Consume Product - Arete Network

>Every time the franchise is expanded, the electorate becomes easier to manipulate, until we reached the current state where democracy is indirect rule by media owners.

If you're looking for the historical period where the electorate was the dumbest and most easiest to manipulate - that's almost certainly 1870-1900. The Gilded Age. That was the period where, at least towards the end, virtually all media was handed straight down to the public by exactly two men: Pulitzer and Hearst. And they didn't give a flying shit about truth - only power. Everything was sensationalism and misinformation, and no rational voice could even carve out a big enough slice of the media market to make itself heard. And the presidents of that age - Grover Cleveland, William McKinley - those pathetic excuses for presidents weren't even really in charge of anything. They were straight-up corporate puppets.

And that's twenty years *before* women's suffrage.

If anything, today's "media owners" are completely losing their grip on the culture. Nobody trusts anything they read, and the media landscape is totally fragmented. Probably the man making more of our cultural decisions for us than anyone else right now is Ryan McInerney - and hardly anyone even knows who he is.