Comment by forgotoldacc
Comment by forgotoldacc 3 days ago
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
You're not considering one simple alternative - and that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin, is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War era because it was mostly just pointing out true things, like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed because the truth was not on their side.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.