Francis Schaeffer on manipulation by the Media and elites

Schaeffer says:

Actually, TV manipulates viewers just by its normal way of operating. Many viewers seem to assume that when they have seen something on TV, they have seen it with their own eyes. It makes the viewer think he has actually been on the scene. He knows, because his own eyes have seen. He has the impression of greater direct objective knowledge than ever before. For many, what they seen on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world.

Schaeffer continues:

With an elite providing the arbitrary absolutes, not just TV but the general apparatus of the mass media can be a vehicle for manipulation. There is no need for collusion or a plot. All that is needed is the world-view of the elite and the world-view of the central news media coincide. One may discuss if planned collusion exists at times, but to be looking only for the possibility of a clandestine plot opens the way for failing to see a much greater danger: that many of those who are in the most prominent places of influence and many of those who decide what is news do have the common, modern, humanist world-view we have described at length in this book. It is natural that they act upon this viewpoint, with varying degrees of consciousness of what they are doing, and even varying degrees of consciousness of who is using whom. Their world-view is the grid which determines their presentation.

How Should We Then Live? in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, volume 5, A Christian View of the West. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. 1982. pg. 240-241. (bold emphasis mine)