New Israeli poll: The impossibility of 'media controling the masses'

Three months in the wonderful SOAS' MA programme as the Film and Media centre, I can say the most important thing I've learned so far is summarised in two readings:

• Impossibility of the Society, by Ernesto Laclau (1983)
• The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media, by Jean Baudrillard (1985)

Both are challenging the notion of the society as a systematic, coherent and total(ised) entity, as well as demystifying the concept of masses, as a de-historised, finalised, totallised, passive and easily controllable concept.

Basically, unlike what a lot of media theories constitute, media can't simply control the masses, even though the elite who runs the media tend to think so.

A great recent example to me is a new poll (I know that polls are not reliable for the same reason that there is no such thing as masses, accorind at least to Baudrillard) that shows two third of the Israelis are not yet bought into the idea of the necessity of attacking Iran; and all this despite such severe and ongoing propaganda against Iran in Israel by almost all the media outlets.

That doesn't mean activists should not resist the process of hegemonic articulation according to the interests of the rich and the powerful in any given society. But they (or maybe I should say we here) should all be aware that putting all our energy in countering these processes of articulation is as ineffective on the public opinion as the attempts by those who run the media.