Comment by somenameforme
3 days ago
This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
It's not even 5D chess.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
> If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_porn
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The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.