Corporate media
As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.
We manufactured fake dissent to prevent real dissent.
Matt Taibbi
It’s difficult to make money doing a good thing. Incentives get in the way, and it becomes a challenge to do what is best when it might conflict with what is most profitable to you. When it is your job to craft narratives about current events, shaping the very nature of the world we live in, you are bestowed a power that requires great responsibility. The reality is, however, that if you want to make a living doing the sacred work of narrating the universe, there are certain stories and certain styles of storytelling that lead to greater paydays.
This is not a partisan issue although it can certainly look that way. When we discuss biased corrupt media, the left points out Fox News or the Daily Wire and how ideologically slanted they are, while the right points out the lack of viewpoint diversity in the majority of legacy media outlets like the NY Times or CNN. As previously mentioned, about 5% of journalists identify as conservative, strongly suggesting a proliferated liberal bias, whereas the highest rated news or should I say info-tainment programs on TV, even among Democrats, are usually on Fox, which would indicate that right-wing media is doing just fine.
Renowned thought leaders from Noam Chomsky and Alain de Botton to more recently Matt Taibbi and Batya Ungar-Sargon have brilliantly demonstrated the skewed incentive structures and the subsequent psyop tactics employed by corporate media. In the 1980s American media covered the violence and oppression in sandinista Nicaragua unfavourably while denying the demonstrably worse violence in the U.S. client state of El Salvador. In the early 2000s the erroneous narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was presented as fact. The mainstream media outlets have consistently chosen narratives that ended up being false and have filtered their journalistic efforts in order to maintain that narrative even in the face of contrary evidence, with often catastrophic results.
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