You are right. The degree and sophistication of media manipulation is profoundly greater in the west. While the Chinese block a lot of media, the manipulation is minimal. Most Chinese are very cynical and know exactly what is going on. The west, or at least the US, traps people in a matrix of sorts where they don't even see the manipulation. The narrative is exquisitely framed and guided to leave people with a sense of moral superiority and basic faith in the system despite perceived flaws, as is ironically exhibited by your comment.
edit: some good resources on the history and nature of western media manipulation are the BBC documentary "The Century of Self" and Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent".
If you want to publish your own newspaper, you can. Nobody will stop you. Start your own online video news service, weblog or nes site - nobody will stop you. Post whatever you like to Reddit, or any other discussion platform.
In China and Russia you cannot do these things. Published mdeia are strictly monitored and censored. The state employs thousands of astroturfers to flood social media with pro-government messages, trash anti-government messages and even directly hook into messaging platforms to delete messages the government don't like. Be persistent at it, and you'll get a visit from the police, or just get beaten up a few times.
The very fact that the BBC could publish that report, and Noam Chomsky could publish his book, is strong evidence for freedom of expression in the west. There are no such equivalent sources published in Russia and China exposing their government's manipulations. Why do you think that is?
> If you want to publish your own newspaper, you can. Nobody will stop you. Start your own online video news service, weblog or nes site - nobody will stop you. Post whatever you like to Reddit, or any other discussion platform.
> In China and Russia you cannot do these things.
It's not as bad in Russia yet. But we are going there.
A handful of books banned for a few individual legal issues does not make for a suppressive state. Are you seriously arguing that the USA is more suppressive of coimmunications and publications that China? Really?
You can lose your job if you post too wrong views too much.
EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It is both relevant (it refutes that you can "Post whatever you like to Reddit, or any other discussion platform." without punishment), and correct.
I think because it is more a consequence of human nature than governmental activity (though in some measure they're intertwined, and so it's hard to say objectively).
I won't argue with you that China is far more repressive and less free than the US, because you are correct in that assertion. I only state that the US is far more _manipulative_.
The U.S. media has nothing on Russian state television, they are quite consciously part of the government propaganda machine. They don't hesitate to use material like photoshopped 'satelite pictures' of Ukrainian fighter jets shooting down that Malaysian airliner and present it as validated evidence. They have presented 'proof' that American soldiers are fighting in the Ukrainian army, and debate outrageous conspiracy theories straight faced. Fox News has absolutely nothing on those guys.
The problem with your claim is that it is irrefutable as anyone denying it could be accused of being manipulated to do so (in fact you are accusing obstinate of just that)
In my view it is an authoritarian trap to defend direct political censorship by pointing to the inevitable force of group think called culture (including, of course, the media), as the latter always necessarily exists everywhere but the former can be abolished.
Manipulation is simply part of any culture. The more interesting question is what other forces there are in a culture to counter that manipulation. Political censorship is an attempt to suppress such counter forces, not a replacement for manipulation. Censorship is supposed to make maniuplation more effective.
Is it? Check out the CNN international edition and US edition on their website after a terrorist attack, and you'll see how blatant it can get (CNN is interesting in that respect since both versions are readily available from a selector at the top of their page). They don't even need to hide it - it's "sold as a feature" because most people are not interested in seeking out alternative viewpoints.
You see it even with more mundane cases in subtle differences in headlines even when they run the same articles. Many of the changes are perfectly reasonable and simply reflects differences in language or relative importance to different audiences. But a lot of the time there are blatant biases being introduced.
There certainly is a difference: In democratic countries people can get alternative viewpoints easily without risk of imprisonment if they want to. But unless they are already questioning the status quo, most people simply doesn't bother, so it doesn't make much real difference if they're censored or not.
As someone who has travelled quite extensively to the US for business, turning on the news channels when I arrived was always a shock, no matter how many times I did it, because even between the US and the UK, the difference in mainstream media world view is massive, and clearly one or both is heavily distorted (I'd go for both...).
(Well, I suppose that's an odd start, since half the problem with politics is people trusting their personal thoughts overmuch rather than gathering evidence. Then again, those who do gather evidence in politics, the softest science, rarely seem to find any that upsets their preconceived notions. Anyway-)
...that this would happen with or without any overt government interference. I'm sure that the soft pressure described by Mr. Chomsky plays a part, and that most government officials in democracies are happy that it exists.
But just look at smaller scales: say, at the umpteen "camp A vs. camp B" divisions that come up in one capacity or another on this site. JavaScript is a horrible language that's killing the web, or it's a cool language with some flaws. Go is a language firmly stuck in the 1980s with the goal of treating its programmers like disposable pawns[0], or it's a fluid pragmatic language with an emphasis on maintainability. Apple has a track record of producing shiny overpriced crap, or perhaps innovative products that usually beat the competitors'. Google is an advertising company and absolutely everything it does has some direct connection to invading its users' privacy, or it's a geeky paradise, tech culture's truest representative among large corporations. The NSA is a villainous organization through and through that's killing everything important about American freedom (common opinion on this site, not as pervasive elsewhere) or it's just doing its job and has little, if anything, to answer for. Feminism... well, I think that word is enough.
These are just some of the biggest examples; there are countless others, and obviously you can get far more examples by broadening the scope from tech. In each case, people tend to divide themselves based on their opinions into one of (usually) two opposing groups. Each group is self-reinforced by memes spreading through its echo chamber, each is very confident it's right, and importantly, eventually members of the two completely fail to understand each other, speaking with different terminology about different principles and both almost certainly far from objective neutrality. Some of the camps have some potential equivalent to Chomsky's cited explicit manipulation - c.f. the recent Fear of Apple post. Most don't. People self-manipulate, and they're rewarded with positive emotions generated from discussions with other people that share their views.
In politics, the camps form within political parties, geographical areas, and often entire countries. It would be interesting and powerful to think of ways to reduce this; on the other hand, I don't think it's fair to blame Western governments for what's basically human nature. My suspicion is that people look at the distortion of reality in democratic country X's politics, compare it to censored country Y's, find the proportion too large, and blame the government of X... but miss that a large portion of each side's distortion is natural, and if you subtract that from each side, the proportion gets far smaller. YMMV.
[0] opinions on Go aren't usually that strong, I think, but I've heard exactly that claim from one firebrand on Twitter.
