Propaganda, if done correctly, is much more effective than blocking internet access or other forms of censorship.
Witness Fox News. I think it has done more to prevent conservative US readers from reading the New York Times than any amount of censorship could ever have done. Actually, active forms of censorship might well have increased the readership of the NYT.
Fox News has a markedly conservative editorial bias, and the Times has a markedly liberal one; but look back a hundred years, or a hundred and fifty, and you will see newspapers openly and unrepentantly taking sides in every issue. Claims like "fair and balanced" are laughable, but we are much closer to that ideal than in the past.
However, with the extreme partisanship of modern politics, and the ongoing fragmentation of small news sources and decay of large ones, we may have already passed the moment of greatest media neutrality; people who want to know the "truth" may be in for a long hard winter.
More fools they, for choosing a thankless, unrewarding, and often impossible task.
me too ;) its unblocked now but the last two days, NYT was blocked.
hey, I think the Shanghai HN readers should get together for a beer sometime, get in touch!!!
exactly. China's "firewall" has become amazingly sophisticated. It can now block just pages of sites instead of whole sites. Also, there is the unsophisticated part, wherein, it does not behave the same everywhere.
Some of this seems intentional and controlled differences based on location (In a western hotel in Shanghai vs. at my house in a middle class neighborhood). Other differences in location seem arbitrary. Her mystery is beautiful ;)
Part of the unsophisticated part includes China Unicom and China Telecom not being able to maintain nationwide networks. I've had difficulty loading content hosted in Beijing from a browser on a different network elsewhere in Beijing.
Historically, locations that have been given unfettered Internet access have purchased it from the telecoms at higher prices. There is no selective Internet filtering based on location of end users on the same network... yet.
we will never know ;). It can have been an automated firewall response to some keyword on a comment page. It could have been a person behind the great firewall that made the call. But hey, two days later, its not blocked again, so there you go ;).
It never ceases to amaze me that there are articles on the Chinese firewall. The list of permitted and denied sites changes pretty much daily (and even seemingly depending on where in any given city or province you are), and anybody who really wants to get to somewhere on the Internet has a good number of options to get to them with minimal hassle.
Witness Fox News. I think it has done more to prevent conservative US readers from reading the New York Times than any amount of censorship could ever have done. Actually, active forms of censorship might well have increased the readership of the NYT.