| I see where you're coming from, but the current media situation says that any attempt to do this would be a terrible idea and backfire horribly on them. I mean, we're already in a world where a large percentage do not trust anything the media is saying. Where 'CNN is fake news' is basically a meme and 'alternative' news publications have taken a large bite out of the older ones' markets. If they try and paint the trucker actions as all negative or crazy, it could go about as well as painting Trump crazy did prior to the 2016 election. Or pleading for Britain to stay in the EU pre Brexit. And something similar also led to GamerGate becoming such a catastrophe. If the media try anything like this against the general population, they'll soon notice that: 1. Trust in them will decline even further
2. Alternative news sites and YouTube influencers will take full advantage of the situation and cover the other side extensively.
3. They'll turn social media sites into even more of a war zone than they already are. So unless they want Breitbart (or the next Breitbart equivalent) to gain a few thousand times more traffic from people who feel like 'the media' is lying to them, I doubt they'll continue this sort of path. |
The media is and has been doing this for decades. If they do it in a totally obvious and outright manner, then yeah, everyone's going to notice, but if they do it in a more subtle way and push their agenda over a longer timeframe, most people won't notice that, or they'll only notice it when it's too late. It's not about brainwashing everyone. All you need is a critical mass and once you're there, you've basically won.
Most people lack critical thinking abilities and they're rather contend with having other people think for them. You don't notice this here on HN because the readers and commenters here are far smarter than the average person is.