I would argue that has been a persistent topic of conversation for my entire life!

I'd love to hear what you have to say about this discussion

The book is pretty dated so some of the specific examples might be boring, but this is a good book on this topic:

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

You could probably get by with the cliff notes version.

To be fair, as it relates to this topic there isn't really a need to discuss because foreign entities have been banned from owning controlling stakes in TV and radio networks without approval. A Chinese organization would never be allowed to control a news network in the way they control TikTok.

But the news networks are on the way out, and tiktoks are in. Do you remember the joyous declarations from 1990s that meatspace state borders do not apply to cyberspace? That was not entirely wishful thinking. The same properties that allow information from "free world" to make way into the "world of oppression" work for different definitions of "free" (democratic, communist, fundamentalist, etc) and "oppressed" (communist brainwashed, capitalist exploitative, sinful and godless, etc). A very similar situation enmeshes cryptography.

Well, China has the great firewall, so information flows less freely from the "free world" to the "world of oppression" than the other way around.

This is so. But places like Turkyie, Russia, or even Iran have much weaker blocks; same applies to much of the authoritarian African regimes.

Basically, to enforce border controls on the internet, you have to break the internet.

Murdoch bought himself an American citizenship, problem solved. We've had that foreigner's propaganda dominante our politics for several decades now.

How many are owned by dual citizens?

> What’s crazy is few people even talk about who currently owns major US news networks and what their motives might be.

People talk about Rupert Murdock and Jeff Bezos all the time. Who else do you feel we should talk about? There is that one conservative owner of most radio stations in the US.

> People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start

After Elon took over, he deleted my Twitter account. Still not sure why, but it happened around the time reporters who retweeted #Elonjet had their accounts deleted. And I did retweet it.

Media consolidation is an issue, but Musk with Twitter is so petty, racist, and blatantly self serving. I refuse to be associated with it.

> but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).

traditional media != social media. The potential for manipulation is much greater with social media.

Murdock has been American for decades now, it doesn't matter where he was born.

They seem like a random collection of people I’ve never heard of before.