How Power Shapes Writing [Part 2]
Media, Fiction, and Propaganda — How Power Moves Through Culture
In the first part of this series, we explored how power rarely appears as force, moving instead through culture — shaping how we speak, what we consider reasonable, and even what feels natural to believe.
But if power influences how we think, another question inevitably follows:
How do certain ideas come to dominate the public mind in the first place?
To approach that question, we need to look beyond what’s on the surface and toward something less visible: the structures that organize attention, shape imagination, and ultimately guide belief.
Media: Filtering Reality
When Noam Chomsky and Herman were writing Manufacturing Consent (1988), they were not primarily asking how media persuades people directly. They were grappling with a deeper puzzle: how journalists operating within free media systems could nonetheless reproduce the priorities of established power.
Through an examination of how leading newspapers and television outlets covered related events differently, they traced how patterns of visibility and framing emerged from the structure of the media system itself.
They focused in particular on how media coverage varied depending on who committed the violence and whose interests were involved.
In Western reporting, the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popiełuszko — carried out in a Soviet-aligned state — was framed as a powerful symbol of political repression. By contrast, mass killings carried out by U.S.-backed governments and militias in Central America were more often reported as elements of regional instability, receiving far less sustained attention.
The effect was to establish the boundaries of acceptable interpretation — what questions could be asked, which perspectives were treated as reasonable, and which were marginalized or dismissed. Information was shaped through sourcing decisions, language choices, and the broader context surrounding events, while tone subtly guided emotional response.
Framing, however, was only one layer in a broader system of filtering that determined:
which topics were treated as worthy of coverage,
how frequently they appeared,
where they were placed (front page or margins),
how long they remained in public discussion.
What Chomsky and Herman were describing was not simply bias, but a structural process through which media systems organize public perception.
At first glance, one might assume their analysis belonged to a different era, conditioned by Cold War politics. Yet traces of the same logic can still be found everywhere in contemporary media.
Consider the media coverage surrounding the Epstein files, where major publications largely focus on the reputational consequences faced by individuals named in the documents, while the broader power structures that enabled the abuse receive far less sustained attention.
Television programs that invite artists like Jesse Welles onto their platforms, yet avoid tunes such as The Poor, where the lyrics turn from personal reflection toward the underlying structures of power.
Or even in places that appear trivial or unrelated to questions of power such as a list of books where eight percent of the titles coincidentally come from the same publisher.
These recurring patterns are not accidental. Media institutions may have a mission to report the truth, but their economic survival is tied to the logic of markets.
Major media outlets rely heavily on advertising revenue, often from large corporations, as a key source of financial support. As a result, readers are not the only audience they have to serve. Plus advertisers carry interests of their own, which do not always converge with those of the public.
Today, this structural influence extends beyond advertisers and into ownership itself, with many major publications now controlled by technology billionaires and conglomerates.
Imagine a writer or editor attempting to cover a story that cuts against established interests.
One of the first things you notice is how the burden of proof begins to shift. Narratives that align with established interests often arrive already wrapped in credibility, requiring little more than a statement from the right source. Stories that go against the grain, by contrast, must accumulate layers of documentation, and caution before they can even be considered publishable. A tech company backed by influential investors may be covered on the strength of vision and potential alone, while reporting on the social costs of such disruption often requires overwhelming evidence, multiple sources, and careful hedging.
When criticism finally makes it into the headlines, the media may expose scandals, condemn public figures, or place powerful names on the front page. Yet attention tends to gravitate toward individuals, leaving the structures that elevated them largely invisible. The corrupt official, the flawed executive, or the disgraced CEO becomes the story, while the incentives, economic pressures, and institutional constraints that made their rise possible fade into the background.
This narrative tendency is often described as episodic framing — the practice of presenting structural problems through individual stories rather than systemic analysis.
And this tendency is continually reinforced by another powerful force shaping contemporary culture — fiction.
Fiction: Personalizing Power
Even if you never wrote any fiction in your life, you are probably familiar with Joseph Campbell hero’s journey.
The hero’s journey structure follows a character who is called into adventure, crosses into the unknown, faces trials and tribulations, and eventually returns home changed. From ancient mythology to modern films, the pattern feels instinctively recognizable because it mirrors a deeply human desire to make sense of struggle, growth, and meaning through story.
As a result, when fiction engages with power, it often personifies it.
The focus shifts toward psychological motives and personal dilemmas, leaving broader structural forces less examined or invisible altogether.
Within this framework, you usually encounter two types of narratives:
The elite savior
The underdog
In the first type, power itself is framed as a tragic necessity.
Lies, coercion, secrecy, and backroom deals are presented as regrettable but temporary measures, undertaken by wise men who hate having to use them.
