"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" was published in 1988.
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
I generally agree, but I don't think foreign agitation can be completely dismissed. I've heard there's evidence that Russia was contributing to the rise of both the BLM and Blue Lives movements. The media can exasperate the issue, and may even be a necessary part of that agitation.
It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
I wouldn't hold my breath. This stuff operates on an emotional level, not a cognitive/intellectual level. Emotions are powerful because they are largely opaque to most people most of the time and are a strong driver of behavior. Like the old saying: you can't reason a person out of a position or belief that they didn't reason themselves into. As long as this emotional manipulation is profitable (e.g., 'engagement'), I don't see a way out of this.
USA is not the world. There are other countries that have social media as well as struggling local media yet distrust in media is not skyrocketing.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others.
"How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
Decent point, but I think the relevance is that there are large swaths of the US that are blanketed by this conservative news bubble, and that our Senate is apportioned (and to a lesser extent the House) to land, not people. So the fact that lots of land is covered by this bubble is relevant at least to the functioning of the Senate.
Couple targeted messaging with gerrymandering and Sinclair doesn't need full coverage to ensure conservatives can control or make gains in state governments/the house.
Coverage (let's say) of left-wing bias in the media has been a major part of right-wing media since at least the early 90s. Limbaugh, for instance, talked about it a lot back then (and I doubt he ever stopped—don't know why he would have), and if he wasn't receiving payment from the advertising department of Fox News, when they started up, he sure should have been (there was a lot of, "well, except Fox News" in his, ah, coverage of left-wing bias). The "the media hates conservatives" thing got his treatment where he acted like it was just a fact that he and his listeners, of course, knew to be true, sometimes calling out what he perceived as examples, but more often just stating it on the way to some other point. From what I've seen, the rest of right-wing punditry (I suppose you'd call it) picked up on this and took a similar approach to it.
The media leftist bias is real, I guess it’s hard to notice from inside the bubble
I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.
I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.
*Disclaimer: working on a news startup to combat some of these issues*
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
Local news stations get their agenda for their parent companies. They are told what to cover, what not to cover, and how to cover things to fit the overarching narrative from executives/producers.
Yes, see this post from earlier in the week. It is a youtube video in which dozens of local news stations repeat the exact same script.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27550122
I have lived in places where I had a lower opinion of my congressperson than of the rest of congress, and where the majority voted the opposite direction from myself on laws and ballot measures.
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
The article mentions a higher level of trust in local news. My local news in Detroit is very matter of fact, here’s an event that happened, here’s visual proof, and with a few exemptions free of opinion. National news, in my experience, is more pundits talking about the events and extracting larger meaning from it. I personally have a very hard time consuming news outside of the local because of this.
I think one issue that has emerged with the 'free' internet is that more people than ever are reading news, but very few people are paying for it. This statistic is often cited by failing newspaper companies about why they are worth investing in. The issue is qualitative more than quantitative. The engagement that most people used to have with news was casual and occasional. There were a minority of cable TV news viewers but for most other people it was limited to short summary programs on network TV.
The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond.
Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube.
When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture.
Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.
Readit News
> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...
Both mainline ideologies constantly and pathologically deceive and withhold information to make things one sided increasing polarization.
MSNBC argues that its audience knows that its news isn’t actually news...(!)
Dead Comment
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...
The internet has opened pandora's box of mass psychological hacking.
The only way from here is to wait and see whether we can survive like this indefinitely - maybe we'll all collectively build a resistance to media constructed to hijack our emotions. In the meantime we will each have to one by one watch our friends and relatives dive down rabbit holes of propaganda and rage. I've seen this firsthand over the past year and it's not pretty.
I can’t help but speculate that the extremely polarized and partisan politics of the US has some thing to do with this. I know it gets old connecting everything to Trump, but he did hold the highest office in the country for four years and during that period systematically claimed that every bit of media coverage he didn’t like was false and fake news, while also helping to spread obviously fake conspiracy theories that still seem to be popular with half the population.
This is interesting given how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
I guess it doesn't help when they run segments like this, sowing more distrust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
>how many local news outlets are owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.
...to itself be dishonest 'journalistic' spin, in this case perpetuated by John Oliver among others. "How many" local news outlets is irrelevant when you consider a vast majority of Sinclair's outlets are for tiny rural channels, meanwhile large urban and coastal channels will undoubtedly skew more liberal but be fewer in #.
When else has the metric of "how many channels" ever been used to determine reach and engagement?
Not sure of the numbers, just wanted to point this out.
I was never interested in politics , left or right and never listened to conservative or liberal commentary you mentioned but the coverage of BLM riots, Trump etc especially in 2020 was mostly fake news and blatant propaganda. That’s what brought me to vote for Trump in the first place, the constant lying and manipulation by the media.
I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can not notice these 24/7 lies by CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. I’m a first gen immigrant, from former communist country, we have a good nose for propaganda and can smell it from afar, I’m surprised American-born Americans are so easily fooled.
I find it interesting first of all that local news -- and weather, especially -- are the most trusted in the US. It reminds me of that old half-joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson -- but more likely it's that the issues that hit close to home are less likely to be polarized across traditional political lines.
We've long passed the inflection point where people seem to judge trustworthiness based on alignment to their own predetermined biases. If I tell you that what you think is wrong -- even if I have a factual basis for that; or more mildly, just frame something in a way that you might disagree with, you can label me as biased.
How did we get here? I think a lot of the blame comes from social media. Local news really cannot trend -- by definition it appeals to a narrow audience, and no one is sharing city council minutes. People do share outrage -- forcing the most polarizing content to the top. And, not for nothing, newsfeeds often put propaganda and disinformation -- or just lowest-common-denominator ("7 child stars: where are they now?") -- to compete at the same level as traditional journalism.
I (previously) wrote some thoughts here: https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
Still, its the most trusted of the group.
Dead Comment
I still found the local news to be much more professional about doing a matter-of-fact reporting job than national news, even for national outlets I may agree with in terms of bias.
Also PBS news has been quite good over the years that I watched it (though I haven't watched any recently, as the current events themselves have become such stress-inducing toxicity, regardless who reports it).
The news magazines and opinion journals used to be much more cordial and high brow on both the left and the right, more focused on digesting books and important issues and less dedicated to parsing the trending issue of the picosecond.
Now you have tons of casual news viewers participating in social media sharing mostly shallow 'opinions' which are just repetitions of what they have just consumed. It's kind of like what used to be the rich person seafood section with highfalutin organic varieties of wild caught fish has been replaced with 16 aisles of DISCOUNT IMITATION "CRAB" MEAT that all tastes the same and comes out of an industrial tube.
When social media was new I think most tech forward people's opinion was that this was good, and that people would move on from "CRAB." Sure we have one whole aisle of synthetic flavored "CRAB," but in the future it will be better. Instead we just got 16 aisles of "CRAB" and no more good fish, just the memories of what used to be a more refined news culture.
Mass participation in national issues is very distorting for the United States as it is constitutionally composed. Our laws are designed for intense local and state-level participation in politics, with representatives mediating the passions of democracy at the national level. The media optimizes for intense national/international 'engagement,' but this must lead to frustration and unhappiness because mass participation can have zero impact on national issues of import (for the most part) because of the fundamental structure of our system.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI