Veteran 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley reported on Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm some of the country’s top law firms into doing his bidding on Sunday night’s episode of the embattled CBS newsmagazine.
Pelley’s segment pulled no punches in describing Trump’s efforts and reminding viewers that Trump is the “first felon” ever to sit in the Oval Office.
I understand how it happens and I agree that the people making and spreading the propaganda deserve more of the blame than those consuming it. However, I don’t think the consumers get a free pass. We (including myself because I understand that I am not immune to propaganda) all have the responsibility to view information critically and not let our biases and our environments distort our view of reality. In the cases where I fail to do so I am ultimately to blame for that. The same is true for all of us. Blaming manipulators lets people avoid taking responsibility for allowing themselves to be manipulated and that is not going to help us solve this problem.
I agree to a certain extent, but at the same time - what level of responsibility do we really have?
I’d say it’s virtuous to keep yourself educated, but it’s also virtuous to realize your limits and to recognize when you should trust others on things beyond you. No one can know everything, and being able to weigh conflicting accounts accurately is a rare skill
Humans naturally drift to a certain distance from their perceived community consensus. Like the Overton window, or the whole concept of “normalizing” things. Our beliefs are relative to our society
Propoganda hacks this. If you hear something uncontested frequently, you start to internalize it. It happens without actually processing the information. If people around you generally seem to hold an opinion, your opinion is relative to this - except with social media, algorithms purposefully distort what you are exposed to
It just doesn’t seem fair to blame people for not rising above their own nature