cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/542681
Even without strong state intervention or state censorship bourgeois democracies manage to convince countless of working people to vote, behave and think against their objektive interest. How so? Editorial boards and directors only hire journalists and creators whose opinions they like, leading to journalists being allowed to say what they like because the board likes what they say. Even if a journalist has a change of heart, their article will likely get removed from mainstream editions. On top of that market machinations prevent the publishing of actually critical content that looks at the root of issues instead of just feeding into capitalists (sur)realism since that wouldn’t bring profits or would upset the shareholder/oversight board. (Now you might say that the left-wing content might sell well among the public, but who controls the flow of (investment) capital and thus dictates what is viable at a large scale and what isn’t?)
I don’t have a similar chart bookmarked for US media, but here’s a great (and kind of disturbing) chart for ownership of all major Canadian newspapers, along with whom they’ve endorsed for PM going back decades. Kind of telling that they’re almost all simps for Conservatives. And almost all owned by Post Media.