The media has always had a vested interest in what it tells you. Look up William Randolph Hearst as an example.

However, today, you see a lot more blatant manipulation in the media. People are conditioned to it, which is scary.

Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Ars has played all sorts of games like this. It started around the time of Casey Johnson and the introduction of strong gender stereotyping. This was from a once brilliant (and well balanced) site that has never recovered.

Today, very few people will tell you how to think, they will tell you what to think, who to vote for, etc.

True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."

The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s (when FEW men had the right to vote, let alone women - which is always overlooked for the sake of propaganda). This is an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years, without challenge.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom...

There are many areas today where people don't bother to do any fact checking. What's worse are those that purposely manipulate history. They insult and disgrace our grandmothers and grandfathers. Yet, most of us would say that our grandmothers were not wallflowers and our grandfathers not anything like modern media portrays!!!

So, in short, yes. The Internet goes a long way to hiding and misrepresenting information. The signal to noise ratio is a big part of the problem, but special interest groups and political correctness have also contributed significantly.