[SequoiaHope]

Very similar to why the New York Times publishes a narrow set of opinions. The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. It’s just that a series of forces have come together such that one does not become an editor at NYT if they’re a militant vegan pacifist. You have to have a certain set of moderate opinions to get in the door. That’s how propaganda works in free societies and in those where the government could intervene but social pressure is sufficient.

https://chomsky.info/consent01/

[roenxi]

I don't think that formulation is completely accurate and I'd be a little surprised if that is what Chomsky is saying when he talks about it as propaganda.

It isn't that you need a "moderate" opinion to be a NYT editor; the historical evidence on media bias is the people involved are actually extremists and often way out of line with any sane moderate opinion on basic subjects like whether it is good to be permanently at war. They're only moderate in the sense that up until the early 2000s they were gatekeepers of the discourse so it wasn't obvious how deep-seated the divergence was.

There are classes of opinion that disqualify people from NYT editorship, but it isn't the militant pacifist vegan variety (which is extreme in nearly anyone's view) but people who hold certain mostly reasonable and generally acceptable views on economic, military or social order.

[alphabetting]

>The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions.

This 1988 model of the flow of information in free societies and their media gatekeepers was probably correct. Nearly 40 years later it is not. The digital content flows in free societies is so diverse today that widely read content extremely critical of whichever parties or power-holders you'd like to read about is everywhere and easy to find. Not the case in authoritarian systems.

[coliveira]

Today it's worse, the platforms will censor directly what you can say. Didn't you notice that certain words cannot even be pronounced anymore in youtube to avoid censorship? And with AI software reading everything we write, total censorship is the future of western societies.

[newsy-combi]

Chomsky is the NYT opinion section of academics. Where it matters, he's smoothly aligned with the rich and powerful. Where it doesn't matter, he's allowed to be a polemicist.

[gobdovan]

> he's smoothly aligned with the rich and powerful

especially when it comes to tourism