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[OC] Im tired of pretending its not (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/dankmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Were there already gatekeepers in the 30s? My understanding was that, radio being a new medium at the time, Hitler was able to do an infowars/Breitbart/prageru style of mass propaganda that was impossible in the existing (print) press.

It's only after the second world war that radio and then television were strictly controlled by the state (albeit more in an attempt to unify and homogenize the nation here in France than to ensure the populace would be vaccinated of anti-intellectualism).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Gatekeepers aren't just public gatekeepers. Powerful private press outlets have controlled and filtered information for centuries. And obviously before that the relationship between rulers, church and printers was a complicated mess.

    So yeah, there were already gatekeepers, which doesn't mean you couldn't get around them, especially when new media is introduced. Unsanctioned press was a thing, even before radio.

    I do think it's refreshing to have someone online come at it from a European perspective, where gatekeepers are assumed to be controlled by the state. The US version of this conversation is so prevalent even not being American one forgets it's not the default.

    Speaking of gatekeepers, I suppose.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    To be clear, the state being the gatekeeper of tv and radio was a thing in France directly after the war, with the French government literally having the monopoly over the airwaves, but in the latter half of the 20th century they opened up the airwaves to private/independent entities. Basically, we also had a pirate radio movement that managed to turn public sentiment towards being in favor of a certain liberalization of tv and radio.

    Nowadays we've come full circle; billionaire-owned media dominates tv and radio, with a handful of more independent stations eaking out a living and meagre audience on the periphery. In a very real sense, advertising and chasing views got to us just like it got the USA.

    Re: gatekeepers, I guess I was more thinking about "hard" forms of it (in contrast to "soft"). You're certainly correct in stating that they've always been around in some way. Still, I think there is a meaningful difference in the case of television, as there were no "pirate broadcasters" to my knowledge even when here in France there were only 1, then 2, then 3 public channels (with about 10 year's wait between each of their creations).

    Maybe a better phrasing for my question would have been, did Hitler's radio propaganda more closely resemble todays's facebook and telegram groups in their unfiltered direct access to people's eyes and ears?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I genuinely don't know enough about it specifically to properly compare. I do know enough to tell that a lot of the processes of legitimization are similar, and certainly some of the content, but I couldn't place radio specifically as part of that loop.

    I think ultimately the difference is the decentralization. Even those "soft" gatekeepers are just a handful of people broadcasting one-to-many. Sure, the 20th century liberalization of media in Europe moved to a more business-driven media landscape, but it was still a handful of corporations plus the remnants of the public broadcasting systems at the helm.

    Now it's point-to-point dissemination, and the disinformation and radicalization is all about SEO and playing algorithmic selection in general. It's so much harder to stop. You can get radicalized right under everybody's noses and nobody will know what firehose of garbage is reaching you. Governments don't even have airwaves to regulate or own.

    I can't promise this is worse, but I can promise it's a much harder genie to put back in the bottle.

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