This phenomenon happens everywhere. You cannot deviate from the state narrative on HN without people having the exact same "no, that cannot be" response. I have also observed a generational divide in susceptibility to propaganda: baby boomers seem completely defenseless to modern propaganda techniques, which matches up well with what this article reports.
Are there any studies (or anything other than your opinion) about the generations' state of defense against propaganda.
I grew up few miles west of the Iron Curtain. Near Little Berlin. I was massively brainwashed into believing everything US was great, everything in the GDR was bad/evil. The Eastern Block was only not invading us because of our big friendly brother (Uncle Sam) ensuring our safety.
And while there were some truth in it, reality was not so black and white. Not everything in the US was rose colored and perfect. Not everything in the East evil (or just bad policy).
Looking back a lot of things were more progressive in the GDR than in Western Germany. Women had way more rights, didn't need consent from husbands to work or open a bank account. Contraceptives and abortion were easier to get and women could leave men without risking poverty.
Child care was orders of magnitude better and the school system structured in a way that today experts agreeing that we should have copied much of it instead of implementing the West German system everywhere.
Also I missed a lot about the two great wars that was known but never taught in school.
So from personsl anecdata I am not so sure my generation is better equipped to deal with propaganda (was born at the end of the 70ies).
I think for baby boomers, they are used to getting their news from 1-2 sources only. So they believe anything the tv station or newspaper tells them. For our generation, we are much more critical about the news we are getting and know how the internet can be manipulated. So having grown up with the internet, we tend to have more antibodies.
I think one factor is the entry cost & inertia of older mass media formats: it's not like newspapers, radio, or TV were ever 100% reliable sources of unbiased information but the cost of the staffing, equipment, need to print locally, etc. meant that there was a lot of money on the line and that much more local accountability. If you printed a bunch of scurrilous allegations about someone, you had assets which could be seized and employees who might face something like libel charges. Local distribution also meant that you tended to build a reputation over time which people could take into account when deciding whether to trust your reporting.
I don't want to oversell that as a perfect solution but it's pretty different from an era where a teenager in another country can anonymously register dcpatrioteagle.com, pay to pump a bunch of nonsense on Facebook, and disappear without a trace when their reputation catches up with them.
> the cost of the staffing, equipment, need to print locally, etc. meant that there was a lot of money on the line
This is a double edge sword. The internet changed the equation whereby now it is more important to create engagement by creating controversy to keep viewership up for advertisers. To a non-American like me, CNN and Fox News, have a remarkably similar format. Johnny Harris explains this best: https://youtu.be/BkUH2tP8PYw
I definitely wouldn’t say the old way is without its own problems - only that it’s what most older people were familiar with. Remember that cable TV is something which became popular when the boomers were in their 30-40s so at least from an American perspective you can kind of view the 20th century as a series of escalations returning to and then blowing past the worst of the yellow journalism era.
Not making it acceptable, though.
...
I guess I'm just trying to point out that politicians and mass media are a global problem.