This may make sense in specific situations, but my favorite thing about it is the wordplay and what it points out about surveillance - surveillance is the more powerful watching the less powerful.
well, "sur-" in french means a lot of things, alone or as a prefix : on, over, more, about, upon, onto, against, ...
So I'm pretty sure there is a pun intended here.
About "surbooker", funny thing is that "booker" is literally the english verb converted to french verb (hence the -er suffix). Even if it is well used in modern french, it still is an anglicism.
The etymology of surveillance is closer to “watch over”, as if from above. The literal “sur” prefix could be “over” or “on” or “upon” when translated to English, so it implies an above-ness.
The “sous” prefix is the logical opposite, usually translating to “below” or “under” or “beneath”, though it can be used to mean “within”.
What other strategies, like this one, have been invented which feels like a more offensive counterforce against the slow surveillance tide, in contrast to the more common defensive strategies that just tries to keep one step ahead of the arms race (e.g. better encryption)?
There's a french guy, part of an activist group that likes to invent passive trolling strategies to fight bad groups (lobbies, governments). For instance they robbed some stupid furnitures from a bank that just avoided some fraud scandal so they start to sue the group. A big company starting a lawsuit to get some chair was super negative to their image. I'll try to find his name again.
That reminds me of the group that closed a valve on an oil pipeline[1]. The aim was to bring the case to trial, so that they could claim that they were acting legally, as the alternative (letting the pipeline continue to operate) was a direct threat to them, by its contribution to climate change.
The case got thrown out[2], because the prosecution couldn't provide enough evidence that the shutters off had done any damage, which sets the stage for a second attempt...
Attac means: Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l'action citoyenne (Association for the taxation of financial transaction and for citizen/civil action)
No. Sousveillance is possible without intent to observe the surveillance mechanisms in place. Go to a festival, these days, with the plethora of cameras (on phones or standalone, video or still) and people are participating in sousveillance (though likely not deliberately or recognizing it as such). They aren't watching the police or other observers. They're just particpating and recording the event itself.
without intent seems like it should just be called "watching" or "recording". also does it stop being called "Sousveillance" if done on a plane? or hiking above a certain altitude?
we are very interested in pulling data from "accidental" surveillance.
> it should just be called "watching" or "recording". also does it stop being called "Sousveillance" if done on a plane? or hiking above a certain altitude?
or if it's done with a drone it's almost terrorism as many politicians would like you to believe. The concept of sousveilance can never be implemented in any meaningful democratic way on a day to day life because individuals are always subordinate to the state.
I have been looking for a lifeloging camera for a while.
But i can't find anything that is discrete enogh. The n"arative clip" looked discrete. But it is of the market.
Just want something that takes picture every 20 min's or so. So that i can review/analyze some of my daily behaviors in hindsight.
At least in the US, you can record anything you want in public. There are some limits for things you see on private property from a public area (like using a telephoto lens for snapping pics of someone's bedroom) but if someone is in public, they have no right to privacy.
You might want to add that video, without the audio to this - as audio recording issues vary state by state and by different situations / parameters, public or not.
There could be other issues to mention such as someone being topless behind a fence is expecting a certain amount of privacy, even if it's easy for you to see because you are on the second floor nearby, and things like that.
There are other sensitive areas that are posted prohibited as well.
Some of these things have not been to court in various areas or circumstances to really see how "right to photograph" applies in various places / different people.
Certainly one might expect that people on public payroll in a public place should expect certain transparency in actions, however upskirt filming marilyn manson in line at a burger king may lend to some issues (civil and criminal in some juristictions).
I think some also have 'rights to their likeness" in various ways and copyright issues as well. Paparazzi may have lawyers who are willing to make it expensive to debate some issues, however filming a phish concert or other performance from a hill and sharing the video on social media is likely to raise a different team of lawyers who would be happy to have such a debate in courts.
So, there may be certain established freedoms to record many things in the US in many places, with some case law to back it up, I don't think it's good advice to say "you can record anything you want in public" and have people not be aware of a multitude of issues that could arise.
I believe private property owners can even sue if you use their barn in a photo in some cases.
