Many voters are willing to accept misinformation from political leaders – even when they know it’s factually inaccurate. According to our research, voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important “truth.”
Why does it have to be either or? It’s totally reasonable to blame BOTH.
It might be reasonable to blame people but it’s entirely useless and even counterproductive. There’s no solution that can come out of that. Even if you rebuild the education system, a significant portion would still be vulnerable. You can see that in countries with better education systems. And then of course there’s the blowback that results from blaming people, which the very same actors you’re trying to protect from co-opt and use against you.
Blaming corporate media on the other hand can produce solutions and quickly. The political system has unfortunately been captured to such an extent by capital that this isn’t even considered. Still that the easier and more productive avenue to pursue if anyone would try.
I could agree … but the gullible masses have no idea they are being manipulated … while the trained and educated media managers and owners (and to a lesser extent the actual journalists) know exactly what they are doing and why
I can blame the listeners for being stupid … but I still blame the messenger for intentionally misleading the public.
Moreover, the founding fathers warned us of this happening, in advance. They knew that it would, they told us that it was all but inevitable, we have had multiple centuries of time in which to shore up democracy… like to implement ranked-choice voting, while instead… we chose not to.
I do not hold out hope for democracy to last much longer, not against such repeated assaults as this. The game of Russian Roulette never ends in happiness, but it does always end.
Things are different now as the educational system is being intentionally damaged, but every single child who grew up in America between the ages of 10 and 80 was raised in an educational environment that taught them in no uncertain terms ALL of the warning signs of fascism and manipulation - these haven’t changed in hundreds of years. They are either willfully ignoring them or spent their years in school eating paint instead of internalizing anything.
It’s totally reasonable to recognize they’re victims. It’s also reasonable to recognize that in most cases, they made themselves that way.
Have you met an average human?