Think of the CIA agent who resorts to torture, portrayed as morally conflicted yet necessary to preserve peace. Or the politician who turns to blackmail and manipulation, framed not as corrupt, but as courageous enough to do what others will not.
In these stories, the masses rarely possess any agency. They appear as absent, naïve, or too volatile to be trusted. The one exceptional figure—usually educated and conflicted—stands in for the will of the people.
In the end, outcomes matter more than means or collective participation.
The underdog narratives, on the other hand, focus on poor or marginal characters that either find a way to get recognized by the power structures or act as moral correctives.
In the first case, the assumption is that the power structures are neutral. Anyone deserving can rise. Structural inequality turns into a problem of character: if your conditions haven’t changed, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough.
When it comes to acting as moral correctives, it’s less about the power structures and more about replacing the wrong person with the right one. Corrupt politicians, cynical generals, greedy tycoons, bad cops, are the ones that need to be taken down to reestablish the order. The underdog’s role is to expose individual corruption and remind elites of their humanity.
Once the underdog character succeeds, the structure gains legitimacy either by showing its supposedly meritocratic nature or by absorbing critique without being challenged by it.
In rare cases, a few outliers slip through the cracks — series like The Wire that place institutions as the driver of the story. Rather than presenting heroes who save the system or outsiders who redeem it, the series depicts police officers, politicians, journalists, and criminals operating within the same structural constraints. No single figure can fix the system. Heroes fail, villains persist, and reform repeatedly collapses under institutional pressure. Success and failure appear less as matters of character than as consequences of structure incentives.
The Wire, however, had its last season in 2008. Most of what we see in modern fiction rarely follow a similar approach.
It is tempting to believe this is not a serious concern — that fiction exists only in the realm of imagination, that audiences can separate stories from reality, or that the romanticization of Mafia bosses remains confined to fiction.
But once power has been translated into story, belief no longer needs to be forced.
It only needs direction.
Propaganda: Directing Belief
In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann introduced the idea of the “manufacture of consent” in his book Public Opinion. The same idea that decades later Chomsky and Herman would borrow to their book title.
In Lippmann’s view, modern society had become too complex for mass participation. Ordinary citizens could no longer directly grasp foreign policy, banking systems, or industrial production, because the scale of modern life placed these realities permanently out of view.
In practice, the environment had outgrown human cognitive capacity, and therefore, elites, experts, and the media had now the responsibility to shape public perception.
What Lippmann described as necessity became later the foundation of modern propaganda.
Edward Bernays took these ideas and what he learned about the unconscious from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and operationalized them for both governments and corporations.
His campaigns helped manufacture U.S. consent for intervention in Guatemala by recasting a small democracy as a Cold War threat, and expanded the tobacco market by redefining smoking for women as an act of liberation — a campaign later branded as the “Torches of Freedom.”
What Bernays realized almost a century ago is that the most effective propaganda does not seek to win arguments. It seeks to attach itself to preexisting meanings and redirect them. Bernays did not invent women’s desire for independence or fear of communism. He just gave emphasis to the former so he could frame cigarettes as liberation, and enhanced the external fear to legitimize international intervention.
At the most fundamental level, propaganda’s role today is still the same: tap into the emotional currents that already exist in the market and suggest a new interpretation that’s aligned with power interests.
The market, however, has grown far more complex since the days of Bernays. Audiences have fragmented, making it increasingly difficult for a single fixed message to move different groups in the same direction.
Faced with this fragmented landscape, propaganda has adapted in new ways. One of them is through the usage of structured ambiguity — a mode of communication in which language remains shared while meaning becomes flexible. Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “community,” or “security” do not have infinite meanings, but neither are they strictly fixed. Their range is bounded, yet elastic.
When propaganda shapes the framework within which ambiguous terms circulate, it invites identification without committing to a single concrete interpretation. Different audiences recognize their own values in the same language, even when those values point in different directions.
What you hear may sound legitimate, even profound. Yet when you look more closely, their power lies not in precision but in resonance.
“The market rewards merit” is one example.
A CEO who goes to the media announcing thousands of layoffs while describing them as “accelerating growth” is another one.
Statements such as “our mission is to connect people” function as reassuring narratives, obscuring business models built on data extraction and attention capture.
Another strategy propaganda has adopted to better control the landscape is what Steve Bannon famously articulated as “flood the zone with s*t.”*
Instead of stabilizing meaning, the aim is to overwhelm the market with information by releasing a constant stream of competing narratives. When people can no longer determine what is true, they retreat into identity-based belief systems, where belonging matters more than understanding, and emotional intensity rises to a level where rationality start to look like disloyalty. The ideal terrain to let people sort themselves into boxes of their own making.
At this stage, propaganda moves beyond manufacturing consent toward manufacturing identity.
To manufacture identities at scale, however, propaganda requires a structure capable of turning spectators into active participants.
Today, that structure exists.
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