> This makes me wonder how our own media is manipulated to influence political movements?
Something I've found very interesting is watching foreign news media and what they report on and some of the externals that surround that reporting...then reversing those observations to my own country's media. It's remarkable how taking that outsider's viewpoint and turning it towards your own native media can help you to understand where they're manipulative or not quite truthful with things.
In my case, my wife is from South Korea and I get constant exposure to the news (important and trivial) about her native country. There's lots of, to me, obvious political influence in South Korean news. It took a few years, but eventually I was able to convince my wife that this was happening. Of course she had some inkling that it was happening, but the various phenomenon I was pointing out to here had completely escaped her notice.
One of the most common in her country is to hide embarrassing political issues with wall to wall coverage of a recent scandal that was just "discovered" about some top-tier entertainer: it's usually a sex scandal, but it could be tax evasion or gambling issues. Those entertainers then "retire" or disappear for a couple years and inevitably stage a come back. The public's attention span is so short that the political issue is quickly forgotten while the poor singer or actor or whatever is drug through the press for a few weeks. It's very rare that a political issue will stay front and center over an inconsequential starlet's sex video.
Over the years I've come to appreciate the very deep relationship the government there has with the major production companies and broadcast networks. It's changing slowly, independent media is starting to spring up on cable networks and podcasts and such, but the overall homogeneity of South Korean pop culture means that most people will still just go to their favorite old media sources for most things anyways. The good news is that they aren't really spreading lies, just choosing to suddenly report at this very moment about something that doesn't matter at all when something that does matter is being ignored -- so they can still say they have a free press and all that.
Recent protests and firings at some of the major broadcasting companies have shown that this isn't nearly as true though.
Turning back on my country's media and I see similar tactics used. I think we're a bit more subtle about it, it's not quite the clockwork mechanism that I see in South Korea, but I think there's always some agenda to what gets covered and when. I think the government influence on major media producers here is just as deep, think about the flood of pure propaganda action movies that came out during Reagan. They're hopelessly obvious these days, but I don't remember them being such obvious propaganda back then.
These days, my wife and I play this game now when some outrageous, but largely inconsequential, news start getting played up endlessly in our respective countries. The game is called "what's really going on?" And we remind each other with this question that the game has started and we'll spend the next hour or so digging into the internet to try and figure out what embarrassing political situation is being glossed over so we can see an actress trip on stage for the 800th time, or some singer spectacularly flame out in public.
I can think of no better example of this in action then this
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/19insert-word-here-differ...