Comment by pkphilip
5 months ago
Reminds me of the time when I consulted with a very large newspaper chain in the US which owned a lot of papers - both left leaning and right leaning. we used to get feeds from all of the usual sources.
But the news articles themselves were "massaged" in various ways by some of the same editorial teams to suit the left-leaning or the right-leaning newspapers. The idea that completely different spin can be put to the same news - and by the same editorial teams, was a big eye opener for me.
What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines. What the media and the establishment hates are people who are not either left or right leaning and who are capable of picking and choosing the narrative depending on what makes the most sense - that is, the so called centrists.
But here we are more than 2 decades later from that time and I see that the spin doctors are busier than ever and the "centrists" have almost completely disappeared.
>What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines.
It has nothing to do with voting or acting. It has everything to do with locking in another consistent reader (aka "ad viewer"). If you can get someone ideologically driven, they become hooked, and you can stroke their ego by feeding them confirmation bias news. It becomes addictive, where the person gets hooked on news that tells them they are right.
All of that just to get them to scroll past or listen to ads multiple times a day.
I genuinely believe if we could scooby-do style pull off the mask of who is destroying the country, it would be the media. I have seen too many people in my life (and seemingly everyone online) go off the ideological deep-end because they fell into the media's ad-farming psy-op game.
The ad viewer rationale is parallel to advertiser interests and state goals. The media will try to satisfy it's advertisers editorially as well as comply with some state narratives for state favors.
Advertisers have massive leverage over what gets published in the media through pulling and pushing their ad funding.
And "Ex" NSA/CIA/FBI employees work in all branches of communications/media and many in editorial roles like "Foreign Policy Editors/Analysts", "Law Enforcement Analyst" or as consultants for editors.
It's not just "the media" who is destroying the country, it's capitalism and their profit motive.
I think this is a consequence of our plurality voting system and the resulting game theory. Polarization is the most effective strategy, and it also has a bunch of other knock on effects that benefit the people in power.
You might have the causality reversed. Another model might be that the electorate naturally divides into tribes, for a similar reason that competitive sports exist: people want to have a team to root for. And then media needs to adapt their message to make it seems like they're on the same "team" as the viewers/readers, because that's the only way they get clicks. So you may have the same parent media company running different spins on different brands to get left or right voters, but their only true incentive is to make the most money by getting the most clicks.
Arguably, the reason that the pre-Internet media oligopoly was more centrist was simply because it didn't face competition. If you were NBC and ran a moderate story that didn't quite please hard-core conservatives or leftists, they could...go to ABC and get the same story? But if you do that now, the MAGA types will go read Infowars instead, the leftists will go read Wonkette, and you'll be left with no viewers and no money.
You assume that the left and the right already existed - and the media is just pandering to these divisions. But I think it goes beyond that. The same media houses own the left and the right wing media and I think it is part of their agenda to polarise the public towards these two extremes.
There's a Fox News video of this on Youtube and the comments are literally completely insane. A third of them saying it was Democrats, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Another third saying it was immigrants and it's Democrats' fault for letting them in. Another third saying it was the Chinese. A few saying it's the woke Marxist agenda. Not a shred of sanity in sight.
There wasn't a single "hey maybe it's just some random people trying to earn money", much less a "hang on, this isn't actually a crime".