Everyone has an agenda, so yes. One aspect of a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is that it's a secret agenda. If we view what Murdoch and leadership of Fox have said, and have said in court, I don't think their agenda is anywhere near a secret.
So if it comes out in court then it stops being a conspiracy and becomes an agenda.
Nations and business have been negotiating laws at all times. If there's some some strong proveable facts it may be a conspiracy reality. If it's paranoia because we don't know what's going on when Presidents, CEOs, and such get together it's probably a conspiracy theory.
Because it's secret, it IS a conspiracy. A conspiracy embodies an agenda (the agenda is the purpose of the conspiracy) and so long as it is kept secret (or advertisement of the agenda is avoided) then it is conspiracy. Most of the work the CIA does is covert and is conspiracy - but surely someone would talk so it could never work, right? - and much of what goes on inside corporations is conspiracy (so we voluntarily do not divulge privileged information when we talk about our work since we want to beat our competitors and keep our jobs). If it's a group of people making plans in secret then it's a conspiracy. Conspiracies have an agenda. Some people say out loud what there agenda is because they have an agenda that they believe other people will agree with and this will help move their agenda forward. Other groups of people have agendas that cannot work if they are publicized because it would be easy to thwart if it were known or it would be opposed by the majority of people if it were known.
When you look at an "agenda" like the TPP, for example, they work hard to keep the agreement they are working on secret and that makes it a conspiracy. Why do they keep it a secret? So that the people can't object to it and so that there is no news to talk about because if people knew what was being agreed to and how that agreement would override any laws that the people might make through their governments then they might realize that what is being negotiated by private companies is a new supernational (and privately controlled) level of government that does not have the good of the people in mind. If it was something that the people would like then the politicians would be in front of the cameras talking every night about what a great new set of laws they were working on.
So conspiracies are merely a subset of agendas and not a wholly other kind of beast. What you and other people seem to want to do is ringfence the word "conspiracy" so that you can use it to mean "theories I think are crazy" and that is exactly the way you are supposed to think in the newspeak. By using the word "conspiracy" accurately and conflating it with the use of the word "conspiracy" to mean "crazy" all real conspiracies become crazy in the public mind. It's just a form of branding, which is big business and as old as the state, what today we call PR but used to be called propaganda.
So you have a conspiracy theory about how conspiracy theories are purposefully released by some unknown mysterious controlling power to cover up their real conspiracies. Fair, enough.
More or less. It's like the way creationists try to argue against evolution. Piltdown man, they yell. Yes, this one quickly debunked fraud is so outrageous it means the whole of science is a fraud. It was some "scientists" who believed in the Piltdown man therefore all scientists are idiots. People with more familiarity with the vastness of the scientific knowledge concering evolution aer much less likely to fall for this sort of thing but most people don't seem to know enough to recognize how bad the argument is and who doesn't like joining in and shaking their heads saying "tut tut, stupid scientist. What a bunch of morons".
It's not an outlandish technique and surely you can see how it would work, right? You aren't arguing that it couldn't work, are you? Perhaps you are just thinking that no-one would do such a thing, because it's so Machiavellian. Don't forget that "the Prince" was drawn from history and showed how certain techniques had been successful at controlling populations. It wasn't just a fairy tale. But still maybe you are thinking that in our enlightened times people don't still think that way. Surely modern people in the last few hundred years have evolved out of the basic drives and behaviours that they evolved into during the proceeding millions of years. You can't imagine yourself being so cold and self serving and devious so you can't see that other people could be. You can't imagine yourself sodomizing a five year old child, then strangling him to death with your bare hands, hacking his body into bits and burying the bits in the woods - therefore no-one ever does that, right? The vast majority of people are like you, they couldn't even imagine doing things like that. They aren't the people we need to worry about. But some small number of people will have no qualms about lying to you and using you and some of those people get control of entire agencies and sometimes countries and by telling the right kinds of stories they can make good people do bad things. You think the average Joe would drop bombs by remote control on a wedding party if it wasn't his job?
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