> By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.
The crucial difference is that cigarettes are targeted at children, and the majority of smokers become addicted before they become adults. Whereas the audience for Limbaugh, Fox News, etc., skews much much older. Everyone is complaining about how their dad was brainwashed, not about how their child was brainwashed. How many smokers start as dads rather than as teenagers?
(To further clarify: Alcoholics are a minority of alcohol drinkers. The majority of drinkers drink simply because they enjoy drinking, and they could quit if they wanted to without withdrawal symptoms. In fact I quit drinking entirely when the pandemic started, for several reasons, and I'm fine, I feel like I could continue abstaining indefinitely with no ill effects. Thus, I don't consider the purpose of the alcohol industry to be hooking junkies, whereas that's almost unavoidable with nicotine, which is medically established to be highly addictive.)
> we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.
I don't believe in such black and white, good and bad people. As I said, people are complex. "It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person". I think we're all flawed, just in different ways. My claim is that Rush Limbaugh is not a magical snake charmer, he's a guy who tells some people what they want to hear, otherwise how do you explain how you yourself are "magically" immune to his charms?
This is the missing piece in the explanatory puzzle about propaganda. It's easy to point out, but you can't jump to conclusions about its effectiveness without explaining why you who are pointing it out were not affected.