Using Communication Theory to Explain Manufactured Reality
Modern ideology rarely announces itself as propaganda.
Modern ideology rarely announces itself as propaganda. It typically doesn’t march under banners or demand explicit loyalty oaths (although the Trump Administration is currently breaking that tradition, making openly Neo-Nazi homages on their official Twitter page, this time it’s William Gayley Simpson, author of Which Way, Western Man?). Instead, it is absorbed through words, images, rhythms, and repetition, until it feels like common sense, or a general sentiment among the population.
Communication theory, particularly when read through a historical and dialectical materialist lens, gives us a set of tools for understanding how this happens. From the structure of language itself to the mass mediation of everyday life, reality is not merely perceived, but produced.
This article traces a direct through-line from the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory, arguing that together they help explain how American ideological power (read as: Propaganda) has been normalized domestically and exported globally through media systems built not to inform, but to sell. The result is not simply misinformation, but a durable culture of indoctrination. One that feels voluntary, apolitical, and inevitable. (Keep in mind that any time something is labeled as “apolitical” it is not, and tends to lean right.)
Language, the First Ideological Terrain
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, often summarized as the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, proposes that language shapes how people perceive and conceptualize the world (Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956). While strong determinist versions of the theory have been widely criticized for being culturally insensitive and racist, its broader formulation, “language influences habitual thought”, remains both defensible and deeply useful.
Language is not a neutral vehicle for describing reality. It organizes experience, foregrounds certain distinctions, and renders others invisible. Words do not simply label the world; they discipline perception. What cannot be easily said is often difficult to think, and what is routinely said becomes normalized.
Comparative cultural experiences make this clear. American English speakers are shaped by individualism, market logic, and liberal ideology (in the broad sense), prioritizing friendliness, optimism, and ambiguity. Conflict is softened. Power relations are obscured through euphemism. Structural problems are personalized instead of systematized. Terms like freedom, choice, opportunity, and personal responsibility carry heavy ideological weight while appearing value-neutral. I will write more on these terms in a future article. (Available Now!)
As an example of contrast, German communicative norms are more direct, efficiency-oriented, structurally explicit, and often foreground clarity over comfort. Disagreement is not necessarily seen as hostile. Rules are not framed as infringements on freedom, but as stabilizing social agreements. These differences are not simply cultural quirks; they reflect distinct historical trajectories, class compromises, and state formations.
From a materialist perspective, this matters because language evolves alongside economic relations. The American emphasis on individual agency maps cleanly onto a capitalist system that must continually obscure structural and systemic exploitation of the working class. If success and failure are framed linguistically as personal outcomes and responsibilities, then systemic critique becomes not only politically threatening but cognitively awkward.
Language, in this sense, is the first site of ideological enclosure.
Passive vs. Active Voice: How Grammar Launders Power
If language is the first ideological terrain, grammar is the primary weapon. Language shapes not just what we notice, but who we hold responsible. One of the most simple grammatical choices, whether a sentence is in active voice or passive voice, has enormous political consequences when it comes to reporting violence, state action, and institutional harm.
By definition, passive voice occurs when the subject of a sentence receives the action, rather than performs it. In “The ball was thrown by the pitcher,” the ball is acted upon; the agent (the pitcher) is secondary. Active voice explicitly names the actor: “The pitcher threw the ball.”
In journalism, this distinction becomes an ideological infrastructure. When language consistently omits agents of violence or harm, it shields State forces like police, military, and border patrol/ICE from accountability by removing them as grammatical subjects and normalizes structural power.
Consider how media outlets routinely report state violence:
• “A woman was struck during a protest.”
• “A Palestinian journalist was killed amid clashes.”
• “An ICE-related incident resulted in injuries.”
In each case, violence appears without a perpetrator. Harm simply occurs.
Contrast this with active constructions:
• “Police struck a woman during a protest.”
• “Israeli soldiers shot and killed a journalist.”
• “ICE agents injured multiple civilians during a raid.”
Nothing about the facts has changed, only the assignment of agency. Yet the political meaning shifts immediately. Active voice clarifies responsibility; passive voice dissolves it.
Contemporary Cases
International Conflict Reporting
Throughout the ongoing genocide in Gaza, major outlets have shielded Israel from responsibility and described Palestinian deaths using constructions that remove Israeli forces as agents. Nathan J. Robinson, writing for Current Affairs, has repeatedly shown how these passive constructions function as rhetorical cover for Israeli state violence. Headlines such as “Hundreds die in an explosion at a Gaza hospital” or “Palestinians killed in clashes” leave unanswered who executed the action, framing violence as an impersonal event rather than a deliberate use of force by accountable members. Critics argue that this pattern de-emphasizes culpability for Israel’s military actions and contributes to a false equivalence in humanitarian framing. As Robinson notes, this is not accidental neutrality, but structured evasion.
Domestic Policing and Law Enforcement
In the United States, similar linguistic dynamics appear in coverage of police violence and “officer-involved” shootings. Instead of “An ICE Agent shot and killed an unarmed person,” many news reports have used formulations like “an ICE-involved shooting occurred” versus the active: “a 37-year old woman was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.” This pattern is a noted form of copaganda: language that normalizes or sanitizes police brutality.
Analyses of institutional reports show that passive voice dominates official police documentation, particularly in sections describing operations, arrests, and use of force; precisely where clarity of agency matters most. By foregrounding actions without agents, reports shift emphasis away from decision-makers and toward procedural abstraction.
From a historical materialist perspective, this grammatical pattern mirrors class power. Institutions with coercive authority are rendered abstract and impersonal, while individuals subjected to that authority are rendered concrete and blameworthy, often even demonized. Language reproduces hierarchy by making domination appear natural, unavoidable, or tragic rather than deliberate.
This is where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis deepens. If language shapes habitual thought, then repeated exposure to passive constructions trains audiences to perceive violence without perpetrators and injustice without decision-makers. The result is a political culture that treats state violence as unfortunate but ineludible; acts of fate rather than of policy, when only the opposite is true.
The Impact of Passive Constructions
Across contexts, passive voice does four things:
1. Erases Agency
When the subject is the acted-upon party, readers are less likely to connect actions to the actors who did them.
2. Neutralizes Structural Violence
State and institutional violence becomes “incidents” or “clashes” rather than deliberate policy or force.
3. Creates False Balance
In conflict reporting, passive constructions imply symmetry between disproportionate forces, thus normalizing these power imbalances.
4. Normalizes Harm
Recurring passive language teaches audiences to treat violence as background noise rather than as choices made by accountable actors.
Passive voice is more than grammar. It is an ideological mediation, conditioning audiences to see state and corporate violence as impersonal, rather than as the result of decisions with material causes and consequences. It teaches readers where to look while reorganizing their moral intuition.
This grammatical habit dovetails seamlessly into mass media’s economic incentives. Clear accountability invites critique. Ambiguity preserves legitimacy. In a system where media institutions are structurally dependent on state access, advertising revenue, and ultimately the consensus of the elites, passive voice becomes a tool of survival as much as ideology.
By the time audiences encounter the televised world Gerbner analyzed (one saturated with violence, authority, and fear), they have already been linguistically conditioned to accept harm without asking who caused it.
Words to Worlds
If language prepares the ground, then media builds the world(view).
“Most of the stories, most of the time, are told by a small group of corporations that have nothing to tell, but a lot to sell.” -George Gerbner
George Gerbner, founder of Cultivation Theory, understood television (and in today’s context, we can understand “T.V.” as all screened media from TikTok to Netflix to CBS) not primarily as entertainment, but as the central storytelling system of industrial capitalism. For most of human history, stories were produced within communities, be it by elders, religious leaders, artists, or shared traditions. Modern media severed storytelling from lived experience and placed it into the hands of corporations whose primary obligation was not truth or cohesion, but profit.
Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory examines how long-term exposure to television content shapes viewers’ conceptions of social reality (Gerbner et al., 1976). Unlike theories focused on short-term persuasion or behavioral effects, cultivation theory emphasizes gradual, cumulative influence. Television does not always tell people what to think about specific issues; it constructs an alternative reality for viewers to think about what kind of world they live in.
Cultivation Theory: How Screens Rewrite Reality
Gerbner identified three core analytical components of cultivation research:
1. Message System Analysis
A quantitative content analysis of recurring patterns in media: who appears, who acts, who suffers, who is punished, and who is protected.
2. Cultivation Analysis
The study of how heavy media consumption correlates with particular beliefs about the world.
3. Institutional Process Analysis
An examination of the economic and organizational incentives shaping media production.
Together, these methods describe a consistent pattern: television portrays a world far more violent, threatening, and authority-dependent than empirical reality supports.
Heavy media viewers dramatically overestimate crime rates, believe a disproportionate percentage of the population hold trust in and work in law enforcement, and exhibit higher levels of generalized mistrust amongst themselves and the State. This constellation of beliefs is what Gerbner termed Mean World Syndrome; a worldview characterized by fear, suspicion, and acceptance of coercive authority as necessary protection.
Crucially, this fear is not evenly distributed. It is cultivated.
Accessibility, Mainstreaming, and Resonance
Cultivation works through several reinforcing mechanisms.
The Accessibility Principle: explains that people rely on the most readily available information when making judgments. If media consistently supplies images of violence, disorder, and threat, those images become cognitively dominant, even though they are statistically rare.
Mainstreaming: describes how heavy media exposure flattens differences across class, race, and region. Viewers from vastly different material conditions converge toward a shared ideological center, which is not a neutral one, but a center skewed toward conservatism, authoritarianism, and market logic. The “mainstream” is not the median of society; it is the median of what sells or what is desired by the owning class to push upon the working class. It is no different than the product placement of a cold Coca-Cola in clear view on a table in your favorite television series.
Resonance: intensifies this effect when media narratives align with lived experience. A person already exposed to economic precarity, racialized policing, or social isolation receives a “double dose” when television confirms that the world is dangerous and untrustworthy. A murderer hiding behind every bush, or a monster under your bed. This is how children think. You must have situational awareness, but avoid irrationality.
From a dialectical perspective, this is not an accident. Material insecurity produces anxiety; media transforms that anxiety into ideology.
Media, Class, and the Illusion of the Middle
One of Gerbner’s most striking findings was that heavy television viewers overwhelmingly identified as “middle-class,” regardless of income or occupation. Media consistently portrays middle-class life as universal, desirable, and normative, while obscuring class antagonism altogether. This is done on purpose, in an effort to suppress class-consciousness (Linked: Ken Klippenstein’s reporting on terrorism based upon “class-based or economic grievances”). There is no middle-class. There are workers, and owners. This is obviously threatening to the owning class, in the most simple of terms, because there are more of us, than there are of them. This also explains the constant need for corporate media to manufacture “culture wars” to distract the masses from class war.
Blue-collar workers who consumed less television were more likely to identify as working class. Those who consumed more media, even while experiencing economic precarity, tend to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed participants in a universal middle, or worse, a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. They hold a thought in their mind that is dangerous both to themselves and their peers, thinking that one day, if they just “grind hard enough”, they too can exploit their fellow workers. Bootlickers.
This illusion is politically decisive. A population that does not recognize itself as a class cannot democratically act as one.
Selling Fear, Exporting Ideology
Gerbner famously argued that American television exists primarily to sell audiences to advertisers. Programs are not the product; viewers are. This commercial logic rewards content that is emotionally gripping, easily digestible, and ideologically safe.
Violence is simple. Fear is fast. Structural analysis is slow.
Over time, this system has produced a population that, despite self-identifying as politically moderate, consistently favored lower taxes, stronger policing, expanded military power, and reduced social welfare. This is a people consistently voting against themselves, receiving nothing but further austerity. Gerbner and later scholars found that heavy television consumption correlated with support for authoritarian policies and right-leaning political positions (Morgan & Shanahan, 2017).
This ideological package did not remain confined to U.S. borders.
Through film, television, music, and literature, American media exported its cultivated worldview globally under the quiet banner of “soft power.” The Cold War Red Scare was both a cultural and political campaign. Capitalism was framed as freedom, socialism as tyranny, and state intervention as inherently suspect, long after the historical conditions that produced those binaries had shifted, and well after the primary nation of target, the U.S.S.R., had fallen.
Audiences across the globe learned to see the world through American narrative framing, often without even realizing they had adopted it.
Echo Chambers and Digital Intensification
While Gerbner focused on television, the logic of cultivation has intensified in the digital era. Algorithmic media does not replace cultivation but rather accelerates it. Clipping culture has made this acceleration exponential, taking 15 second clips, almost exclusively out of context, to capitalize on both fear and anger, as well as the current, extremely short spanned, Attention Economy (especially when a large majority of those clips are coming from clip-farmers sponsored by legally-questionable online “Crypto Casinos”). In an environment where the number of views is directly correlated to the “bag secured” by advertising revenue, this will only get worse.
People seek content that confirms existing beliefs. Platform algorithms reward engagement, not accuracy. Echo chambers form not because people are irrational, but because the system is optimized for reinforcement.
The result is a feedback loop: fear produces consumption; consumption deepens fear; fear justifies authoritarian control.
Reclaiming Reality
Communication theory shows us that ideology does not require conspiracy. It requires structure.
Language disciplines thought. Media supplies the stories. Capital sets the incentives. Over time, a population comes to accept a distorted reality as natural. Understanding both the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and George Gerbner’s theories in conjunction allows us to see ideology not only as propaganda, but as an environment. A symbolic atmosphere we breathe daily, often without noticing, and sometimes by addiction.
If there is a path out, it begins with recognition: understanding and reclaiming language, slowing consumption, and rebuilding spaces where stories are told by communities rather than corporations.
A world built only to sell will never tell the truth for free.
References
• Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1976). Living with Television: The Violence Profile, Journal of Communication, Volume 26, Issue 2, Spring 1976, Pages 172-199
• Gerbner, G. (1994). The Question of Cultural Indicators.
• Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. Anchor.
• Hofstede, G. (2001), Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations, 2nd ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
• Morgan, M., & Shanahan, J. (2017). Television and the Cultivation of Authoritarianism: A Return Visit from an Unexpected Friend, Journal of Communication, Volume 67, Issue 3, June 2017, Pages 424–444, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12297
• Sapir, E. (1929). The Status of Linguistics as a Science. Language, 5(4), 207–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/409588
• Whorf, B.L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
The Sapir-Whorf argument you present, especially of active and passive construction, does not work beyond some languages - as a speaker of a language where it is impossible to make a passive construction or even construct a sentence that includes an action without actively signifying orconjugating the actor - it would not apply, yet we still have narrative construction, censorship and so on. Just that the argument that language shapes reality or even behavior is unsound, behaviour and language are shaped by the power structures we live in, we learn not to say, or even not to hear when it is said, the things we find threatening to our existing world view.
Which is often shaped by experience, class and gender privilege or lack thereof...etc the social violence that shapes us all in one way or another.
Unless we train ourselves to be critical.
As this is my first inteoduction to xultivation theory, and it resonates with me strongly (and agrees with both the Parenti argument on media and the manufacturing consent arguments which I am familiar with) I hope to read more on the topic
Great Read! Very well written. I feel like recognizing these word manipulations is a reality check the world really needs right now.