From Don’t Look Up to Reality: The Manipulating and Manipulated Media in the US

Abstract

The black comedy film Don’t Look Up, which is a great success in 2021, sharply insinuates the absurdity of American media in the post-capital era, reflecting that the American media is manipulating the society as well as being manipulated, ironically but truthfully. Currently, media penetrates individual opinions and impacts the entire civil society in the modern US. The contents and concepts carried by popular entertainment and the mass media fill people’s daily life and spiritual world. Inspired by the realistic satire in the film Don’t Look Up and the reality in not only the US but most countries all around the world in the post-capital era, this paper endeavors to emphasize how American media manipulates the crowds invisibly through a comparative analysis of historicity and realism, particularly exposing the historical change in its function-from information dissemination and interaction to information blinding and ideas manipulating. Also, this paper manages to illustrate various substructural factors like Profit-seeking of Capital Markets, Political Game, Populist Social Sentiment and some other reasons, which manipulate the media from the dimensions of economics, politics, society, etc.