Do you recall when GWB took office and long time
members of the press core were kicked out if they
asked tough questions?
Helen Thomas got the cold shoulder for a while, but GWB started asking her questions again to try and gain credibility. The scale is incomparable, which was the point of the parent.
All this is part of a media whose purpose is to
help Americans feel that they have the moral high
ground so that wars can be waged whenever necessary.
If you really meant what you said here, it would indeed be a conspiracy theory, despite your insistence that it's not.
You would need a lot more evidence than you're supplying to support the sort of assertions that you're making.
What the US government does isn't even particularly relevant to the article.
My post was not meant as proof, it was just intended to trigger a thought process in the reader.
We make a lot of arbitrary distinctions about the legitimacy of institutions.
When we see the leader of an Afghan city state traveling around in an SUV with a bunch of guys with machine guns, we call him a "warlord", yet we offer utmost deference to the US presidential motorcade.
Look at it this way, society has winners and losers. Winners generally want to continue being winners, so they end up in control of coercive force (guns, military, etc.) and they end up with the tools of propaganda at their disposal (newspapers, puppet officials).
What differentiates one nation's winners from those of another is far less than we tend to think, since much of our "consent" to the status quo is built upon our belief in certain doctrines and institutions.
Surely our democracy is worth something, and many of our institutions are worthy of some deference and respect, but so are China's and Mexico's and Iran's...
There are a variety of other fallacies which add to our distorted view of the rest of the world, which I could also go into detail about.
How omni-present it is and how believable it is.
In the Soviet Union, propaganda was universal but universally disbelieved since people learned to discount it.
A mechanism which gives people strong incentive to support the official version in their own words creates much more believable propaganda.
If China has mechanism for creating propaganda that is more omnipresent and as believable, then I suppose it has a leg up. But in ways, omnipresence of propaganda can sometimes work against it's believability.
Just much, those states which have a powerful central propaganda mechanism can erode their credibility over time, especially when they use it to attempt to dispel things that are directly visible to ordinary people. The USSR's propaganda naturally became less effective as the country's production system fell apart. China's recent economic growth obviously reinforces the credibility of the state there.
You would need a lot more evidence than you're supplying to support the sort of assertions that you're making.
What the US government does isn't even particularly relevant to the article.