I'm working on a set of stories that all tie in together. One of the ties is a conspiracy that has many different facets. One of these has to do with the entertainment industry. In the conspiracy, the bad guys want to "dumb down" the population by replacing movies and TV shows with decent, involved plots, with stuff like pseudo-news talk shows, shows about celebrities, reality TV, and all manner of sports that aren't really sports in the traditional sense. (Dominoes, eating competitions, etc.). Movies would mainly be pointless comedies, remakes of classics, remakes of old TV comedies, and so on. Films with complicated plots, or anything that encourages the use of imagination would be out. So here is the questions I have, and I can make an argument either way. Would a group with agenda that promotes a cartoon like whatever comes on Saturday mornings now over something like the original Scooby Doo (where there was a puzzle of sorts), be more likely to promote the fictitious conspiracy theories out there, or would they be more apt to debunk them?

For promoting the idea that the Moon landings, JFK and Sept 11 were all really conspiracies we have the encouragement of a lack of critical thinking. If the vast majority of the nations can't figure out how to examine the evidence for these events, they surely will not see the big one taking place before their eyes.
On the other hand. Making people believe that there really were a number of government conspiracies might make some people look for one in other places. Places that they really shouldn't.

For promoting the idea that those events happened more or less along the lines of the official story we have the reassurance that the government doesn't do stuff like that. That it can't.
On the other hand, to get that to sink in, people will have to get a basic skill in critical thinking, which may stare them looking to other things that seem like they need looking into. It would also give them the tools to convince others more easily.

I'm absolutely not looking to debate any of these. They've been done pretty much to death. I'm asking only for opinions about what the reader/voter would do with regard to lasting conspiracies if the goal was to turn the nation into actual "sheeple".

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

It's already happening

Tog,

The great deal is that either way, whether there is a conspiracy or
not, the solution is the same: Marginalize the kooks. Even the kooks
will have to agree with that! (They just won't believe they are
kooks -- whether they are, or not! But everyone who isn't a kook,
and is instead a sheeple, will agree that the kooks are kooks.)

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I thought this story was supposed to be fiction!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort