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When nearly every news outlet, every talk show host, every celebrity, are all repeating the same message over and over again it has an effect, it has a very large effect on how people think. The repercussions can ripple through the economy and other aspects of society. If this message is something like "your president is completely insane and will destroy the nation" then the effects will tend to be negative and have undesirable consequences.
Society is easy to manipulate
It simply is not true that EVERY media source reports the same stuff, in the same way. Fox News for example, and its MASSIVE number of affiliates, all of which together make up a substantial amount of the consumed news media from a television perspective, report entirely differently to the CNN camp and others similar, to the point of ignoring facts entirely in order to do so.
The media in and of itself is not a threat to society. But society is a threat to itself when the people choose sides instead of truth. And that's called partisanship -- which is the greatest threat we face.
It simply is not true that EVERY media source reports the same stuff, in the same way. Fox News for example, and its MASSIVE number of affiliates...
While Fox News and its affiliates exist, there can be no threat that the MSM will become too one sided, because Fox and its affiliates have greater reach than most people realise,
The same cannot be said of the slightly more left wing news...
Because critical thinking is common amongst lefties, and so is distrust of those who have, or act in the name of making a heap of coin.
First and foremost, again, no one is "manipulated" without their consent and cooperation. And to that extent, the very fake news media are simply giving those people the ammunition to bolster the position they've already taken. If it were otherwise, then there would be no disagreement, no division, no debate. EVERYONE would think the exact same thing because they had all been programmed to do so. But it doesn't work that way.
The media is a threat to society if it's lying about what it's reporting.
Partisanship is not a threat as long as no one is lying to support their cause. It's all about the lies.
I like the way you worded that.
To add to it, who's going to talk about Lockheed Martin funding establishment campaigns regardless of party while they're doing huge commercial campaigns? Who's going to talk about their lobbyists writing laws and having congress members sponsor them?
Because does Lockheed Martin really need to advertise to the citizens? Of course not, and that's just one example of how commercial campaigns buffer them from bad publicity.
Um... no. The threat to society is the gross lack of transparency and our dependency on "the media" for information, which can be and is presented as propaganda via mis-truths, half-truths, and un-truths UNDER COLOR OF LAW. Government propaganda is "legal" now, thanks to Team Obama. At this point, we have no way of knowing which lies came from "the media" and which lies came from government.
Every news organization since the beginning of time has slanted opinions to what ever their agenda is.