[mesh]

Relevant read is Chomsky's and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Basically, there has always been a strong bias and structural constraints toward US / elite views.

I think the core question is why trust has gotten particularly bad over the last decade (I have some ideas, including one side particularly trying to weaken trust in it).

[BirAdam]

I think the main reason is that places like Twitter provided real-time images of things happening around the world. All it takes is one influencer looking at a photo and talking about it for people to see that reporting is heavily biased. There were also just huge mistakes… like the Weather Channel saying things are terrible and the reporter guy appearing to be struggling to stand while two guys are just walking normally in the background.

[legitster]

There's a couple of problems with Chomsky's book that make it hard to seriously recommend.

The whole book was spent describing a "propaganda model" of news that begins and ends with corporate incentives, profits, and advertising. But he completely ignores the large number of non-profit, independently funded, or publicly owned news sources. And from experience they can exhibit some of the exact same systematized biases! Even without greedy owners.

There's also a lot of conjectures about how news works that simply aren't true or have not existed in decades. He's more interested in pushing his "theory of everything" and making it generic enough to fit any situation anywhere. And the whole idea of using his credibility as a linguist to confidently push a punch of political theories well outside of his actual experience never sat right with me.

There's also an irony that this book was written to combat the media in an era when it was highly trusted and respectable. Now that the media is completely distrusted in America, it's hard to also argue that it's a tool of the elites when it seems dismantling trust in the media is also a tool of elites (which some of his modern contemporaries now argue).

I think the average person is better off reading books about Dick Cheney or the machinations of the War on Terror. You'll actually get a sense how clever people in the seats of power go about actually hijacking the media to take advantage of voters (and the elite!) for particular policy goals.

[lapetitejort]

I would say nothing has changed except who "media" refers to. People who blindly trusted ABC now blindly trust Joe Rogan. They both support the elite.

[yupitsme123]

It shouldn't be a surprise that there's no more trust. And blaming it on one "side" makes no sense because in Chomsky's view power has only one side, not two.

Chomsky and other critical theorists and marxists pointed out that those in power get to dictate what's truth, what's news, what values we should follow. Once you realize that, the next step was supposed to be revolution followed by a world with no power structure.

The various revolutions of the 20th century never worked out that way, and nobody wants to risk their life for that stuff anymore. Meanwhile I think we've all assimilated Chomsky's view that the system is rigged and that everything is a lie or a distortion invented to perpetuate the power structure.

There's no more trust because there's nobody to trust in. You either keep your head down and just try to exist, or you lie to yourself and pick out which lies you want to buy into.