However I must admit it's been more than a decade since I really looked into these things, and have only skimmed some articles relating to this issue in the past few years, mostly to do with filming public employees, so definitely not legal advice or anything, etc.
If you are in public, you have no right to privacy. Anyone can record you. You don't have to be overtly recording all of your interactions but there is nothing unethical about recording everything you see in public.
..and if audio is being recorded, and several other possible issues. I just posted a few of the ones of the top of my head in other section of this discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18514586
For me the interesting philosophical question is how different is it to see things with out eyes and remember them vs. recording with a device? For the most part, the fidelity and the transmittability are the main issues. If, hypothetically, someone invented a system that would allow a computer to adaptively display images to a human and accept semi-conscious feedback with the intent of reconstructing a relatively high-fidelity image from human memory, would such a system be illegal or equivalent to using a recording device?
Similarly, would it be possible to reduce the fidelity or persistence of the recording device to the point where it wouldn't violate any ethical or social conventions? Some sort of "bad camera" that deliberately produces abstract representations of what is photographed or downsamples in such a way that forging the images becomes so easy that nobody would accept this sort of evidence in a court of law or even in more casual circumstances?
I have, and it is not that I want to view other people it is that I want to see what I do. Our brains are not good at saving the type of mondane day to day activitys that make up most of our days.
It is for my own consumption. So while I don't think it is unethical I am sure that some people will react negatively. Which is why is has to be discrete, also I don't want to think about the camera at all, that would negate it's purpose.
Its purpose is to give me objective information about my own life. Something that my brain can't serve me, it only gives subjective info.
There is also a diffrerance between video and audio and a snapshot every 20 minutes.
It kind of ticks me off that people lose their collective "sh##" when things like Google Glass and Narrative help to give power to the civilian to record things in an unobtrusive manner but that people are totally fine with the ubiquitous billions of eye-in-the-sky surveillance cameras (see London) that the government uses to watch us every second.
> ticks me off that people lose their collective shit when things like Google Glass [record ubiquitously but] people are totally fine with the ubiquitous billions of eye-in-the-sky surveillance cameras
The overlap between the “people” who don’t like Google to record their lives and the “people” who don’t care if the police do it is quite small...
But in any case the police in a democracy are at least nominally accountable to the populace, and can be checked via elections and other mechanisms. The mission of police is ostensibly for public benefit and includes criminal investigation, which surveillance could arguably help with. Google is a multinational corporation accountable primarily to itself which wants the data to help with its advertising business.
I appreciate the response, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic but the operative word here is "nominally". While it's nice in theory to view law enforcement and the government as some kind of trustworthy body whose purpose is to serve and protect, in reality that kind of power is often abused.
Look how long it took for bodycams on police to be used and even then, they get conveniently broken, battery dies, or just blatently turned off.
Do you live in a country where smartphones don't exist and nobody uses them? I regularly notice people outside taking photos/videos with their phones (or digital camera) where unsuspecting individuals are in the background. I have made it a habit to try and ruin these people's pictures when I'm in the shot by making ugly faces/hand signs.
Relatedly, in Austria there was a court case several years ago where somebody sued a photographer for taking his picture in public, arguing that it was making fun of his character (Belustigung) and to everyone's surprise, he won the case.
you mean, like they do in almost every single retail establishment you enter? Or do you mean like on the streets?
do you realize that your statement also implies it's "rude" and "unethical" to take a photo in a public place if there's anyone in the frame you didn't ask permission of?
Modern society has very much accepted that recording people unobtrusively without their consent is 100% ok. Not only does no-one refuse to go into an establishment that may record them without their consent, no-one gets upset when you take a selfie in public and capture the people behind you, or when you take a picture in a public park (or whatever) with many people in it.
The problem, and I speak from experience here, is when you actually make people actively aware of the fact that a person they know is taking pictures that include them when they're not paying attention to the camera.
Most people do not care that faceless entities are taking their photos and video of them without their consent. If they did, they wouldn't keep allowing their legislators to pass laws allowing this practice.
I got a narrative pretty early on, it's not bad but unfortunately in the last year the battery life has absolutely tanked on it, lasting only 2 hours max at this point, and as this the custom today, completely non-removable.
