Comment by somenameforme

Comment by somenameforme 3 days ago

You miss the direction of causality. People, especially in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies' with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not because the medium 'converted' anybody.

Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.

I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.

And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.

quesera 3 days ago

I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly overestimate people's willingness to critically examine ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.

Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.

Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.

This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?

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somenameforme 3 days ago

Again there are obvious and mostly endless counter-examples to this. A couple of examples from both sides of the aisle - when Fox News fired Tucker Carslon, their ratings plummeted and he ended up getting [far] more viewers on X than FoxNews gets during prime time broadcasts! When the NYTimes published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that the George Floyd riots and violence should be brought to an end by deploying of the military, their readers freaked out to the point that the director of editorials was "retired", and they publicly announced they would be rethinking about what they publish.
People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/467804/nurses-retain-top-ethics...

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- quesera 2 days ago
  
  I think you're proving my point though.
  While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.
  The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.
  This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.
  Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!
  
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  somenameforme 11 hours ago
  
  Well, again I'd look at the examples where a media (or in this case) a media source falls outside what is expected. With Tucker this is easy - he's a very religious person and quite regularly makes his religion a significant part of his arguments, yet few people who follow him support or advocate those claims. In fact he has some order of magnitudes greater viewers than his entire religious group has followers! People follow him mostly for the multipolar and anti-hegemony stuff, but accept (while not embracing) embracing his own distinct takes outside of that because they don't generally run too hard against these worldviews.
  Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.
  
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