Reply #169: yes, how could it be otherwise?

[Two Americas]

My guess is that people watch cable TV, hear the right wing attacks, and then see everything as defined by the pundits, see politics as nothing more than a partisan battle similar to a sports event, and think they are obligated to take the opposite positions from the right wingers to be on the right side of everything. It never occurs to them that they are allowing the MSM to define them, to tell them what opposition to the right wingers is. Then, anything anyone says that varies at all from the MSM-defined opposition to the right wing is rejected and attacked.

I am convinced that the point of the right wing propaganda is not so much to promote conservative politics, not to rally the base, but rather to define and control the opposition to the right wing. The opposition to the right wing is defined in such a way that the premises and assumptions of the right wing are not challenged, and so that infighting can be caused among Democrats. I would bet that we could accurately determine how much attention people here are paying to cable news programs by the ideas they post.

I suggested a few weeks ago to a person that perhaps they were watching too much cable TV, and they indignantly denied that. I then noticed that over the subsequent 24 hours that same person started several threads commenting on things they had hear on cable TV. The propaganda is so effective that people are convinced that the "reality" being created for them by TV is the only reality, and cannot even see that it is being spoon fed to them, that someone else is doing their thinking for them.


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