Of course, only those blessed with good vision and memory should be able to have a visual record of their life :/ I can't wait for a chip that records everything I ever see so that I don't have to rely on flaky human memory.
I've began experimenting with "sousveillance" - using two commodity pieces of hardware:
- A GoPro Hero5 Session - which is a ~2 inch cube that shoots 4K: which I use for running, bicycling for transportation, and as a dash cam. The stabilization features works decently. ~$150.
If you can find a good way of attaching this to yourself, it's not too bad. Fairly* low profile - about 2 inches by half inch. It can be purchased for ~$25.
Some things I am working to overcome is really on the "cloud" and "streaming" sides, as I feel it defeats the purpose to stream or upload to policed platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, etc.
I've found the Mobius B action cam useful and affordable for general sousveillance. It's a primitive interface, but can be configured via a text file across any platform. I presently have mine configured as a motion cam, which is sensitive enough to effectively use as a standard camera too. Vids and pics can be viewed through mini usb on a phone or pc. The B has a wide angle lens and the text file has an option for narrow view. I often use it as a rear facing dashcam when someone gets too aggressive, eg tailgating, etc. For home I use a webcam and the Motion program, which works quite well for me. Lots of options in the Motion config file.
If the iON could sync/backup the images to your phone at regular intervals, maybe something like IFTTT could be used in conjunction to upload the images to a private server...
The researcher who coined the phrase, Steve Mann, has been working on wearable computing since the 80s. In any picture I’ve seen of him over the years he’s had some kind of camera on his face. He also invented the hdr image merging algorithm. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
Video ends when police officer asks me to stop filming because of a rule about not filming in meat wagons that he just invented, and I agree. Later outside of the meat wagon he told me to delete a video. I asked him if I understood correctly that my recording was illegal action and he wanted me to destroy an evidence of that illegal action. Immediately four other policemen lifted me up and carried in their hands to the police station, put me in separate room, confiscated my phone and documents, and then he punched me in the kidneys.
That room apparently was the only one in a police station without surveillance cameras.
I spend the rest of the day in a special unventilated cage covered with lists of acrylic glass together with a guy who later was carried away by an ambulance because there was not enough air for two people in the cage.
Police hard reset my phone but probably because they were idiots and I use Windows Phone a microSD card with all my video was left intact.
I was fined by 1000₽ by Russian court which watched the video I recorded and found not enough evidence of me being innocent on the base of the reports written by completely different police officers instead of these I filmed detaining me. The court refused to call witnesses. The same happened during appellation.
When those vids were first made I thought it wasn't very good at making a point because, a guy walking up to you with a camera and just sitting there with it is obviously quite creepy.
But why is it creepy?...because I don't know what he'll do with that video and it just establishes a weird dynamic to the situation.
But then why am I okay with a camera in the ceiling?
I suppose the alternative would be actual eyes, say if a convenience store had the budget for that, an equivalent to their ceiling-cams would be a security guys watching you and everyone else as they shop.
I would love for somebody to combine Narrative's 8+ hour time-lapse lifelogging photos with the ability to be linked to your phone which would continuously upload the photos to a selected FTP server. That way if the device is confiscated or destroyed by law enforcement, you'd still have a record.
It surprised me to not find a single instance of "smartphone" or "smart phone" in that entire article.
Arguably every smartphone in the world participates unwittingly in a global sousveillance network, they don't even have lens covers or camera-active lights, while running heaps of privileged software beyond control of the owners.
Every time I find myself in a cafe, restaurant, or other populated public space it can be rather disturbing to count the number of networked cameras and microphones within my line of sight at any given moment thanks to this development.
Overly centralized control of military power, economic power, and media distribution power are often bad and lead to corruption, while the distribution of the above generally lead to widespread benefit to civilization and society.
The biggest bang for the buck for benefit to the common man would be through the inversion of "Trusted Execution" or DRM technologies to enforce privacy policies on corporations and large organizations on behalf of the public. It will never happen, because the general public, and especially the tech portion of it, are emotionally conditioned against such technology. However, there are many mechanisms like this, which show this kind of asymmetry with regards to centralized power.
Some corporations have already taken a step in this direction, by giving up access to encryption keys and the ability to read their user's data. It would just be one step further for a corporation to cede control of privacy policy implementation on behalf of its customers by running code implementing those policies on trusted execution engines. This way, users will be able to revoke access to their data from corporations and large organizations.
