While the parent is getting down-voted because his comment is presumed to be supportive of the "enemy". I think he brings up an important talking point regarding the press/media. While I don't think lies are the right way to describe it I do think there is a truth problem in much of the media today left/right and both political and non-political news. Sensationalizing and Click-Bait is a form of dishonestly and leads to people having skewed understandings of events and their relative importance. I think this is not primarily driven by politics but the economics of the "attention economy." And the question of what is the effect of this on wider society is import to consider.

That is an oligarchy. Ultimately, it does not matter much if coercion is based on political or economic power, or the media.

That being said, in these cases media and politicians tend to align over time, either because media help compatible politicians, or because politicians created the media landscape themselves. Oligarchies tend to be symbiotic. For those close to power, anyway; for the rest of the country it’s more like parasitism.

To add on to what you're saying, it doesn't necessarily have to be an oligarchy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

IIRC Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman make the argument in "Manufacturing Consent" that basically consent can be manufactured in the U.S. because of the role that business and corporations play. Which is sort of a critique of capitalism, but I also recall Chomsky talking about how it's hard to really call the U.S. capitalist considering how much of the military industrial complex and academia (especially defense-related) is government funded, and how central those things are to the U.S. econonmy.

I'm not sure of the details but my takeaway is media consent can be manufactured in a corporatist/capitalist-like system, which may also be but is not necessarily an oligarchical one.

I think the thought that it’s not dangerous because it’s not the government is itself dangerous. As you say, private interests and multinationals have a lot of power to ensure compliance. Economic power is as powerful as political power.

I think that concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite is a form of oligarchy.

Right. It's excessive and unaccountable power that's dangerous --- no matter what form that power takes. Limiting your worries to abuses of state power and ignoring abuses of private power is like worrying only about being shot with a gun and so ignoring someone pointing a crossbow at you. Both will injure you.

For sure. When the book was written income inequality wasn't extreme as it is now.

Also the whole idea of a government / multinational divide gets a bit blurry, doesn't it, when you look at the longstanding U.S. government relationship with companies like G.E. , A&T, etc, and, I'm sure in one form or another, today with Google and Amazon.

I mean government-funded research created the tech giants.

Lastly, as much as people love to knock government, ideally it's how people organize to do stuff, and, has an accountability mechanism (elections).

I'm kind of riffing off of what you are saying but yeah. Power comes in many forms and can be abused in many forms.

Exactly. Power is power, whether it’s wielded by a government or a company. Money buys governments and elites give favourable conditions to their friends’ companies. This problem is not exactly new either, it was already the case e.g. with the East India Company and its equivalents (not to single out the English).

At the risk of breaking the rule on talking about votes, this comment would probably be more welcome if it dealt with a specific situation. Right now, it seems like a coy lead into a "gotcha."