Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
2people
2016–2020years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >I have no idea why American unions collapsed
I learnt a lot about that unknown history from Alex Carey's classic Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1987). It was no accident but a huge and deliberate campaign. The story is pretty horrifying.
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Alex+Carey&column=autho...
A small part of the story, from p31:
"The American Advertising Council represents large corporations and large advertising agencies. In April 1947 the council announced a $100 million advertising program which, over the next twelve months, would use all media 'to "sell" the American economic system' to the American people. The program was officially described as a 'major project of educating the American people about the economic facts of life'.
Daniel Bell, then an editor of Fortune, provides a perspective on both the scale and the anti-union and anti-New Deal purposes of these campaigns:
"It has been industry's prime concern, in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by...the depression. This 'free enterprise' campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism [i.e. the New Deal] ... In short the campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority of the last 20 years into the Republican camp ..."
Bell sketches some of the resources, created to sell goods but now used in an overwhelming campaign to sell ideas. 'The apparatus itself is prodigious: 1,600 business periodicals, 577 commercial and financial digests, 2,500 advertising agencies, 500 public relations counsellors, 4,000 corporate public relations departments and more than 6,500 "house organs" with a combined circulation of more than 70 million. Of the opinion-shaping product Bell observes: "The output is staggering. The Advertising Council alone, in 1950, inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400,000 car cards, 2,500,000,000 radio impressions ... By all odds it adds up to the most intensive "sales" campaign in the history of industry'
- > We’re looking to fund... new revenue tools that can bolster and sustain independent media organizations.
Dear YC: I wholeheartedly support this and strongly recommend these books as required reading for anyone seeking to change how media works in our society.
1. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky & Ed Herman[1]
2. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty by Alex Carey[2]
I realize these have an "anti-corporate" bent to them but they are truly good analyses and well worth reading with at the very least a critical eye. As Carey documents, it is the corporate sector that has developed much of the modern tools of manipulating mass opinion.
More than mere fact checking, I think you will find that the chief challenge to achieving sustainable independent media is the business model. Advertising necessarily biases media towards at least the class interests of advertisers (if not any particular one), or else it would go out of business. Meanwhile it has trained readers to not pay the full price of quality content. This is a fundamental problem.
Another challenge is that companies have business models that support their own PR and lobbying while ordinary citizens do not. That is unless they are organized and combined resources, but with the dissipation of unions there is no strong popular economic counterpoint to corporate PR. This is part of our news system as well.
I very much hope some good work can be done here, with a sober and clear understanding of the fundamental challenges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Risk-Out-Democracy-Communicati...
- Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have done excellent comparative research demonstrating exactly that in great detail. For example by comparing coverage of events by the U.S. and its allies to similar events by enemies, finding consistent and strong bias in the mainstream media.
They also develop a theory, more of an explanation, that this is essentially because mainstream media is funded through advertising which then naturally biases it towards the interests of the business elite. That is how we get thought control in a democratic society.
See Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions for numerous cases. Wonderful books. See also Alex Carey's work on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.
- This massive propaganda effort is detailed in a chapter of Alex Carey's Taking the Risk out of Democracy. The scale of it was incredible.
