The news has existed to drive public opinion for over a century, before television even existed. Hell, there was even a book written in 1922 named "Public Opini

The news has existed to drive public opinion for over a century, before television even existed. Hell, there was even a book written in 1922 named "Public Opinion" about the very subject. The blurb about it on Wikipedia echoes truer today than it did at the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) The introduction describes man's inability to interpret the world: "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. People construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones."