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It baffles me that university professors, who are in front of a minority of the population for typically only 4 years, are viewed as having all this control, whereas the people who literally own the media, who can arbitrarily hire and fire any voice they please, are viewed as somehow having less sway over their own company's output.

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You're ignoring the power they have to shape minds during that 4 year period, which is particularly powerful for residential students who are out of the nest for the first time, how they can keep doubleplusungood people out of a lot of professions by not letting them graduate (it's now getting explicitly official in some, and personally sobering for me, the moderate conservative-libertarian I was in 1979? No way today I could become a scientist in the US today), and apropos of that, they control who gets to teach K-12 students, the Overton Window in K-12 curricula (which has had a serious allergy to effective teaching of reading for close to a century now, and much later math), etc.

I don't disagree, but my point is that it's still less power over media than those who actually own the media have.

If universities are really brainwashing people, then those who own the media can just not hire those brainwashed people. Power over hiring is the ultimate level of control over any organization, media companies included.

You can make the argument that the media needs an audience, and if the masses are brainwashed then they have to speak in that language. But if you're talking about non-objective-truths such as values, and those values are so widespread that media has to cater to them - that's not brainwashing, that's just popular culture.

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