Given your definition of "manipulated", I don't think there's anything in your original statement (in this particular discussion) to disagree with. If I recall correctly, you were contending that the Sites' video would be manipulated ("put forth as") to suggest that the entire exercise was wrong. That's probably true. Or, if I were to quibble, I would only say that the "reception" of that news would have that effect on many people. (You see, I don't think the public is manipulated so much by the news as the public is manipulating the news as it ingests it, so what is received is, as you put it before, distorted to fit preconceptions.
I take your point about posts not being picked up as intended. I think this is because most of us are far more used to talking than to writing. Even if we write as we talk, literally, the effect will not be the same as if we had actually spoken the message to another. There is an art in writing to give the effect of "sounding" just like one speaks, which cannot actually be how one speaks at all. The principle is akin to the principle of naturalism on television - to make something realistic appearing is not the same as literally being realistic. Take Hill Street Blues, for instance.
Anyway, I understood your point and I tried to imagine us as two acquaintances in an actual conversation and I could see that the same words that you used in that post, given other aspects of tone, body languages, etc., would most likely not have come across as lecturing.
I noticed, btw, in your other most recent post to milford, that you seem to refer to the media as if it's an entity with a single mind, such as a very large organization might be. I'd like to take you up on this (in as friendly a fashion as possible, lest you feel like you're getting a lecture :-)) if I may.
I don't think the media functions as a single entity with common purpose. To the extent that an editor or publisher might create parameters, any single given element of the media, may have some sense of a unified direction. And in that case, since most journalists tend toward liberal in the US context (I'll expound on that little qualification in a minute), one might expect most media outlets to lean liberally. However, in more recent decades, with corporate ownership of more and more media outlets, I would imagine this would have swung to the other side of the coin, as most corporate CEO's tend to lean toward a more conservative viewpoint. After all, no matter how "objective" any given journalist might attempt to be, he's inevitably going to be influenced by his or her own politics - BUT he or she will be even more influenced by the demands of the job and the paycheck. The percentage of journalists who would be willing to risk sacrificing themselves for their beliefs is probably about as high a percentage of any other grouping of people - which is not very high, to put it mildly.
I would argue that this myth of a liberal media, which may or may not have ever existed in the past, has been gone now for some decades.
The reason I specified "in the US context" above is that the American media has always been a right wing media if looked at from a global standpoint. Every country, like most individuals, believes itself to be the measuring stick by which moderation can be judged. Thus during China's cultural revolution, a large number of people were seen as "reactionaries" even though from the outside they were clearly communist - they were just less extreme communists than those who wielded power during that time. By the same token, an American liberal, is only seen as liberal as set against his fellow countrymen, but is not really a liberal at all from a broader perspective. As loosely as "commie" is used these days in referring to a certain category of American citizen, real communists/marxists always hated American liberals far more than they did American conservatives. And from that same perspective, the media is hardly liberal, so if it does indeed function with that common purpose as your words suggest, it would be a conservative purpose, albeit that it might be LESS conservative than some would like.
Yes, I know I've opened a real can of worms here. :-)