I completely agree. The hardest part of returning from military operations overseas was that Americans inevitably had their views shaped by one of two prevailing video viewpoints. Trying to discuss what happens over there in any meaningful way with someone who hasn't been inevitably devolves into an emotional reaction (usually roughly pro or against) instead of a conversation.

Every news is to some degree manipulated.

Together with a friend I was one of the geocaching and confluencing pioneers in Germany.

Some large papers and TV stations reported about this "phenomenon" and wanted to make an article/ documentation about us. Every one of them came with a story in their head which we had to fill with our pictures and quotes. No one was interested in "reality". For a news clip we had to shoot situations several times, I remember leaving a house 5 times until they shot was done. Up until then I thought news would be unstaged.

the moment they essentially ask you to cooperate in staging a scene, why would you cooperate?

I was young and needed the money ;-)

This [1] image is a perfect embodiment of everything you're saying. But I'd add that I think there's a dissonance in our belief in other people's naivete and the actual numbers. In particular trust in media has fallen off a cliff. Only 31% of people trust in mass media to "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" at least a fair amount. [1] If you restrict the question to those 18-49 years old, it's 26%. People may not be able to precisely point to why they feel this way, but it's clear that people have become deeply skeptical of media in general. The reason this is relevant is because media, in turn, relies heavily on what you're talking about - images framed to convey a narrative.

I think what we really take issue with is something related but different. And that is people voluntarily believing things that confirm their biases, while ignoring or even denying things that challenge them. Pew did a nice piece on that here [3]. These [4] are just their poll questions, which are quite interesting. For instance, "spending on social security, medicare, and medicaid make up the largest portion of the US federal budget" - 41% of Americans incorrectly labeled that as an opinion. And of those that labeled it an opinion, 82% further incorrectly labeled it as false. Going the other direction, "increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the US economy" - 26% of Americans incorrectly classified this as a factual statement, and of those 83% claimed it was accurate. The same is of course true on both sides of the aisle, with the questions affirming as such.

People have a tendency of believing what they want to be true, while challenging (often quite aggressively) everything that goes against that, or even simply denying it. This can create the perception of a naive people being misled by malicious actors, but I think reality is that people tend to pick the views that they want to be true often for entirely subjective reasons that cannot be clearly qualified, and then work to find evidence to support that.

[1] - https://www.washingtonian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gar...

[2] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-med...

[3] - https://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between...

[4] - https://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between...