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The whole point of the manufacturing consent propaganda model is that you don't need some vast conspiracy, you just need industry consolidation and the leaders

by gwerbin 7mo ago

The whole point of the manufacturing consent propaganda model is that you don't need some vast conspiracy, you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat. And just look how consolidated the media is in the USA right now, and look at who makes decisions for those companies. > Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. There are a million things that could've done to sell ads. Funny how they chose the one thing that just so happens to align with the particular political agenda of the president, who just so happens to be the current figurehead of the entire political movement with which Fox just coincidentally happens to have been tightly aligned for my entire adult life. Must be a coincidence. > And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck. There was plenty of it, you just didn't see anything about it in the news except as page 10 human interest stories in the liberal-aligned media like NPR and the Boston Globe. Must be another editorial coincidence. There is no way you can earnestly believe that the right-wing media doesn't favorably report on right-wing politicians and their causes. The Manufacturing Consent model is extremely successful among social science models in that it implies clear and testable predictions that have been corroborated again and again and again around the world, pretty much since the dawn of news media. If you don't agree with that assessment, then in my opinion you are ignoring reality or at best ignorant of it.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat And I’m saying that’s nonsense. The media operates on independent incentives. The political calculus then responds to it. Attention-driven society doesn’t need a maestro, and rarely has one. Pretending it does is comforting but wrong.
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  You’re arguing against the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology. It’s been a century since Bernays wrote the seminary work on this topic, why the credulity? The connections are not tenuous, these people are operating in the daylight, even giving public talks and publishing treatises about their strategies. Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics. You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor. Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy. > Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives. It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.
    - gwerbin 7mo ago
      > And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives. You're arguing against yourself. Musk has a clear political allegiance. Same with Ellison and Bezos and the Koch brothers and the Sinclair Media group. It's a clear example of the Manufacturing Consent model operating in practice. And that's just the "mainstream" media. Connecting political influencers and content creators to funding and information sources is a big deal, e.g. https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-paying-pro-democrat-influencers-up-to-8k-a-month-report/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-payi... (Relevant to the topic: note the well-known political alignment of the NY Post and how it might affect reporting on a topic like this. I think I had a homework assignment like this in 10th grade.) Under the current administration we have the president and FCC openly threatening and pressuring media companies, but that's just them being more bold and arrogant than in the past. There are many ambiguous and uncertain things in this world, but there is very, very clearly a directional flow of messaging and alignment from powerful people and organizations with particular political alignments to the media organizatinos that they control and/or fund.
- gwerbin 7mo ago
  You claim it's nonsense, I claim it's been the reality in the United States for decades, and only becoming more true every year. You can choose to confront the evidence before you, or continue to live in willful ignorance, but the world you describe simply does not correspond to the one that we inhabit.

by gwerbin 7mo ago

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago

> you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat And I’m saying that’s nonsense. The media operates on independent incentives. The political calculus then responds to it. Attention-driven society doesn’t need a maestro, and rarely has one. Pretending it does is comforting but wrong.

datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
You’re arguing against the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology. It’s been a century since Bernays wrote the seminary work on this topic, why the credulity? The connections are not tenuous, these people are operating in the daylight, even giving public talks and publishing treatises about their strategies. Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics. You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor. Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy. > Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives. It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.
  - gwerbin 7mo ago
    > And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives. You're arguing against yourself. Musk has a clear political allegiance. Same with Ellison and Bezos and the Koch brothers and the Sinclair Media group. It's a clear example of the Manufacturing Consent model operating in practice. And that's just the "mainstream" media. Connecting political influencers and content creators to funding and information sources is a big deal, e.g. https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-paying-pro-democrat-influencers-up-to-8k-a-month-report/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-payi... (Relevant to the topic: note the well-known political alignment of the NY Post and how it might affect reporting on a topic like this. I think I had a homework assignment like this in 10th grade.) Under the current administration we have the president and FCC openly threatening and pressuring media companies, but that's just them being more bold and arrogant than in the past. There are many ambiguous and uncertain things in this world, but there is very, very clearly a directional flow of messaging and alignment from powerful people and organizations with particular political alignments to the media organizatinos that they control and/or fund.
gwerbin 7mo ago
You claim it's nonsense, I claim it's been the reality in the United States for decades, and only becoming more true every year. You can choose to confront the evidence before you, or continue to live in willful ignorance, but the world you describe simply does not correspond to the one that we inhabit.