The public will never go for this, however, because they're already conditioned against such technologies from its application by large organizations against the interests of individuals.
Does distribution of military power really lead to public benefit? My impression is that e.g. widespread distribution of small arms to local gangs, paramilitary mercenaries, etc. generally just leads to a lot of small scale conflict and death. Look at any of the most violent parts of the world, and they are generally awash with distributed military power.
Distribution of media power also seems like a mixed bag, especially if media consumers have poor media literacy. Social media (and the internet more generally) in the past few years gave pretty well any publisher the same direct-to-consumer distribution channel, and the result was many readers believing in nonsensical conspiracy theories because they couldn’t distinguish them from reputable news.
Does distribution of military power really lead to public benefit?
Concentration in the wrong hands is the problem.
distribution of small arms to local gangs, paramilitary mercenaries
The local gangs and paramilitaries in those situations represent local concentrations of power, not disbursement. Local warlords rule because they are armed in particular. If they didn't have an advantage over the general populace, they wouldn't be ruling it.
Distribution of media power also seems like a mixed bag, especially if media consumers have poor media literacy.
There were periods of time in the US when there were tons of hyper partisan local newspapers. History itself is a mixed bag. However, things often work out, if you give power to the public.
> Local warlords rule because they are armed in particular. If they didn't have an advantage over the general populace, they wouldn't be ruling it.
This claim does not seem well supported by evidence.
We can look at otherwise largely comparable places where either small arms are largely limited to police/military or where small arms are broadly distributed, and violence is generally much higher in the latter.
Giving everybody in an economically precarious place a gun increases violence, strengthens the influence and size of local gangs, amplifies ethnic tensions, etc.
Much of the violence in developing countries is worsened by US and European arms producers/merchants distributing weapons. In the past it was deliberate US policy to distribute weapons broadly in particular countries with the goal of destabilizing them via widespread violence.
Unfortunately in the USA a powerful arms industry resists efforts to systematically study the effects of gun policy, much less implement effective gun control, using comparable techniques to the tobacco industry of a few decades ago. The result is uniquely and shockingly high levels of gun violence compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
* * *
> There were periods of time in the US when there were tons of hyper partisan local newspapers
Yes and the propaganda was highly effective politically, leading to terrible policy outcomes.
71 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadMy favorite so far on that list "surbooker"--"to overbook"
So I'm pretty sure there is a pun intended here.
About "surbooker", funny thing is that "booker" is literally the english verb converted to french verb (hence the -er suffix). Even if it is well used in modern french, it still is an anglicism.
French, in particular, is full of nuances like this.
The “sous” prefix is the logical opposite, usually translating to “below” or “under” or “beneath”, though it can be used to mean “within”.
The case got thrown out[2], because the prosecution couldn't provide enough evidence that the shutters off had done any damage, which sets the stage for a second attempt...
1: https://www.wired.com/story/monkeywrenching-vandals-are-rein...
2: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/climate-...
They often do this kind of operations. See there recent operation about Apple not paying taxes : https://www.macg.co/aapl/2018/11/attac-redecore-lapple-store...
Attac means: Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l'action citoyenne (Association for the taxation of financial transaction and for citizen/civil action)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jon+palais+&atb=v119-3__&iar=video...
His thinkerview video is worth watching (for french speakers)
> Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on the "watchful vigilance from underneath...
without intent seems like it should just be called "watching" or "recording". also does it stop being called "Sousveillance" if done on a plane? or hiking above a certain altitude?
we are very interested in pulling data from "accidental" surveillance.
or if it's done with a drone it's almost terrorism as many politicians would like you to believe. The concept of sousveilance can never be implemented in any meaningful democratic way on a day to day life because individuals are always subordinate to the state.
Just want something that takes picture every 20 min's or so. So that i can review/analyze some of my daily behaviors in hindsight.
There could be other issues to mention such as someone being topless behind a fence is expecting a certain amount of privacy, even if it's easy for you to see because you are on the second floor nearby, and things like that.
There are other sensitive areas that are posted prohibited as well.
