I'd say the 2016 election proved how hard we are to manipulate. Hillary lost despite spending more and having nearly the entire media (with only a few exceptions like Fox) on her side.
A fraction of a fraction of the 2 billion dollars the Hillary camp spent trying to manipulate the election.
CA is the Clinton camp's boogeyman, much as Correct the Record was for Sanders fans and George Soros is for Trump supporters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/...
>A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-ele...
It notes that:
> Trump’s coverage during the general election was more negative than Clinton’s
Positive coverage of Trump was during the primaries, which is what the Clinton camp wanted, calling him a Pied Piper:
> We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...
Make no mistake, the media recognized very quickly that Trump drew viewers. There’s a damn good reason why CNN is posting record profits.
Seems to be true in this case. They covered Trump, which made him the person people think about.
They told people to hate Trump. The electorate didn't listen.
Back to the original question, does that mean we're easily manipulated?
On the original question: evidence seems to say yes.
Heck, very very few advertising campaigns involve telling the user to buy a product or service. Most focus more on creating a new need/want, or in repeated exposure to make the advertised good seem “normal”.
Now the tricky thing is that manipulation requires intent, which is very hard to prove. Hanlon’s razor would have us believing that in most cases, shady things happen because people are dumb, not malicious. So for my part I personally believe that the media got addicted to the ratings and felt internal pressure to provide equal coverage even when the scandals were quite unequal.