I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that “it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual’s role in the American democracy.”

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not alI-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results… The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

–Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”

El Pais is a brand of PRISA, an advertising and media conglomerate with headquarters in Madrid, Spain.

Fuck the Heritage Foundation.

Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances:

• Awful.systems - Blocked
• Beehaw.org - Blocked
• Blahaj.zone - Blocked
• DBZer0 - Blocked
• Dubvee.org - Blocked
• Eco.br - Blocked
• Feddit.org - Blocked
• Feddit.nl - Blocked
• Feddit.uk - Blocked
• Hexbear.net - Blocked
• JLai.lu - Blocked
• Leminal.space - Blocked
• Lemmy.best - Blocked
• Lemmy.ca - Blocked
• Lemm.ee - Blocked
• Lemmings.world - Blocked
• Lemmyf.uk - Blocked
• Lemmygrad.ml - Blocked
• Lemy.lol - Blocked
• Lemmy.ml - Blocked
• LemmyNSFW.com - Blocked
• Lemmy.one - Blocked
• Lemmy.zip - Blocked
• Literature.cafe - Blocked
• Mander.xyz - Blocked N
• Pawb.social - Blocked?
• Quokk.au - Blocked
• Reddthat - Blocked
• Sh.Itjust.works - Blocked
• SLRPNK.net - Blocked
• Szmer.info - Blocked
• Tchncs.de - Blocked
• Aggregatet.org - Not Found
• Aussie.zone - Not Found
• Feddit.cl - Not Found
• Feddit.it - Not Found
• Futurology.today - Not Found
• Infosec.pub - Not Found
• Lemmy.one - Not Found
• Lemmy.pt - Not Found
• Midwest.social - Not Found
• Monyet.cc - Not Found
• RBlind.com - Not Found
• SDF.org - Not Found
• Lemmy.world - Linked
• Sopuli.xyz - Linked

Also, in memoriam:

• Feddit.ch - Blocked

Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That’s why they’re not included in the list.

I really like this short video (4:43) that Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

Yes, they are very nice to express solidarity with Vegans and VeganTheoryClub.

The !news team has recently changed course and opted out of the bot. AFAIK it will still operate in !world and !politics, but I want to share the news and thank everyone who has given feedback, downvoted, and protested the bot. This isn’t over, but I feel we’ve reached an inflection point.

I’ve experienced Rooki acting inappropriately and immaturely as well. This recent incident is part of a pattern of behavior.

VeganTheoryClub

The 8-track version hits harder.

Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as “Credibility: Medium” and “Factual Reporting: Mixed”; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

On Dave’s page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they’ve produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

Dave’s personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.

MBFC claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. An example of this right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of ‘undecided voters’.

If you want to understand bias, learn the five filters of the propaganda model.

According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are the first and third filters of the propaganda model.

Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated a great short about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

I’m quite certain if I ignored the warning, I would earn a ban. The difference isn’t between the World and ML mods, it’s between me trying to play nice with their inconsistent bullshit rules, and the people getting banned from ML not respecting the predictable bullshit rules of that instance.

It’s obviously more than a disagreement about how to define ‘spamming.’ The MBFC bot is now the most downvoted account in Lemmy history, and it is now more unpopular than the most popular Lemmy account is popular. It appears in every !news, !world, and !politics thread where it is experienced as spam by the vast majority of users.

But the harm it does is greater than merely taking up pagespace. It distorts the discussion in favor of MBFC’s author’s right-wing views, and gives the World mods the pretense of neutrality when removing left-wing voices from their communities. The MBFC has been widely discredited. For example, Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources Noticeboard rates sources as generally reliable (green), no consensus (yellow), mostly unreliable (red).

Giving this joke of a resource an institutional place in the flagship communities of the Lemmy’s largest instance are an embarrassment to the entire Threadiverse project. Due to WP’s policy of neutrality, it’s even more damning when you look under the hood and read the specific criticisms that lead its policy of not linking MBFC in its pages. I am being threatened by the mods for reposting excepts from those criticisms in reply to the MBFC bot spam.

If your criticism of the bot is too regular or too persuasive, the mods will call you a spammer.

The irony saying that while the World mods are actively censoring criticism.

Wow, you’re really reaching there. I’m asking you to stop blaming women for men’s problems. There’s a group of people who aren’t doing that, and if you don’t want to be called a misogynist, follow the example of that group.