Informant38

Idle thoughts:
In order for a democracy to mean anything it has to have a reasonably well-informed demos, or public. Because obviously a public that thinks the moon has an atmosphere like earth's will be more inclined to vote for a tax-funded project to build cities there, than a public that knows the moon has no real atmosphere to speak of will.
So controlling the information the demos, or public, has access to would be a way of controlling how the public voted - voting being democracy in action, as I understand it.
Presenting a "debate" about the moon's atmosphere with two equal sides represented and having the narrator/moderator sneer ever so slightly whenever the no-atmosphere side is introduced, for example, if it's done subtly enough, will work.
Controlling how the public votes is not democracy, though.
And so again we come to the media, and its role as bottleneck of the news sources it purports to represent. To maintain the illusion of democracy the demos, or public, has to be constantly assured they have access to unbiased information from which to form their opinions, and the biased information they do receive has to be presented in a way that instills confidence in the opinions it forms, opinions that the public should believe rise directly out of the information they get.
In that sense the information the media delivers is very much like the information the eyes and ears deliver to the brain, and in that sense the demos, or public, is very much like a great crowd of Helen Kellers.
This gets more complex as the not-yet critical mass of willing receivers grows - those who don't want to form independent opinions, who are in fact very nervous about having opinions of their own, but instead watch for the cues and clues that let them know what the god-like presence inside the television wants them to believe, and to say they believe.
These two elements - those whose confidence in their own opinions is generated by the media that supplies those opinions ready-made, and those whose opinions are nothing more than call-and-response chanting led by the same media - are not democracy in action.
This is the scam, to make you think you've chosen something on your own, when really it was chosen for you.
And so once again we have this chilling irony of the very undemocratic control of opinion used to get the demos, or public, fixated on the creation of democracy in a foreign country, Iraq, because that seems like a good ideal, a worthwhile goal, and at this point the only possible even slightly moral reason to justify the body counts there; when in fact there is no interest in creating democracy in Iraq, on the part of those who engineered and expedited the invasion and occupation, and there never was.