Media can manipulate masses in order to spread : Fear Hostility Greed Etc Hostility/division, like war & etc, can kill millions. Greed, can ruin financial lives of millions. Fear - yet the fear, like the recent absurd of the flu, it can stop the economy, but that's about it. (In extreme cases, society would divide, if quarantine is prolonged & conflicts would follow) If used at limited dosages, it can focus masses on something that is completely not-harmful. That's a powerful tool. Imagine, something is about to happen, - you press the button, wham bam thank you ma' am & whole globe is like this :
Don't worry. We read the news with a pinch of salt or with eyes and mind closed. most news are manipulated, biased, half true/fake.
Would be a waste of time. Was more of a realization, that it could have a positive usage, when time is necessary. - even in here, is a minority. Amen.
It doesn't take much effort to find the source document/video/tweet for any news story, in a way that was never even close to possible pre-internet. If there's this massive coordinated effort to manipulate news these days and you're able to use source documentation while you presume the rest of the world is too ignorant to do so, that would provide you a massive informational advantage, would it not? Of course "manipulation/bias" is always in the eye of the beholder. When police violence against blacks was completely ignored by any news organization for 90 of the past 100 years I would think the news was pretty damn manipulated/biased if I was black. The "good old days" of Walter Cronkite were only "good" if you were middle class and white and didn't want to see anything that would upset your sensibilities or cause you to think about your beliefs.
Im not into conspiracy theories, but the industry of publishing by 2010, roughly was ~$130B. That's not much at all... Given the fact, that it's global scale that we talk about. That is so called the death of ego, when one realizes and hopefully admits that hes/shes not perfect, while the pre-event / pre-truth perspective of reality has to be left behind/get rid off, since it is no longer a correct one. And it is haaaard to do so. Noone want's to be wrong. To be clear, im not saying that it is a cooperated effort to do so, it's more like a following the trend, only in the industry of publishing/news. (whatever that sells and brings in revenue for em) Even at the cost of the truth. Ofcouse there's many reporters who has an average intellect, thus they do fall for the delusional news of their own industry. Avalanche fueled by new fools being sucked in, and few smart ones, who wants to make those earnings by generating clicks.
My point is that none of this has changed probably since Greek times but certainly not in the life of the Republic here in the U.S. News has always been paid for by advertisers, in fact in the past advertisers had much more influence on a given paper/channel because they did direct ad buys. Pay has always been low to middle of the road, so there have always been many reporters of average intellect. News has always self-reinforced, heck that's such a natural part of the human psyche that it happens in the self-reported neighborhood news that goes around by word of mouth. What's different now is that we have an unprecedented ability to check source documents/audio/video. If CBS, NBC, and ABC all showed the same 30 second clip of the President saying something in 1962, you and I as regular citizens were pretty much stuck with that. Now we can go listen to the entire interview/speech/press conference and hear it for ourselves with full context. If the newspapers all chose to excerpt the same section of the Pentagon Papers, that was what we all got. If that came out today, we'd all be able to read them in their entirety the day they were released. We can see the entire George Floyd murder if we can stand to watch it, and we could see it even if none of the media chose to cover it at all, which certainly would have been the case in the 50s. So I'd maintain that you and I as individuals who care about and can benefit from knowing the underlying truth of a matter are in an unprecedented time where we are far less subject to news manipulation/bias and far better able to verify what we hear against the actual source of the news than anyone in all of history. Media manipulation/bias hasn't changed a whit in millenia, but our ability to cut through it has. It's a great time to be alive!
A few hundred years ago someone said: "Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another." It is the antidote to what someone recently said that someone said a while ago: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
The media have evolved from simple means of searching, processing and transmitting information into means that control and transform the human inner world. Instead of expanding the horizons of human consciousness development, giving it independence and freedom in judgments, modern media are increasingly manipulating mass consciousness through standards of behavior. Trying to convey information to the consumer, the media perform their most important task - to make sure that in the mass consciousness of the masses this information causes reactions that meet the requirements of the customer, which can be represented by both individuals and the government. The media's ability to significantly influence the mass consciousness has been noticed long ago. Improvements in the technical capabilities of the media have significantly increased the scale of manipulation of the mass consciousness, which can be easily and effortlessly influenced. The crowd has no opinion of its own because it isn't capable of critical thinking. As a result, any opinion has to be pressed into it from the outside and under pressure, and skillful manipulation of information makes the possibilities for the masses to be inspired by the media virtually limitless. Today, through the mass media, the world public is getting acquainted with the modern way of life. This process can have a negative impact on people, leading to information overloads, which in turn weakens the ability to think.
News have been becoming more and more inaccurate thanks to the internet and social medias. But it helps if you research and look deep into to find whether they are harmful or not.