RW media conglomerates deceiving the people and distorting our elections...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California in 1934. He and a progressive third-party candidate combined for 50% of the vote. The Republican candidate got 48% and won.

The TV news of the day was newsreels shown before movies.

Californians who wanted to see Clark Gable's bare chest in It Happened One Night were treated to a newsreel about the 1934 Governors race. The newsreel included things like (this is real...) a man-on-the-street interview with a wild-eyed man with a crazy beard and mustache and a heavy foreign accent who said, "Upton Sinclair's system worked pretty good in Russia. Why not try it here in California?"

And there was a wonderful (staged) scene of hobos from around the nation massing on the California border awaiting a Sinclair victory.

"Among supporters were MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. During the campaign, Mayer turned multiple studio lots in Los Angeles into propaganda machines, churning out fake newsreels to be played before feature-length films in the state. One notable newsreel included Soviets arriving in California to vote for Sinclair."

Fair and balanced!

[montanacowboy]

1. Wash Rinse Repeat

The American people never learn and are easily misled

[whathehell]

5. The American people were not so easily misled

until the demise of the Fairness Doctrine under Regan allowed the Right Wing to blur the lines between "entertainment" and "Politics" and take over the airwaves.

Wash, rinse and repeat that.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. Well, they sure didn't elect Sinclair in '34

[Blue Owl]

2. Why the propaganda's just dandy

Is it real or is it Rupert?

[drm604]

3. K&R

Nothing new under the sun. You'd think that people would learn at some point.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. How? When?

The lies are never exposed, the truth is never revealed. How would someone who saw that newsreel ever discover that the hobos and the wild-eyed foreigner were actors?

[drm604]

7. I don't know.

It's just frustrating to me that people keep falling for the same propaganda over and over. The kind of thing described in the OP seems like obvious propaganda to me, yet people fall for it constantly. Somehow we have to get people thinking and questioning.