Well, I didn't mention the propaganda on /. because it didn't occur to me that anyone would think it special. The astroturfers and other propagandists have been here since before I had an account, and a lot of their work is so blatant that it's hard to miss. So it's not that the propaganda here didn't occur to me; it's more like I thought it such a cheap shot that I'd be criticized (and possibly downloaded) for wasting reader time by mentioning something so obvious.
Not that there's anything about this that's special to /. either. A growing and well-known problem on sites to attempt to collect ratings of various sorts from users is that companies pay their people to spend time watching such sites and flooding the rating system with bogus positive ratings and reviews. Companies routinely set up hundreds or thousands of accounts for this purpose.
This goes back to the early days of online forums. An especially clumsy one showed up back in the 1980s, when a lot of BBs, newsgroups, etc. found that any occurrence of the string "Armenia" in any message would trigger the automated submission of thousands of bot-generated messages from Turkish extremists, filling up disk systems and making the site useless until they were purged.
The propagandists have gotten a bit more subtle since then, but they've always been with us. /. has had them since the early days of 5- and 6-digit id numbers.
And "blase" (only one 's', and the 'e' really should have an acute accent, but /. garbles it ;-) isn't really the right word. It's more like we need to acknowledge that propaganda is and will remain "part of the landscape". Rather than get all excited about it, we should be quietly working to limit the junk, and try to find ways to get the real info more visible. Exposing propaganda is most useful if it's done in a matter-of-fact manner, rather than as a shouting match.