The greatest thing about tight, upcoming elections is that governments actually start to do a tiny bit of what people want. Great result.
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The buying public: the "bewildered herd" (a term here borrowed from The Phantom Public) must pay to understand the unseen environment by the mass communications media. The irony is that although the public's opinion is important, it must pay for its acceptance. People will be selective and will buy the most factual media at the lowest price: "For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps." The media have the social function of transmitting public affairs information and their business profit role of surviving in the market.
Nature of news: people publish already-confirmed news that are thus less disputable. Officially-available public matters will constitute "the news" and unofficial (private) matters are unavailable, are less available, or are used as "issues" for propaganda.
News truth and conclusion: the function of news is to signal an event, and that signalling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement; journalism creates and sows the seeds (news) that establish public opinion.
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Not only is access to information now completely free, but it's not even uncommon that a regular person is more well informed on any given topic than either the media or ostensibly highly informed political figures. See: Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [1] Outside of classification, we have all have access to, more or less, the same information. And, at this point, it's absolutely common to see high level political figures and the media both making plainly factually incorrect statements and implications, that are not only disputable but simply objectively wrong.
If anything, the real bias in society seems to do more with people believing what they want to be true, instead of what is true. Of course the exact same bias also has clearly infected politicians, the media, and so on.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one, and that's simply not possible. And even if it were, that clearly artificial homogeneity would itself drive distrust. See the USSR where the government not only directly controlled literally every single medium for communication, but also strictly ideologically filtered for admittance (or exit) from the country. Nonetheless this led to widespread jokes like, "Why do we have two newspapers, Pravda (meaning truth) and Novesti (meaning news)? Well that's because there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."
So we can even go one step further and say that to manufacture consent you need to not only eliminate all dissenting views, but you also need to somehow hide that from your public and make them believe that what they are reading is free to diverge from the official narrative. Chomsky, of course, hit on this exact nuance with his famous quote, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." But now a days you can no longer limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, because with the internet you can find communities where basically any view, no matter how fringe, is the norm.
Why do you think they’re forcing TikTok to change ownership? US corporations are much easier to control.
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To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
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[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
Here's what I mean by manufacture of consent - the system knows your "syntax": the set of memes you'll respond to, and can deliver any message over that channel. Note that another person's "syntax" may be different, yet the same message can be delivered to both of you while maintaining the illusion of information topic diversity.
It's also possible to eliminate a viewpoint by associating it with people who are crazy, or otherwise unpalatable. By spreading stories about a select few people on the right, for example, the mainstream media has now manufactured a "far-right" label that can now be used to mean "anything a Berkeley coffee shop customer would disagree with". Here's a recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/alternative-for-germany-afd-... After a few pages of ridiculing the supporters they interview a single person, a chain smoking mother of 8 from Eastern Germany. The implication of course being: if you listen to anything these people say, that's who you are. Never mind that even chain-smoking mothers of 8 are supposed to have representation in a democracy.
Or you can stop an effort to create some financial accountability with a simple "they are with the Russians" and leave it at that.
This sort of propaganda/censorship package is tried by literally every single collapsing empire, and it just backfires horribly every single time. The only modern feature will be propaganda bots, but that will likely be even worse. Because the thing is, you can't just convince people that 2+2=5 by screaming it at them endlessly. The only time propaganda really works is on topics that people know absolutely nothing about and have no preformed opinions - like certain wars. But even that tends to very liminal, and then once people realize that things weren't exactly as they were led to believe, they're now that much less trusting of you.
I think your own example also emphasizes this reality. AfD isn't unique. Such parties are skyrocketing in popularity all throughout Europe. See the Sweden Democrats [2] who may soon become the largest party in Sweden. If you took out the ad hominem attacks against them, that Wiki page would be about 10% as long. Yet not only is the propaganda failing to change minds in the desired direction, if anything it seems to be having the exact opposite effect. Like always. But if politicians, let alone countries, were capable of learning from the past - then we might not find ourselves where are today, playing history on repeat like hamsters going around on a treadmill, with little but technology offering a refreshing change of scenery.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...