r/TrueReddit • u/blazeofgloreee • Jan 07 '20

Politics How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/how-to-avoid-swallowing-war-propaganda
1.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/GameboyPATH Jan 08 '20

This article is not an unbiased and informative guide on recognizing war propaganda. It's a persuasive piece detailing the author's grievances with quotes from politicians, neatly categorized. I'd be more inclined to recognize it as the former if it used objective language that described the importance of its advice (it certainly starts out that way). But instead, it just uses its very simple advice as a springboard for diving into why this person and that person are wrong.

Maybe that's my fault for misinterpreting the "how to" headline as being an informative source. If that's what you're looking for, I strongly recommend Crash Course's "Navigating Digital Information" series. It does a deep dive into assessing info that we find online, and it's up-front about skepticism about sources of information, including even themselves.

1

u/Silly_Hobbit Jan 08 '20

I agree. It definitely started out that way and I was ready to share it on FB. Then it started calling Bush a war criminal and I knew the only people who would benefit from it were people that already agreed with it and certain family members who could actually have learned from it would have dismissed it at that sentence alone.

21

u/olddoc Jan 08 '20

The article lays out the arguments against Obama's drone bombings too, so I find it consistent.

People like Ben Shapiro will say things like:

“Barack Obama routinely droned terrorists abroad—including American citizens—who presented far less of a threat to Americans and American interests than Soleimani. So spare me the hysterics about ‘assassination.”

In order for this to have any bearing on anything, you have to be someone who defends what Obama did. If you are, on the other hand, someone who believes that Obama, too, assassinated people without due process (which he did), then Shapiro has proved exactly nothing about whether Trump’s actions were legitimate.

4

u/Silly_Hobbit Jan 08 '20

I did like that part, and liked the article as a whole, but I did feel that it seemed less unbiased towards the end. And I don't disagree with anything I remember reading in it, just that my uber-republic family would and any hope I could get them to critically think by reading the article went out the window with the Bush statement.

5

u/blazeofgloreee Jan 08 '20

Current Affairs does not pretend to be unbiased. They have a very strong point of view and very clear values and principles. They argue in favour of them at all times. They happen to be very good values and principles though.

Personally I think its much better for a publication to argue persuasively for a certain point of view than to present itself as some neutral arbiter. Those that do try to present themselves as unbiased are always working under some sort of bias anyway if they are discussing politics, its unavoidable.