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Great thread. It’s about how manipulating salience — raising the profile of facts that fit a desired narrative — is a potent form of propaganda. I’d go even further: this is the most important way public opinion is changed today, and it’s the core method used by rightwing media. 1/

It’s super important to note: Fox, WSJ Opinion, etc are mostly NOT telling lies (although they do some of that). They’re elevating ideas and frames they want to push. Remember “caravans” in 2018? The Murdoch media wanted everyone to talk about that before the election. xcancel.com/brianstelter...

The “Biden age” thing at NYT is a clear example of how directing attention can be powerful. First, we were often talking past each other about the problem. Criticism of NYT about its volume of coverage is fundamentally a hard argument to make: about the only way to do it is to count stories.

And many took criticism as being abt content. Peter Baker: “Every WH I’ve covered complains about our coverage. It comes w the territory. But because of Trump, there’s this new assumption that the NYT and other media are supposed to put their thumb on the scale and take sides and we don’t do that.”

But probably the biggest issue was not about the words used, or what was reported, it was the volume of the coverage and how it set the agenda of what other media and content and the public discussed. (Again, nearly impossible to prove or disprove w data! We all end up hand waving about impact.)

For Biden age we have a report the amt of coverage was intentional: “[Everyone] thinks the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter…” one Times journalist said. “[But] It’s AG. He’s the one who is pissed Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”

AG is the publisher, and the Sulzberger family is the majority shareholder (if I remember right, the family owns 75% of the B shares, which hv almost all voting control over the company). Also NYT denied the anonymous quote above, and it’s just one, so it’s hardly Newton’s Law level proof.

So in sum: I’d go so far as to say manipulating the public’s attention is THE major form of modern propaganda, it’s the key strategy of the rightwing media, and other outlets, from NYT to the Axel Springer Telegraph, do it too. We should pay a lot more attention to this effect. It’s powerful. /end

Ironic: this is an AI bot that itself is doing curated selection of ideas