The propaganda move here is actually kinda subtle, by claiming fake news will “corrode faith in institutions,” what they’re really saying is ANY news that corrodes faith in institutions should be disregarded as fake news. Remember, your falling for someone’s lies if you think anything is wrong!
Criticizing Hindenburg will only empower the nazis. Now is not the time.
ANY news that corrodes faith in institutions should be disregarded as fake news
Gotta wonder if they consider FOX News or MSNBC a media institution of faith or Fake News.
Hell, is organized labor an institution we're supposed to put our faith in or a fake news outlet? I guess all they can do is report and we'll have to decide.
The largest drop off in trust in the American government happened after the government covered up JFK's assassination. America's institutions deserve contempt.
They act as if Americans had much faith in their "democratic institutions" before fake news came about.
I like how pinning Americans' lack of the faith in the system is painted as rooted in something that is "tricking " them; and not that the system is actually failing them (it is, of course)
It's also exactly backwards. People are prone to conspiratorial thinking precisely because of our collapsing institutions. We are in a deep crisis--just about everyone intuits this--so everyone is want for an explanation, an understanding, or something that gives them a sense of certainty in response to its opposite. The idea that so-called fake news erodes our "faith" (lol) in the state's institutions is liberalism to a T in that it treats the effects, and only the effects, of a malady without ever understanding its cause.
our institutions are collapsing because the capitalists in charge will do everything in power to make sure they don't have to fund them, including actual conspiracies
The idea that so-called fake news erodes our “faith” (lol) in the state’s institutions is liberalism to a T
There's a certain amount of truth in the observation that, say, the Murdoch Press take-over of a host of smaller independent news journals has eroded faith in institutions by deliberately amping up the distrust and hysteria already chronic within journalism. The Washington Times being bought out by the Moonies, the Epoch Times being pushed by the Falun Gong, the WaPo being bought out by Amazon... These don't go unnoticed, nor do their editorial shifts occur without some degree of blowback. Scientologists and Mormons and Catholics and Evangelicals and Peter Thiel all using their legal clout to intimidate or bankrupt any media hostile to their interests will drown out opposition voices. And the end result is a mainstream landscape of news that's either too vulnerable to challenge anyone in power or too partisan to be taken seriously by anyone outside their niche.
All that does, in fact, "erode faith in institutions" that were otherwise held in high regard.
The actual failure of those institutions definitely undermines their own cause. But we do run into a kind-of Chicken/Egg dilemma, in which a guy like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama can call out departments as corrupt, only to step into office and stuff them with their own suite of know-nothing stooges and hacks. Which came first? It doesn't seem like the EPA was always headed by Scott Pruitts. The Defense Department wasn't always run by Donald Rumsfeld. The courts weren't always stacked with Federalist Society cronies. And the state legislatures weren't always beholden to ALEC.
In order to displace the comparatively benign local interests with an openly parasitic class of nationally syndicated elites, corporate boards had to spend a ton of time, money, and manpower actively undermining and attacking the existing office-holders. The whole Reagan Revolution was predicated on displacing public leaders and privatizing away public property, and the first step in that game was to denounce these institutions for corruption and incompetence far in excess of what actually existed.
In the same way that the CIA sponsors Color Revolutions abroad by exacerbating and outright fabricating reasons for outrage, US media and the domestic bourgeois seize and maintain control by vilifying anyone or anything contrary to their interests.
democratic institutions such as... the government? not really democratic, the supreme court? oh please, the fucking FBI, CIA?
Yeh it’s a few Russian bots that undermined faith in the western establishment, not the fact that our governments, media and schools have lied to us for a century.
You could write an essay on the intersection between ideology, "science", and propaganda on display in this single image
Is there a name for that lib-tendency to disregard simple actual things and needlessly cerebralize it to some "higher-level" indirect effect so that it loses meaning to anybody but the most milquetoast bookworm?
"fake news is bad--not because people believe it, but because it erodes the trust in democratic institutions"
"racism is a problem--we solved racism in the 1960s, it's not that people are racist, it's because the racism has become institutionalized"
"The republicans aren't banning black people from voting, they're disenfranchising urban communities"
Liberals are the only ones trying to constantly legitimize institutions. They are institutionalists at the their core which is why reform rather than abolition (revolution?) is the only path they want to take. I feel like for Americans, it tends to go that that liberal institutions are established by liberals then the pendulum swings the other way and they are de-legitimized by right wingers. They later lose power to liberals who attempt to re-legitimize those same but weaker institutions. Nothing really changes because nothing is supposed to change.
tbh the real news is what made me lose faith in w*stern “democracy” :joker-che:
People aren't falling for our pop-up ads anymore and that's bad, because it signals a decay in the historic faith we all had in the institution of mass market advertising.