Some of these things have not been to court in various areas or circumstances to really see how "right to photograph" applies in various places / different people.
Certainly one might expect that people on public payroll in a public place should expect certain transparency in actions, however upskirt filming marilyn manson in line at a burger king may lend to some issues (civil and criminal in some juristictions).
I think some also have 'rights to their likeness" in various ways and copyright issues as well. Paparazzi may have lawyers who are willing to make it expensive to debate some issues, however filming a phish concert or other performance from a hill and sharing the video on social media is likely to raise a different team of lawyers who would be happy to have such a debate in courts.
So, there may be certain established freedoms to record many things in the US in many places, with some case law to back it up, I don't think it's good advice to say "you can record anything you want in public" and have people not be aware of a multitude of issues that could arise.
I believe private property owners can even sue if you use their barn in a photo in some cases.
However I must admit it's been more than a decade since I really looked into these things, and have only skimmed some articles relating to this issue in the past few years, mostly to do with filming public employees, so definitely not legal advice or anything, etc.
Similarly, would it be possible to reduce the fidelity or persistence of the recording device to the point where it wouldn't violate any ethical or social conventions? Some sort of "bad camera" that deliberately produces abstract representations of what is photographed or downsamples in such a way that forging the images becomes so easy that nobody would accept this sort of evidence in a court of law or even in more casual circumstances?
It is for my own consumption. So while I don't think it is unethical I am sure that some people will react negatively. Which is why is has to be discrete, also I don't want to think about the camera at all, that would negate it's purpose.
Its purpose is to give me objective information about my own life. Something that my brain can't serve me, it only gives subjective info.
There is also a diffrerance between video and audio and a snapshot every 20 minutes.
The overlap between the “people” who don’t like Google to record their lives and the “people” who don’t care if the police do it is quite small...
But in any case the police in a democracy are at least nominally accountable to the populace, and can be checked via elections and other mechanisms. The mission of police is ostensibly for public benefit and includes criminal investigation, which surveillance could arguably help with. Google is a multinational corporation accountable primarily to itself which wants the data to help with its advertising business.
Look how long it took for bodycams on police to be used and even then, they get conveniently broken, battery dies, or just blatently turned off.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? and all that.
Relatedly, in Austria there was a court case several years ago where somebody sued a photographer for taking his picture in public, arguing that it was making fun of his character (Belustigung) and to everyone's surprise, he won the case.
do you realize that your statement also implies it's "rude" and "unethical" to take a photo in a public place if there's anyone in the frame you didn't ask permission of?
Modern society has very much accepted that recording people unobtrusively without their consent is 100% ok. Not only does no-one refuse to go into an establishment that may record them without their consent, no-one gets upset when you take a selfie in public and capture the people behind you, or when you take a picture in a public park (or whatever) with many people in it.
The problem, and I speak from experience here, is when you actually make people actively aware of the fact that a person they know is taking pictures that include them when they're not paying attention to the camera.
Most people do not care that faceless entities are taking their photos and video of them without their consent. If they did, they wouldn't keep allowing their legislators to pass laws allowing this practice.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/
Do you have any links to the ads?
I know TFL are working hard to combat up-skirting and cyber-flashing.
- A GoPro Hero5 Session - which is a ~2 inch cube that shoots 4K: which I use for running, bicycling for transportation, and as a dash cam. The stabilization features works decently. ~$150.
- An iON SnapCam - https://www.amazon.com/iON-Camera-SnapCam-Wearable-Bluetooth...
If you can find a good way of attaching this to yourself, it's not too bad. Fairly* low profile - about 2 inches by half inch. It can be purchased for ~$25.
Some things I am working to overcome is really on the "cloud" and "streaming" sides, as I feel it defeats the purpose to stream or upload to policed platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130913190505/http://www.wired....
I wonder what every happened to his Sousveillance project? His map still updates, but I haven't seen any of his other post feeds updated in awhile.
Was what I immediately thought of and it was conveniently also referenced in the linked Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
Video ends when police officer asks me to stop filming because of a rule about not filming in meat wagons that he just invented, and I agree. Later outside of the meat wagon he told me to delete a video. I asked him if I understood correctly that my recording was illegal action and he wanted me to destroy an evidence of that illegal action. Immediately four other policemen lifted me up and carried in their hands to the police station, put me in separate room, confiscated my phone and documents, and then he punched me in the kidneys.
