Arguing the obvious: you're saying that they should fear the big scary police state. That's exactly "people are scared of what they're told is scary".

You're partly correct. But I'm not actually saying "you should fear x". I'm making observations on mass media and a conjecture on the underlying fears of people, then just letting you figure out what you think about it. I also do not hold any power or credibility over my audience, I'm just some guy on the internet.

Contrast this to media entities, in a position of trust, twisting the world to conform to whatever they gain most out of. Do you yourself feel that the mass media sources you are familiar with fairly represent and report on the issues they address?

You're more likely to be killed by police than by terrorists (in the US, possibly not in the UK). The police can legally detain you, steal your property (again in the US), and whatever they do illegaly is usually not punished. If that's not reason enough to scare you, then I'm assuming you don't have many fears.

In theory, I definitely support a surveilance state, with powerful law-enforcement agencies. In practice, none of the states on Earth are trustworthy enough not to abuse that power.

That's not simple at all, especially if you don't want to become what you fight and restrict freedom of the press while you're doing it.

> That's not simple at all

I did not mean simple in terms of implementation; you're absolutely right :)

> and restrict freedom of the press while you're doing it

Yeah. I think there's better ways. There's a lot to it... we need to incentivize media to report on the facts without twisting them, criminalize abuses of trust and power, create meaningful "trust rating" systems that actually impact audiences' willingness to follow certain sources (like we have with restaurants).

"You can't say x" is a pointless game of whack-a-mole and has the arbiter as a single point of failure. We need a better system altogether.

What we need is better education, teaching critical thinking, and scepticism. If more people had the skills needed to look at a newspaper report and see that it's fabricated nonsense then no one would buy that newspaper, incentivising them to report on reality instead.

Sadly, politicians quite like the ability to manipulate the public via their friends in the press, and very few of them are going to campaign for making that less effective.

Do politicians manipulate the public via the press, or does the press control politicians via the public?

I believe that media outlets used to have to compete on credibility - a little critical thinking distributed throughout the population made a difference. But with so much consolidation of mass media, especially behind the scenes, one is left picking between only a few fundamental options. If they're all trash, where else are you going to go? It much tougher to take a principled stand and reject all mass media outlets rather than the easy route of identifying with the ones that better stroke your biases.

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship"