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Originally Posted by macker
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
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In 1928, you might have had a point.
Information comes from everywhere and anywhere these days, including so-called citizen journalists, while varying opinions, moderate to radicalized, are equally unfettered for access for the average news consumer.
If you're got something to say, you should have no problem making yourself heard.
You have no excuse at all in this day and age, even in darkest Africa, for not being connected to the information age and viewing all sorts of interpretations of that information in any form you might want.
As a result, the point from 1928 has obviously been blown out of the water. Its virtually impossible to contain information in its rawest form.
The newest trend for news and opinion is websites like The Huffington Post which offer a platform for comment, usually provided for free by those seeking a podium to talk, with profits focussed narrrowly in a few pockets. The electronic, global spanning version of Speakers Corner.
With virtually no overhead, no worrries about print production, no limit on content, no need to send a reporter out to cover a hurricane, ever-expanding readership and therefore large net profit margins, these money-making media opinion websites have been proliferating like rabbits.
You saw the lucrative nature of these new media sites when The Huffington Post was sold recently for hundreds of millions of dollars.
On a smaller scale, Calgarypuck, with content provided for free by volunteers, is pretty much the same thing.
Journalists, who have been engaging in ceaseless whining about shrinking newsrooms for decades, are gravitating towards these alternative information sources, sometimes as a sanctioned sidebar of their traditional employers.
This goes to a very important point - you MUST make a profit in any business, and media is no exception.
With the vast proliferation of means and methods by which a news consumer can view content, competition for eyes is ferocious . . . . . and the smart people who understand the psychological and money-making implications of "Confirmation Bias" and "Hostile Media Phenomenon" are those who will end up with dollars in their pockets.
It's all about how you can make a buck on the media web these days and, more importantly, finding the right formula. The New York Times is back to charging for content. You can view 20 stories from your IP in a month but go over that and you have to pay for content. The first time they tried something like that, they bombed horribly. If I'm not mistaken, this second attempt has netted about three times as many subscribers as they were expecting. They finally found the right way to do it and you can expect their example to proliferate in varying forms.
If you're a normal human being, American or otherwise, you will likely engage in the "comfort food" practice of finding a few sources of information that surround you in a warm blanket, that being a source that tells you your opinion is right versus challenging yourself in the darkest, scariest places you can find.
That is not confined to America. In fact, you could easily argue Americans might be the most likely to see contrary opinions versus, say, the average Pakistani.
The way I see it, media are simply reacting to the demands of consumers, reshaping themselves to a new age and reacting to enhanced competition for eyeballs that are increasingly demanding "confirmation bias."
But that only means you have a rapidly expanding base of sources from which to get your information and the interpretations of that information.
Its up to you to decide if you want to be informed but don't say you can't be informed.
Its a golden age for a news junky.
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I think it more a condemnation of the U.S. citizens rather than the product. Obviously Time believes that in the United States fluff pieces will draw in more people than hard news stories and that elsewhere in the world, people WANT to read the hard news.
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Its kind of instructive these days to go to "normal" news sites and see what the top ten "most viewed" or "most e-mailed" or "most popular" stories might be on any given day.
Today the most viewed story in Canada's Globe & Mail is "My Gynecologist Pushed Plastic Surgery On Me" while the most viewed stories in the Washington Post, LA Times and NY Times are decidedly more serious.
Does that make Canadians dummies? No, it just means we're voyeurs and curiousity hounds and that's a helluva headline.
The beauty of our society is that we're free to be as stupid and ill-informed as we personally want to be . . . . or the opposite. No pressure. My experience is that people are experts in their daily lives and when outside events impinge on their lives, like a global recession, they start to expand their horizons a bit to take that information in. Otherwise, don't bother them because they're trying to make ends meet.
And I have no problem with people being more interested in Kim Kardashian's flopped wedding scam than Congress spinning its wheels, simply because they actually DO see both, but they might read the Kardashian headline and story first.
Cowperson
