So what.
Mass media was firmly in the hands of the communist party in the USSR.
But that didn't prevent the people there from forming their own opinions.
Those were often based upon real life experience that is less easy for those in power to sanitise.
you are saying one of the most infamous cases of public discourse control didn't control public discourse and uhm. no? it's renowned in its infamy for a reason. regardless, it's a good jumping off point to outline some things, even if i know you don't personally care to respond to it properly.
- ussr state media was instrumental to keeping the regime and public discourse going, and that media culture hasn't really left russia today. your implication that it had little utility is insane
- there were plenty of periods during the sovjets that you
indeed couldn't form your own opinions; this went beyond public organizing and censoring journalists. eg stalin terror was so thorough that it wasn't uncommon for
families to not discuss politics in case some naive nephew listened in and randomly shared about it to some state operative. of course, plenty of lived experiences among the sovjets tell a story of relative private freedom, but it really depends on the area. however, this did have a real effect on people. furthermore - north korea still exists and we have more than enough substantiation of the apparatus going on there from north korean refugees to know that such behavior is possible. and, well, we also see it in the states.
... and in extension, you could look a the chinese media apparatus and try and talk to some chinese people about politics. that is, not political activists but people that are in the west to work or study. i accidentally know some chinese people (long story) and it's very strange to see how this affects people in real life. it's not really a question of individual opinions but how they mentally tackle things. it's very subtle and hard to phrase and i'm tired from writing this post. but basically, point is; yes, a media environment definitely shapes
how people think, even if their positions,
what they think, may be sympathetic to yours, accepting the same reality that a business is bad, that a government is doing a poor job, etc.
&there's also some intricacies in how the two systems don't compare well. media is not just one thing that works the same. so
- nature of the media landscape: when people talk media apparatus in the us it goes beyond eg fox (although naturally, fox is the core talking point and works as a shorthand of what's going on). trucker radio, podcasts, social media; there's
a lot of money flowing around in that sphere which doesn't inherently earn money for the spenders, and the right both has a better grasp on navigating social media on the level of a political apparatus
and are very entrenched in most major battlegrounds. large mass media just happens to work & align with these interests. sovjets didn't have that for a pretty simple reason; there was no internet.
- appeal: the sovjet state media had a different relationship to these things than current big media; the sovjet project was inherently a movement that was
explicitly transformative, whereas american mass media is regressive and dominated with a dismissal of change. no matter how much eg trump yells about a new era, it's a fascistoid return. it's a very common rhetorical trick conservatives do; the appeal is that we must preserve things, but huge changes are needed
now, and it's basically always like that; the fascist appeal is basically both of those scaled up. we have to go back to the past, that it's not a real past doesn't matter. it's why manufacturing is so dominant in the discourse right now, it's a return. point is, then, that sovjet projects did not deal with comfort, they dealt with an idea of another world that you were told you had to live in. basically sovjet media spoke of a future you didn't know, whereas the dominant right wing appeal is that you know these things that have disappeared because they were unviable or bad? they weren't, here's a blanket.
... like, it's probably a bit vague, so i'll try and rephrase it. the point is that the core appeal of most right wing media is "stop changing things", this goes from fox to podcasts. most left wing media - sovjets included - are "we're changing things". both are an appeal and
are not related to action. trump was elected out of anxiety not because he represented change, but because he represented action; if we are to go semantic, the appeal of trump's change is to
go back to something so it wasn't ever changed.
- also, sometimes things break. the sovjets were not politically viable. the media can only do so much; there are a number of reasons russia can't be handled the same way north korea can, and for that matter, america can. sidenote on that: americans bicker a lot about how their size makes things difficult, but it's simply not the same scale of black hole areas that russia has. there have been infamous instances in russian outlier regions where people still didn't know that the romanovs were gone.
basically my point is that the sovjet media apparatus was massive, it was sometimes incredibly efficient, it doesn't compare to the modern, american media environment, and going "so what" and using it as an example is frankly ridiculous.
