Agreed entirely on the necessity of travel for mind expansion, but I would say that an inattentive person probably wouldn't spot the difference between foreign and the US media. Propaganda is the subtle knife of social control, and it is ubiquitous in the world.

A way of seeing through the propaganda is what I would call realism-based-education. By that I mean reading "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann, "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky, and "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, to start. Reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli would also be a good companion to these, though its focus is quite different. Reading these quick and easy to understand books has done more for my worldly education than going to college when it comes to building critical thinking.

People need to understand that mass media is for placing ideas into your head for the purposes of influencing future actions-- no more, and no less.

add to the list Chris Hedges and his articles about Inverted Totalitarianism.

Ah yes, I'm aware of those articles as well-- they are fascinating. I didn't think to add them to the list in my comment but they'd be a good addition for sure.

I'm of the opinion that a lot of these propaganda/political realism topics belong in the same general category, and I'd like to make a syllabus of sorts eventually.

I like to read international news sources (news.google.com can be a good jumping off point) and, yes, I agree with you that our news in the USA is engineered to tell a story that keeps people in line.

International news sources, especially state-funded ones like Al Jazeera and RT, are just as biased, just in the other direction (US and Europe are teh suxx, Russia and OPEC are your friends!). If you can handle the cognitive load of filtering out the biases from all sources and have the perspective and knowledge to synthesize them into some objective truth, then my hat is off to you because I can't do that.

There is only one list that RT and Al Jazeera belong in together; the "what two news organizations are polar opposites of each other?" list.

Anyway, the point is diversity, not supremacy. Don't watch BBC or Al Jazeera because it's supposedly "better" than US media; watch because its bias is in different areas. All it does is help you in evaluate a different point of view. Worst case, you hear the same thing twice.

Except RT. That's just trash.

Thanks - that was what I should have said more clearly: more diversity is better.

RT and AJ are both pro status-quo for their Establishment. So for me, they're in the same league but I always love to check the perspectives for the big players on the world stage from time to time to see what they're up to.

For those with the time and interest to browse I had previously compiled an incomplete list of domestic propaganda activities by the United States. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856218

There is also some compilation done for international propaganda, although mostly the programs, anecdotes and news links are scattered and still need compiling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709976

Some things almost sound like science fiction, like the DoD program to predict successful overseas propaganda by observing brain scans of test subjects: http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf

There are significant numbers of people who have seen it without physically leaving the bubble. But in this, the Internet is critical, as is a healthy reservoir of skepticism, paranoia, and introspection.

From an engineering perspective, the media bubble is beautiful. The control over the message is elegant and masterfully done. Generally speaking, it is like equal parts stage magic and martial arts.

Any attack against the power structure is simply deflected away from the center line and bounces off. When necessary, a burst of flame from some unsleeved flash paper distracts the attention of the audience just long enough for the real targets to be lost.

As someone who has seen it, living inside it feels almost oppressive. Almost. You have to continually remind yourself that it's there, and it's there to control your behavior.

"But you gotta get outside the bubble to really see it."

Actually, it's sufficient just to not be liberal, and to a lesser extent, be neither liberal nor conservative. (But the liberal machine is much better oiled and more generally competent, moaning about Fox News notwithstanding.) It's hard to see propaganda that you currently agree with. (I do not exclude myself from that general statement, it's just that what I find harder to see is quite different than what the general US news is currently propagating.)

But I'd also observe that even standing outside the mainstream of US political propaganda, I'm not convinced there's necessarily a cabal of insiders sitting around in their smoke filled rooms figuring out how to "keep the masses in line". I think instead you've got people figuring out how to push their agendas, often in groups, and through a process of natural selection on the agendas in question you end up with agendas that tend to satisfy people to some extent and "keep them in line". You need not "conspire" to push fairly popular ideologies on people, you need only let the adherents of those ideologies do the things they naturally will do anyhow.

Edit: Look, downvoters, you might not like to hear it, but the US propaganda machine is liberal, or at least, Democratic (if you are more liberal than the Democrats and consider them "conservative"). Look at the political affiliations of the media, Hollywood, the bureaucratic apparatus, the University and academic system, and to believe that the propaganda system isn't Democratic is to believe that all of these things are peopled by 90%+ Democrats yet somehow transcend their political orientation to push... what, exactly? It's not even close... it's not like it's 60-40, it's 90%+ plus on every survey ever taken of those groups in recent times. Note my claim here is an objectively verifiable fact, not merely an abstract partisan snipe job. Ask yourself, what else would they be pushing?

If you don't see this, well... it's probably because you're not seeing the Democratic propaganda as propaganda, leaving you seeing only what gets through that isn't.

Further edit: Would someone care to post and explain the social mechanisms whereby the media et al is populated by Democrats yet is pushing some other form of propaganda on us all the time? Evidence would suggest it will get you highly upvoted. (Personally I'd suggest the fact that people just downvote but aren't posting suggests that this is either not possible, or very hard. This probably means something.)

Maybe they are not pushing propaganda. Just because News Corp. (owners of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc.) ignores journalistic and societal ethics, and simple honesty, doesn't mean that others do the same. It's an interesting argument, to set their own standards so low and then persuade their audience that everyone else is equally dishonest.

Much to the misfortune of the nation and world, the current conservative establishment built its power on propaganda that overcomes any level of absurdity with aggressiveness. Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are good examples. For example, they led the nation to war over WMD in Iraq, they deny climate change, they talk about death panels, Obama's citizenship, etc.

I don't see that elsewhere on the political spectrum. There are fringe left-wing outlets, but they aren't the top-rated cable news channel and leading newspaper.

And you have groups of people (i.e., those in the same industry) generally adopting similar ideologies - so you have say, Silicon Valley people tending towards a certain viewpoint.

Which doesn't mean it's part of a propaganda machine, it just is.

I have noticed that advertisers motivations are laid bare when seen by people outside the target audience. The underlying narrative, hidden from the target group, is shockingly clear to non-targets. This car will make me sexy again, this cereal will transport me to a magic land. I hate advertising.

Watching ads with sound off can also help understand the hidden narrative

I suspect that if it were easy to merely filter out the music, but leave the voice audio, that would work as well. I think of music as basically a brain hack. It can affect your mental state against your own will, even if you are aware of what it is doing and why.

An example of this is horror movies. Suspenseful scenes will be suspenseful, even without any accompanying visuals. Even if you realize on an intellectual level that the music is engineered to make you feel stressed or nervous, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent yourself from feeling those things when you hear the music.

Or maybe that's all just me. I am very wary of the use of music because of this (primarily in situations where somebody else is subjecting me to the music; I'll listen to it voluntarily when I get to control what it is, but I try to avoid it as much as possible in any commercial setting).

The emergence of internet based video propaganda is particularly interesting to me, since it typically bypasses copyright law to use whichever music it pleases. Lots of popular pop songs being used in the background of blatant propaganda videos. Here is one rather extreme example (in terms of music use, not really content): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqw0VE5SUY My understanding is that the Russians made it.