Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch’s jab lands because it flips a familiar culture-war reflex on its head. Instead of treating “the news” as a campus-seminar conspiracy beaming liberal ideology into the heartland, he frames it as something more banal and more pervasive: sales. Not selling a party line, necessarily, but selling attention, lifestyle aspiration, and the steady churn of novelty that keeps consumers receptive and markets moving.

The intent is diagnostic, not exculpatory. Lasch isn’t defending journalism; he’s demystifying it. “Advertising” here is shorthand for a whole commercial logic: stories shaped to fit format, to keep audiences from switching channels, to reward spectacle over continuity, and to reduce public life to a series of purchasable emotions - outrage, fear, reassurance. The subtext is that the real bias isn’t left or right; it’s toward whatever converts most efficiently into clicks, ratings, and a dependable audience. That bias can mimic ideology, but it’s ultimately transactional.

Context matters: Lasch wrote against late-20th-century consumer culture, skeptical of elites, therapeutic selfhood, and institutions that claimed moral authority while quietly serving the marketplace. In that framework, “propaganda” is almost too dignified a word for what mass media does. Propaganda implies discipline, coherence, a state project. Lasch suggests something more corrosive: a privatized public sphere where civic attention is monetized and citizenship becomes just another demographic segment.

The line still stings because it refuses the comforting story that our problem is simply partisan distortion. If the news is advertising, the scandal isn’t merely bias; it’s that the public’s reality is packaged, priced, and optimized like any other product.