I feel the need to defend Scott here a little and say that, yes, while media manipulation is nauseatingly endemic (insert that "It's Media" meme image here), he is still probably right that the media, by and large, does not invent Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrications. I mean, for Chrissakes, here he is, sampling InfoWars. InfoWars! The website where people's general understanding of the brand is "that show where Alex Jones claims that Satanist Democrat Lizardpeople are coming to take your guns and harvest your children for their adrenochrome."
And here's Scott, saying that even Alex Jones's website is not, technically, guilty of Protocols-ing, of making every single detail up whole-cloth, in spite of the above. The reality of what InfoWars et al do is both more sinister and yet somehow more boring than that: taking things that are trivially true and factual, but blowing them up disproportionately to the exclusion of even things that would falsify whatever story the outlet wants to tell you. I think the sad truth is that, for the human mind, narratives form most solidly around the brightest parts of a story, so whatever the media chooses to highlight will indeed carry the founder's effect for the rest of the facts of the story.
Sure, there are whoppers of stories that mislead the populace, and not all of them are from places as uncomely as InfoWars, but perhaps the reason why the media seems so unassailable is because they rarely ever say things they have absolutely no proof of.
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Notes -
I feel the need to defend Scott here a little and say that, yes, while media manipulation is nauseatingly endemic (insert that "It's Media" meme image here), he is still probably right that the media, by and large, does not invent Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrications. I mean, for Chrissakes, here he is, sampling InfoWars. InfoWars! The website where people's general understanding of the brand is "that show where Alex Jones claims that Satanist Democrat Lizardpeople are coming to take your guns and harvest your children for their adrenochrome."
And here's Scott, saying that even Alex Jones's website is not, technically, guilty of Protocols-ing, of making every single detail up whole-cloth, in spite of the above. The reality of what InfoWars et al do is both more sinister and yet somehow more boring than that: taking things that are trivially true and factual, but blowing them up disproportionately to the exclusion of even things that would falsify whatever story the outlet wants to tell you. I think the sad truth is that, for the human mind, narratives form most solidly around the brightest parts of a story, so whatever the media chooses to highlight will indeed carry the founder's effect for the rest of the facts of the story.
Sure, there are whoppers of stories that mislead the populace, and not all of them are from places as uncomely as InfoWars, but perhaps the reason why the media seems so unassailable is because they rarely ever say things they have absolutely no proof of.
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