Early reports are saying that Biden said under his breath " A dictator says what?"
American presidents were always evil, but they used to be competent.
The article mentions it but the headline kinda leaves out the fact that this was a question asked to him in the most obviously insidious by some propagandist "reporter". Classic type of propaganda. They're constantly doing this. I wonder what the rational or instigator is for having reporters do these propaganda-as-a-pointed-question softballs? I mean I see why it's done, but who's the one requesting it? Are the people in charge of the reporters providing the questions and getting them from someone else? Is the reporter asked to ask them by someone in the government? How does that work?
I think it's a self perpetuating system. The reporters who can intuit the correct questions and illicit the desired responses are lauded by their superiors and promoted, the ones that don't toil in obscurity or drop out. The reporters at the top model the desired behaviour for the newcomers who either get with the program or go nowhere.
The system self-selects for sensationalists and ideologues and very rarely does anyone feel like they were instructed on how to report so they can say with sincerity that they had full editorial freedom while still doing exactly what their superiors want them to do.
Politics and management work the same way. Everyone toes the line, but most don't even really know that there is a line or who it was that drew it.
“Biden calls Xi dictator” and “Biden refuses to call Xi dictator” both sell better than “Biden met with Xi, made uninteresting small talk, affirmed vague commitment to unspecified cooperation”. It’s all about provoking headlines that sell, and white settlers are hungry for yellow peril.
I think people presume that too often. "If it bleeds it leads" on its own would lead to Western media actually detailing American crimes or Israeli crimes against Palestinians. People give Western propagandists way too little credit for deliberately creating the narratives they do and I don't know who is proliferating this idea that they're just sleepwalking into these narratives that serve Western ruling class interests. I would assume it's all entirely coordinated and intentional until proven otherwise, especially given that we already know about how people in the CIA directly talk with their journalists to run certain stories in international media outlets, and we know journalists talk to people in the govt because they say so in their articles. I just wonder more about who is talking to who or what the cues are for this kind of thing.
