I don't believe you. My guess is the demand comes from manufactured consent, not from people who deeply understand the issue.
- "yellow cake uranium"
- "a land without people for a people without a land"
Per Chomsky, the co-authored work is more Herman's than his, and anyhow the phrase and concept is from Walter Lipmann, 66 years before Herman and Chomsky's work with the title inspired by it (and 51 years before their first book on the topic.)
But, no, neither the idea that deliberate propaganda is a major source of political beliefs or the particular manner and mechanisms by which the US media is involved in delivering that propaganda is "projection".
> Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap
Manufacturing Consent doesn't pretend to be an exploration of what the “real interests” of the public are; it can't be misleading "projection" at doing that, because it doesn't do it at all.
And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.
“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.
Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.