“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” —Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
As Yakov Smirnoff would say: “In America media builds Potemkin Village for people.. in Soviet Russia, people build Potemkin Village for the media”
I wouldn’t laugh
If a man doesn't read the newspapers, he is uninformed. If he does read the newspapers, he is misinformed.
And especially in America today.