No, I’m very willing to bite that bullet. Censorship is indeed a binary. There’s a fundamental and important difference between a system where the government has soft power to encourage stories it likes, and a system where newspapers must not print anything the government doesn’t want them to.
It is certainly true that they're not identical, but my point is that the state in America just maybe might exert some effort in the pursuit of generating an average mindset of ~"all is well with our governance, no need for concern, go about your day". Despite no shortage of fundamental issues in the US (and the west in general), any suggestion that there might be some issues with the current form of the political system itself is typically met with strong resistance. Surely basic human nature plays a part in this, but from reading the way in which the news is presented (the way events are described, which parts are included and repeated, which parts are downplayed or not even shown), I suspect there is some level of persuasion going on. How one couldn't notice this is beyond me, but I seem to be the outlier so perhaps the problem is on my end.
The problem is that you're equating things that aren't the same. There's no way to deny that the American government thinks it's great, and puts in effort to convince people that it's great. That's the explicit goal of e.g. civics education.
What the American government doesn't do is require citizens to believe it's great, or forbid them from saying it's not. If you get on a soapbox and talk about how the system was rigged against Bernie Sanders, a lot of Americans will think you're being silly, but none of them will think that you should be arrested for subversion.
> The problem is that you're equating things that aren't the same.
Actually, I'm not.
If two countries both engage in indoctrination, in different forms and to different degrees, pointing out that one is different, or does it to a lesser degree, is not a proof that they do not do it in the first place.
> There's no way to deny that the American government thinks it's great, and puts in effort to convince people that it's great. That's the explicit goal of e.g. civics education.
I feel like you're implicitly suggesting that's all they do.
> What the American government doesn't do is require citizens to believe it's great, or forbid them from saying it's not.
That isn't a prerequisite for indoctrination, and only a prerequisite for certain kinds of censorship.
> If you get on a soapbox and talk about how the system was rigged against Bernie Sanders, a lot of Americans will think you're being silly, but none of them will think that you should be arrested for subversion.
Of course. But indoctrination and censorship can take many forms, and can be very hard to spot when done well. It also helps if the private sector engages in it so the government doesn't have to.
