News outlets being owned by a small number of people (monopolies/oligopolies) in-game leads to a rise in patriotism and conservatism. I take issue with this because it doesn’t reflect the situation in real-life, where people who push political agendas through social and news media tend to be progressive liberals. Could you tell me what your reasoning around this decision was?
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Hmmm interesting. I think while its true that social media is sometimes perceived to be run by those with a liberal/progressive bias, broadcast media, such as print/radio/tv tends to have a conservative/patriotic tint.
In the game, that situation is focused on broadcast and pre-internet media, hence the effects.
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In the US, a belief in the “liberal media” is understood, which isn’t without cause, but monopolized media has shown itself to be neoliberal. Protecting billionaire interests and the voter groups who reflexively support them. Whether that’s the centre-left or centre-right depends on your nation’s Overton window. It’s not fascist, it’s pro-wealth, pro-capitalist, and often pro-status quo.
We’ve often interpreted this effect as a means of sleepwalking us into a kind of corporate dystopia, again, not without cause, though that might be a demonstrative conclusion. Whetever you stand, I think it’s naive to pretend this effect doesn’t centrally strive to sanitise corporatisation, the wealth gap, and the loss of consumer control.
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By that logic, the effects of Media Monopoly should be an increase in membership of capitalists. This is not the case. Instead, patriot membership increases, but note that this has been justified by Cliff in a previous reply.
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so make media monopoly support the status quo, make it reduce you political capital so you can make less changes or make it increase mebership of whatever group is the majority, and make it increase your populatiy with the wealthy since the benifit from it
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Thats a very interesting idea. I guess a media monopoly could support the status quo, but maybe the reason for a billionaire to achieve a media monopoly is so that they can skew the political consensus to their own beliefs. That probably involves a pro-capitalist stance, but it could have any number of flavours. Perhaps a tendency against environmentalism (this seems to be the case in Australia), or even an anti-Europe/xenophobic POV, which seems to be the case in the UK.
I guess ideally this situation would have varying effects per country, but that might make the game feel too random to casual players…
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Every country has differences and plus that’s what makes countries different and unique from each other! But I think it’s more good imo that is about decreasing liberalism because I usually end up upsetting the religious and the conservatives.
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What I really don’t wanna say is it’d probably increase the chance of Brain Drain and Corporate Exodus by normalising a pro-wealthy bias, but those situations are hard enough as is (Brain Drain tends to be the easier of the two, but still)
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