Let’s just pretend that the media was nearly all owned and controlled by one slightly divided faction – lets call them zogopolites.
Zogopolites only report news and opinion which they like. There might be a little difference between the Sydney Zogopolite and the Australian Zogopolite, but not that much. The one on the far up pretends it is sensible and centre and that the other media is far down, but they both ignore the down who don’t have any media at all, expect the papers they publish in their back sheds.
If the down have policies, ideas and information, you won’t get to hear it, but you might be told that all you hear outside the Australian Zogopolite is filthy downism, and you may get some vague distorted idea of how evil the down are.
The zogopolites distort and lie about ‘opinion’ and science they do not like, or which might cause followers to think about whether the zogopolitism was actually survivable. The media calling itself centerist, spends a lot of money hiring people who scream and shout a lot, because the point is that people should be angry and contemptuous of the down – that way they won’t listen to them, in the unlikely event they were ever to hear any.
Zogopolites all protest strongly if anyone on the up gets ‘censored’ – even if that person has access to other news media, or even their own news media – but it completely ignores censorship of the down. So people might even think zogopolitism was “fair and balanced”. What you don’t hear won’t bother you and you won’t notice it, and they more or less never report on the Down except abusively or falsely , so it seems normal. They may even deny that zogopolites exist, their ideology is commonsense after all. You must be deluded to disagree.
The up think that you should have to hear them and nothing else.
If we were living in this world we might think we have non-zogopolite media on youtube or something, but somehow most of it runs with the same kind of line; we must ascend! we must ascend! descent is bad!!!! We might flatter ourselves that we do research, when all we do is look for stuff that confirms our feelings, which have been cultivated by zogopolites – remember the shouting and lies?
Given that zogopolite media will largely not report the truth, or let other opinion in, and it is close to impossible to set up competing media, what should people in this world do?
Should they just say that is the way it is, and we will believe zogopolite reality because its there, and it owns and controls the media? or is there some other solution?
Tags: Disinformation
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