That room apparently was the only one in a police station without surveillance cameras.
I spend the rest of the day in a special unventilated cage covered with lists of acrylic glass together with a guy who later was carried away by an ambulance because there was not enough air for two people in the cage.
Police hard reset my phone but probably because they were idiots and I use Windows Phone a microSD card with all my video was left intact.
I was fined by 1000₽ by Russian court which watched the video I recorded and found not enough evidence of me being innocent on the base of the reports written by completely different police officers instead of these I filmed detaining me. The court refused to call witnesses. The same happened during appellation.
But why is it creepy?...because I don't know what he'll do with that video and it just establishes a weird dynamic to the situation.
But then why am I okay with a camera in the ceiling?
I suppose the alternative would be actual eyes, say if a convenience store had the budget for that, an equivalent to their ceiling-cams would be a security guys watching you and everyone else as they shop.
Stay away from my cooking times and trade secrets China! These ribs are fall off the bone tender!
http://digitalurbanliving.projects.cavi.au.dk/www.digitalurb...
Arguably every smartphone in the world participates unwittingly in a global sousveillance network, they don't even have lens covers or camera-active lights, while running heaps of privileged software beyond control of the owners.
Every time I find myself in a cafe, restaurant, or other populated public space it can be rather disturbing to count the number of networked cameras and microphones within my line of sight at any given moment thanks to this development.
The biggest bang for the buck for benefit to the common man would be through the inversion of "Trusted Execution" or DRM technologies to enforce privacy policies on corporations and large organizations on behalf of the public. It will never happen, because the general public, and especially the tech portion of it, are emotionally conditioned against such technology. However, there are many mechanisms like this, which show this kind of asymmetry with regards to centralized power.
Some corporations have already taken a step in this direction, by giving up access to encryption keys and the ability to read their user's data. It would just be one step further for a corporation to cede control of privacy policy implementation on behalf of its customers by running code implementing those policies on trusted execution engines. This way, users will be able to revoke access to their data from corporations and large organizations.
The public will never go for this, however, because they're already conditioned against such technologies from its application by large organizations against the interests of individuals.
Distribution of media power also seems like a mixed bag, especially if media consumers have poor media literacy. Social media (and the internet more generally) in the past few years gave pretty well any publisher the same direct-to-consumer distribution channel, and the result was many readers believing in nonsensical conspiracy theories because they couldn’t distinguish them from reputable news.
Concentration in the wrong hands is the problem.
distribution of small arms to local gangs, paramilitary mercenaries
The local gangs and paramilitaries in those situations represent local concentrations of power, not disbursement. Local warlords rule because they are armed in particular. If they didn't have an advantage over the general populace, they wouldn't be ruling it.
Distribution of media power also seems like a mixed bag, especially if media consumers have poor media literacy.
There were periods of time in the US when there were tons of hyper partisan local newspapers. History itself is a mixed bag. However, things often work out, if you give power to the public.
This claim does not seem well supported by evidence.
We can look at otherwise largely comparable places where either small arms are largely limited to police/military or where small arms are broadly distributed, and violence is generally much higher in the latter.
Giving everybody in an economically precarious place a gun increases violence, strengthens the influence and size of local gangs, amplifies ethnic tensions, etc.
Much of the violence in developing countries is worsened by US and European arms producers/merchants distributing weapons. In the past it was deliberate US policy to distribute weapons broadly in particular countries with the goal of destabilizing them via widespread violence.
There is plenty of evidence that all else equal, gun control leads to reduced violence. See e.g. https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/38/1/140/2754868
Unfortunately in the USA a powerful arms industry resists efforts to systematically study the effects of gun policy, much less implement effective gun control, using comparable techniques to the tobacco industry of a few decades ago. The result is uniquely and shockingly high levels of gun violence compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
* * *
> There were periods of time in the US when there were tons of hyper partisan local newspapers
Yes and the propaganda was highly effective politically, leading to terrible policy outcomes.
The same can be true for highly centralized news media. That's one of the points made in Manufacturing Consent.