Glock32 nailed it in the other thread..."Democrat-Media Complex", it is real, it is malevolent and it is a clear and present danger to liberty as established by our Founders! They are all the worst kind of domestic enemies!
I actually had a debate with someone in the comments forum at PajamasMedia about this. One commenter claimed we were the most propagandized society in history, and another said he was being ridiculously over the top when you consider the propaganda that existed in the USSR, and still exists in China, etc.
I think the first guy's assertion was actually pretty close to the mark though. You could argue that we are indeed the most propagandized population on the basis that we (the collective 'we' I mean) don't realize we're being propagandized. It may have been much more overt in the USSR, but rational people there knew they were being fed copious amounts of BS. The 'samizdat' phenomenon didn't evolve in a vacuum, after all. Here, on the other hand, most people have blithely believed that we have a free and open press that is not polluted by "official truth" of any kind. For over half a century Americans have tuned into the Big 3, or opened the major broadsheet dailies, and believed they were being presented with objective reporting of the facts, and that any editorializing was reserved for those articles clearly indicated as opinion pieces. We now know that nothing could have been further from the truth. Even before WWII, Duranty was winning Pullitzers for hiding Stalin's engineered famines, and with starry-eyed idealism reporting on the wonders of the Potemkin villages presented to him on his trips to the USSR, how it was evidence of the New Soviet Man's superior social model. The New York Times...all the news that's fit to print!
So yes, I say this insidious form of propaganda is ultimately more harmful. As Rush points out, everything about the public consciousness would be dramatically different if the media actually reported the news in a neutral fashion, if they actually held Democrats to the same standards.
It's now clear to me why the Framers were careful to leave an escape hatch in the system they created. They knew in spite of all the brilliant checks and balances engineered into the system, all these failsafes can be short circuited when there is a large, unofficial collusion between the entities that are supposed to be checking and balancing each other. We have all branches of government and a media united in their common desire to increase the size, scope, and power of the State.
The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last...