Most of the mainstream media is supposedly “purely entertaining,” but I find them didactic to the point of being manipulative. There is so much blatant agenda. They are parables.
Want to emphasize: There is nothing wrong with having an agenda, blatant or otherwise, necessarily. It’s entirely possible to be positively manipulated. And besides, “positive” doesn’t even mean one thing for different people. So I’m not arguing in favor of removing agenda/manipulation/etc. It’s just that I didn’t understand how such media qualifies as “purely entertaining” when the presence of ulterior motives seems so obvious.
Now I have a theory: only the stories from one’s taken-for-granted worldview appear to be non-manipulative, agenda-free, non-didactic non-parables, until they are examined, at which point it turns out that they are, in fact, all of the above.
In other words, there are many many people who, actually, genuinely, in their own lives, hold the worldview of the mainstream media. That’s how they can believe such stories are “purely entertaining” without any manipulative messages. They already believe what’s in the story, so they don’t perceive the story as manipulation. That’s the theory.
And now I am recognizing that my stories, too, would be parables for those who don’t get the worldview. And I get that they don’t get it, because I don’t get most of the mainstream media (and even non-mainstream media) either.