"The real owners" of the advertising-media complex are the companies that pay to have products, social programs "stars" and slaughters promoted on legacy media. Consumer society needs consumers and delivering them requires manipulating consciousness in many ways.
. Karl Kraus the Viennese satirist, documented the media’s role in fomenting the incompetent and disastrous charade of WW I. As one of Kraus’s recent translators, Michael Russell , says, ‘Kraus saw a powerful influential press in Vienna becoming ever more mendacious, manipulative, corrupt and self-serving, forming ever stronger ties with the aristocratic, industrial, financial and above all political elites of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later, after the war, with the struggling democracy of a new Austria.
Kraus saw the media as an apocalyptic threat, creating a false reality, one which it was impossible to reject publicly without being considered a fool or a mad man.
Since that time the advertising-media superorganism has assumed near total control of all human communication.
99% everything we learn about the world comes to us today through a screen. This has created an extended perceptual loop, information we receive about the world via a screen is treated the same way that information about the world which we receive via our senses - it is trusted.
Kraus knew as many people did that the first world war was started for profit and that the media advertising complex - newspapers and magazines in that day - were not passive agents by active parteners who participated in the profits reaped by the advertisers from the first mechanized slaughter of civilian populations in the history of warfare.
As they danced, they sang: "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands."