I finally understand why my Boomer parents believe everything on the news—they've never heard of these Noam Chomsky ideas

Last Thanksgiving, my mom cited a TV segment as gospel truth. When I mentioned the source might have its own agenda, she looked at me like I'd suggested the moon landing was fake.

That's when it clicked. She wasn't being naive. She was doing exactly what she'd been trained to do for 60 years.

1) The three-channel universe

Picture this: You're 10 years old in 1965. You turn on the TV and you have exactly three choices.

ABC. CBS. NBC.

That's it. Those three networks controlled 95 percent of prime-time viewing from 1950 to 1970.

There was no cable. No internet. No podcasts. No alternative sources.

Everyone in America watched the same news, delivered by the same handful of anchors, at the same time every evening.

This created something we've completely lost: a shared national reality. When Walter Cronkite said "and that's the way it is," that literally was the way it was for most Americans.

Boomer brains were wired in this environment. Information came from official sources, vetted by professionals, delivered through institutions everyone trusted.

A whole generation learned that news equals truth. Full stop.

2) Authority bias runs deep

There's a psychological phenomenon called authority bias. We believe things simply because they come from someone who appears to have expertise.

It's why we trust doctors. Why we follow teachers. Why a person in a lab coat selling toothpaste seems more credible than your neighbor.

For Boomers, this bias is turbocharged. They grew up when 68 to 72 percent of Americans trusted the media in the 1970s. Today, it's 31 percent.

My mom still sees Brian Williams or whoever and thinks "serious journalist." Her brain pattern-matches to those decades when TV news anchors were basically national authority figures.

The suit. The desk. The tone of voice. All of it triggers that deep programming: this person knows what they're talking about.

Meanwhile, I see the same person and think "paid employee of a massive corporation with specific interests."

3) The repetition effect hits harder with age

Here's something wild: older adults are more vulnerable to what researchers call the prior exposure effect.

Basically, the more you hear something, the more true it seems. And this effect is stronger in older people.

When Boomers watch the same news channel every single night, hearing the same narratives over and over, their brains increasingly accept those narratives as reality.

It's not stupidity. It's psychology.

Older viewers are also more likely to trust sources they've known for decades. That channel they've watched since 1985? It feels like an old friend. Why would an old friend lie to them?

This explains why many Boomers will dismiss a well-researched article but accept whatever talking point was repeated fifteen times on their preferred network.

4) Enter Noam Chomsky

In 1988, Chomsky and Edward Herman published "Manufacturing Consent." The book laid out something called the propaganda model.

The basic idea? The media doesn't need to be state-controlled to act as propaganda. The structure itself creates bias.

Five filters shape what becomes news:

Ownership by massive corporations. Advertising as the primary revenue source. Reliance on government and business sources. "Flak" to discipline the media. And dominant ideology (originally anti-communism, now "war on terror").

These filters mean the news serves powerful interests by default. Not through conspiracy, but through normal business operations.

Think about it. If your revenue comes from advertisers, you're not going to run stories that upset those advertisers. If your sources are government officials, you're not going to jeopardize that access by being too critical.

The system selects for certain narratives while filtering out others. All without anyone needing to issue explicit orders.

Boomers never learned this framework. Why would they? Their news sources certainly weren't teaching it.

5) The illusion of objectivity

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating: Boomers were sold a specific story about journalism.

Objective. Unbiased. Just the facts.

This was always partly myth, but it was a powerful one. It meant you could trust what you saw on the evening news because journalists were supposed to be neutral arbiters of truth.

Chomsky's model explodes this. It shows how even "objective" reporting serves specific agendas through what gets covered, what gets ignored, how issues are framed, and whose voices are included.

When I try to explain this to my dad, he hears "all news is lies." That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying all news is filtered through economic and political structures. Some news organizations are more transparent about this than others.

But he genuinely believes his preferred channel just reports facts. The idea that selection itself is bias? Mind-blowing.

6) Digital literacy gaps are real

My parents can use Facebook. They can Google things. But they don't understand how algorithms work.

They don't know that Gen Z gets 84 percent of their news from social media compared to only 31 percent of Boomers.

More importantly, older generations don't have the muscle memory of questioning sources that younger people developed growing up with the internet.

Younger people automatically wonder: Who wrote this? What's their agenda? Who funds this publication?

Boomers tend to ask: Is this from a "real" news source?

And by "real," they mean: does it look like the news they've always known? Does it have the production values of CBS? The gravitas of NPR? The familiar format of their local paper?

A polished cable news segment passes their credibility test. A thoroughly researched piece from an independent outlet doesn't, even if the journalism is better.

They're using the wrong heuristics for a completely different media landscape.

7) The manufactured consent is working

Here's what Chomsky understood that most people miss: the propaganda model predicts its own invisibility.

If the media actually serves powerful interests, those same interests ensure the propaganda model isn't widely discussed or taught.

Think about where most people learn about how the world works. School. News. Books published by major publishers. All of these are part of the same system the model critiques.

So the critique gets marginalized. Called radical. Conspiracy thinking. Dismissed without serious engagement.

The very institutions that would need to inform people about media manipulation are the institutions doing the manipulating.

Boomers never encountered these ideas in school. They don't see them discussed on their news programs. So of course they seem radical or conspiratorial when younger people bring them up.

The consent has been successfully manufactured. They consented to a worldview where their trusted sources are trustworthy.

Questioning that worldview feels like questioning reality itself.

Final thoughts

I don't blame my parents anymore.

They're not dumb. They're not even particularly stubborn. They're just doing what made perfect sense in the world they grew up in.

Trust the professionals. Believe the authoritative sources. Accept that if something is on the news, it's probably true.

That world doesn't exist anymore, if it ever really did. But their brains were formed in it.

Understanding Chomsky's work helped me see this. The propaganda model shows how systematic forces shape information before it ever reaches us, rather than relying on individual journalists to lie.

My parents lived their whole lives inside that system without ever learning it was a system.

Now when my mom cites CNN like it's scripture, I get it. For her generation, it basically is.