With so much media available, today's populace should be the best informed citizenry ever. The technology definitely exists to achieve this and yet audience laziness and consolidated agenda-based reporting have produced just the opposite result. Reporters have a parti pris and audiences have short attention spans. Reporters have editorial marching orders and audiences only have the research acumen to read headlines, catch a glimpse of an online post, or hear approved pundit talking points repeated endlessly through a 24/7 news cycle. Both reporters and their audiences lean heavily into their confirmation biases and the first informs the latter.
From this defective melange comes popular world views, cultural movements, and a constrictive box of individual myopia that's absolutely certain beyond any need for critical thinking. Why dig deeper when so many headlines say the same thing? Never mind if the varied entities behind those headlines are owned by the same one source. Why look for nuanced gray areas when the attractive newscaster acts so sincere as they interview the beyond doubt expert? Never mind if other experts with differing points of view are never interviewed and appeal to authority alone is a logical fallacy, even more so when that authority is carefully screened to match agendas. Why risk social media ostracization by asking unpopular questions when one can binge-watch Games of Thrones again and let the experts hash it out? Never mind if experts are knighted by the approval of the Self-Appointed Correct and those deemed not correct are not allowed a voice.
Instead of reasoned debate, honest investigative reporting, and a populous with a curiosity and skepticism that drives deeper into all that can be known, what evolves instead is a self-reinforcing alliance of laziness and agendas reducing the world's technical capabilities to know into a pathological somnolence netting dreamlike states of imagined but certain-for-all-time reality. The hypnotic effect of this over time can drive lazy masses into sleepwalking in directions with socially engineered results. It is no conspiracy theory to suggest that people try to influence other people, otherwise the big business of public relations, political action committees, and advertising are conspiracy theories. If laziness reduces the voice of the people to the bleating of identical sheep and media agendas continue to strive to pull the wool over the flock's eyes, then one can say the clockwork sheep are truly eyes wide shut.
