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Why would Al Jazeera produce this video? I think that's important to keep in mind as you watch it. The video begins by pointing towards "western media" as the source of problems, which is a pretty advantageous message for a non-western media outlet to send. They suggest that "press freedom" is just a buzzword for how media operates in democracies, which is quite convenient for an outlet owned and funded by a non-democratic country. And why might they have wanted to use an abstract fifth filter instead of the very specific one Chomsky wrote in his book?

There's a nihilistic "the media are liars and everything you read is a lie" take that bounces around the Internet a lot, but I don't think that was Chomsky's original point.



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