No Exception
News is inherently propagandous. No matter how factual or fictional, all news will invoke some kind of emotional response allowing for manipulation of the person receiving it. Whether the news is as large as a multi-country war starting or as mundane as a video game being announced, there is some type of manipulation being attempted even if the person relaying the news doesn't intend to.
News agencies are an obvious form of a propaganda machine. Any news network is a business and therefore exists for profit and to get that profit they need people experiencing their news. No profit, no reason to exist. Because of this they are gonna go where the money is. They're gonna get a target audience; they're gonna get the ads and sponsorships; they're gonna do whatever to keep business going. Profit alone corrupts this form of news.
These news agencies always have some sort of bias and audience to appeal to and because of this they perpetuate the memes of these biases and audiences to keep their audience and therefore profit. Right wing sticks with right wing news networks that perpetuate their memes, left wing sticks with left wing news networks that perpetuate their memes, leftists theirs, libertarians theirs, whoever of whatever arbitrary label tends to stick with news providers that perpetuate the memes they have been infected with.
Listening to multiple news sources and even doing your own research is not a solution. Listening to multiple sources just exposes you to more biases and memes and even if they have weaker influence on you because you subject yourself to multiple conflicting ones, they are still there regardless and will still have some type of influence on you. Doing your own research can be a non-solution because you probably already have your own biases and memes that will still influence your research and encourage you to come to the results you want.
Even giving just facts doesn't make a news source non-propagandous. You can use just facts to support any belief without lying or twisting the truth. You can do this by isolating facts that support your belief and disregarding all other facts that go against it. If someone challenges your belief, just find more isolated facts to support yours and discredit theirs. The worst of this is ragebait. People showing a bad thing happening and getting people angry about it to either convince people of their beliefs or keep existing beliefs strong. It is literal emotional manipulation and possibly the worst form of news there is and the easiest to manipulate people with. Be extremely careful not to fall for the memetic influence of this kind of stuff.
Most news is of absolutely no importance to you anyways. Even news of wars and tragedies. What are you gonna do about a war in a country you nor any of your family lives in? How does it even affect you? Why should you care? Why do you care about this war and not the countless others that have occurred during your life? Same with tragedies, tyrannical foreign governments, whatever. Receiving news about these things that you can do nothing about nor even affect you at all does absolutely nothing of any good to you. All it does is make you mad about whatever thing and/or get mad at others whose beliefs go against yours on the topic of the thing neither of you have any influence over. This kind of news does nothing but bring a net evil into the world. I focus on problems that actually affect me. I'd rather do something about a problem I or someone I know is facing than get mad because bad thing happened to people I don't know nor can help. I just find it so insidious that news that doesn't effect people is one of if not the biggest factors in people's hostility towards each other.
Even mundane news is all propaganda. An announcement of a movie, game, book, whatever form of media is propaganda trying to get you to buy it and promote it to get more to buy it. A status update on social media is probably the result of self-grandiosity to get more popular or just get attention. A wacky headline still just wants you click and share it to get more profit. Be careful of even the mundane stuff as it could still be trying to manipulate you.
I myself can't stand really any type of news now. I just want people to shut up about all this crap. Everywhere I see is just people trying to spread their memetic viruses as a result of what they learned from news. I just view it all as propaganda at this point. Even the very little amount of news I do purposely seek out that actually does affect me and I view so I can learn and improve stuff in context of the topic, I still view as propaganda since the presenters still have a bias and even the presentation of facts can be used as a propaganda tool. Just because something is good doesn't mean it's not propaganda. This article is propaganda.
Written 2023-4-10 Published 2023-5-1