone says ‘the mainstream media aren’t covering this’, they usually are, just not in the way they want.
“People who don’t read the news are uninformed. People who read the news are misinformed.” -Mark Twain
“freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.” -V.I. Lenin
It’s amazing to me how widespread this is on Lemmy.
As a side, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the 🐐
